Koontz News
Elsewhere prologue and US cover courtesy of Entertainment Weekly
May 26, 2020
Dean Koontz needs no introduction, but his newest novel does — at least, a small one. The author is set to release the thriller Elsewhere on Oct. 20; it follows a father and daughter who come into possession of a very mysterious object, which the local eccentric who passed it on to them called “the key to everything.” The key comes with a warning that it must never be used, but of course that doesn’t exactly happen.
EW is exclusively revealing the cover above, and below you can read the first excerpt, of the novel’s creepy prologue.
Read the prologue @ Entertainment Weekly
Dean’s statement on his “prediction” of COVID-19
April 9, 2020
The end-all be-all blog post debunking how Dean Koontz “predicted” the coronavirus
March 4, 2020
It would be impossible for me to send the following response to everyone tweeting that Dean “predicted” the coronavirus:
Nope. In 1981 version it was “Gorki-400” from Russia. Was not Whuan from China until 1996 revision. And images of 2020 date is from a Sylvia Browne book, not a Koontz book.
By ya know what? I’ve sent it to a heck of a lot of people. Trouble is, my little response doesn’t ever cover all of the claims presented and doesn’t give me a lot of room to back it up. So, henceforth, my new response tweet will be “nope” and a link to this page. Enjoy!
Claim: Dean predicted the corona virus in his 1981 book The Eyes of Darkness
A couple of base-level problems:
- Coronavirus is a family of viruses. SARS is a coronavirus. MERS is a coronavirus. Even some forms of the common cold. The current virus is COVID-19. So at best, he “predicted” COVID-19, not coronaviruses. (Way to start an argument Mr. Pedantic.)
- In the 1981 book The Eyes of Darkness by Leigh Nichols (yes a pseudonym of Dean’s) the virus is named “Gorki-400” and is from Russia. Russians are convenient bad guys in 1981 due to the existence of the Soviet Union. (Ah the simpler times of the Regan-era.)
- The original Twitter post that started all this used a photo of a vaguely current mass market paperback edition. (Can’t tell what printing the tweeter used but that edition was released in 1996 and was the “current” cover until 2008.) It’s obvious the author of that tweet saw the 1981 copyright date in a much more recent edition and thought “Hey! He wrote this is 1981! How prescient!”
Claim: Ok, it was changed from Gorki-400 to Wuhan-400 in the re-release under his own name in 1989?
Yes, the book was re-released under his own name by Dark Harvest in 1989. Guess what? Still “Gorki-400” in that edition. It wasn’t until the 1996 re-re-release that the name of the virus was changed to “Wuhan-400” and it’s origin moved to China. (The relevant Snopes article originally said “1989.” Later said it had changed “by 2008.” As of this writing it just points out that the Amazon.com preview that shows “Wuhan-400” is from a 2008 release.)
Claim: In The Eyes of Darkness Dean specified that a world-wide virus would happen in 2020.
More recent versions of the twitter post have added an additional photo of some text stating “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like virus will spread throughout the globe…” In no way do any of these re-tweets point out this this image is not from a page of any edition of The Eyes of Darkness, nor even of any Dean Koontz book. It’s a page from 2008’s End of Days by Sylvia Browne. I’ll let you read about her and her “predictions.” (I’ll wait.) Oh, and that’s just a few years after SARS (2003) so hell, I could have “predicted” it would happen again.
Claim: But “Wuhan-400.” “In around 2020.” 20 times 20 = 400
Nope. Not making this up. It’s out there. Score one for frickin’ numerology.
Claim: So he revised the book and wrote “Wuhan-400” in 1996. That’s still a 24-year-old prediction. What say you?
A few final points:
- Dean revised a whole bunch of his older novels in the mid 1990s.
- By 1996 the Soviet Union was no more so who’s the new “bad guy” for the story that would make sense at the time? China.
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956. A minimal amount of research in 1995, even sans-internet, would have made that a good choice of a “source” within China.
Lastly, if you’re still not convinced by all of this it still couldn’t have been Dean who “predicted” it first. The Simpsons beat him by 3 years in 1993. Better yet, the film Akira beat that by another 5 years in 1988. I’ll let you decide.
Update 27 March 2020: Dean’s opinion on the matter…
Snopes says: Mostly False
February 19, 2020
Please, can we just stop with this nonsense now?
Claim
Author Dean Koontz predicted the 2020 new coronavirus outbreak in his 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness.”
Rating
Mostly False
What’s True
An image shows a genuine page from Dean Koontz’s novel “The Eyes of Darkness” containing the words “Wuhan-400.”
What’s False
However, Dean Koontz did not predict an outbreak of a new coronavirus. Other than the name, this fictional biological weapon has little in common with the virus that caused an outbreak in 2020.
Read the full article, which even talks about Gorki-400, @ Snopes.com
Whuan-400 a.k.a. Gorki-400
February 17, 2020
Read this post instead. It’s got a lot more detail.
The end-all be-all blog post debunking how Dean Koontz “predicted” the coronavirus
So yeah, I didn’t think I’d write another post about this wild conspiracy theory that Dean “accurately predicted” the coronavirus but here we are again. The reason I am is that folks are getting a simple basic fact wrong: The fact that Dean wrote about Wuhan-400 in 1981 when The Eyes of Darkness was originally published. Turns out, the virus in the book was originally from Russia and named Gorki-400. It wasn’t named Wuhan-400 until Dean revised the book in 1996. Here’s four examples, two of the original text, and two of the revised text.
Wuhan-400
February 10, 2020
This is all over Twitter. I give up, I can’t not post this…
The wait is nearly over
February 8, 2020
After nearly nine years, my lettered copy of Screamplays is on its way!
What’s New & Updated February 3, 2020
February 3, 2020
Well, the site was stable this week with just some minor bug squashing going on. If you see any PHP errors on a page, please drop me a line and we’ll get them dealt with ASAP. So, without further ado, here’s some new content for you.
- The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Lists by Mike Ashley to “Cosimc Sin” & The Vision (DRK)
- An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton to Beastchild (novella) & Beasthchild
- TV Guide, October 20-26, 1979 to CHiPs: Counterfeit
- TV Guide, September 29-October 5, 1990 to The Face of Fear (TV)
What’s New & Updated January 20, 2020
January 20, 2020
Ok folks, I’ve finally started digging into the fanzine content in earnest. This stuff is complicated on many levels. First off, Dean says that most of this content, without being specific about which content, isn’t actually by him. I’ve included his comments on the matter wherever appropriate. Second, I’ve listed relevant details and cross-references where I can which can force me to create other holding pages just to make the cross-reference work. Third, the letters. Ugh the letters. ‘Nuff said for now. Fourth, I’ve needed to add two whole new categories to the site: Art and Publisher. The former you can check out now, the latter will have to wait as I get further along. Just consider the placeholder page a massive tease for now.
- The Alien Critic #6 to Demon Seed
- A Dream Given Form: The Unofficial Guide to the Universe of Babylon 5 to Appendix F
- Good Guy, Bad Guy, Critic
- L’Ange Jacque
- Locus #701 to The Forbidden Door
- Locus #702 to The Night Window
- The Science-Fiction Collector #6 to A Werewolf Among Us
- The Science-Fiction Collector #7 to Fear That Man and Writing Popular Fiction
- The Science-Fiction Collector #14 to The Crimson Witch.
- Way Station (You’re really going to want to check out this one!)
- An additional note from Dean regarding a ghost-author for two chapters of Writing Popular Fiction
Whats New & Updated January 13, 2020
January 13, 2020
Just the one item this week as I’ve been focusing on some other writing assignments and organizing the fanzines as most of them still need to be added to the site. I’m hoping to get to those soon.
- Facebook quote re: Demon Seed‘s original title
The Night Window paperback release date
December 26, 2019
Amazon has listed 25 February 2020 as release date for the (what I assume to be) premium paperback edition of The Night Window.
Devoted is not Jane Hawk #6
December 21, 2019
Not sure which edition’s cover this is supposed to be but the link points to an Amazon.com page that lists this as “Jane Hawk 6” which it is not. More details as I discover them.
We all just bought Dean a very nice new $11.6 million house
December 21, 2019
Checkout out details and more photos via these articles:
Dean’s latest statement on a third Chris Snow book
December 16, 2019
Dean’s Junior Year High School Yearbooks
December 13, 2019
Bedford (PA) High School, The Echo 1962
Whats New & Updated December 9, 2019
December 9, 2019
Looks like this was the week for updating appendices. It wasn’t planned, just how things worked out.
- “According to Dean” for Children’s Hospital in Appendix B
- The Echo 1959-1963, Bedford (PA) High School to Appendix A
- Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature by Bran Stableford to Appendix B
Did Dean get the moon wrong in Velocity?
December 9, 2019
Jeff Cann has some criticism of how Dean described moon phases in Velocity. (Who am I to argue?)
This isn’t just a picture-book problem. As my kids grew, we moved into family story-time with chapter books. And moon mistakes remained a common occurrence. So frequent in fact, that whenever the moon was mentioned in a story, my kids fully expect me to stop reading to endorse or correct the description. It’s usually a correction.
I just read Dean Koontz’s Velocity. I don’t know that much about Koontz, I’m just starting to read his books. Based on the few Koontz books that I’ve read, I gather that many of the stories, like Velocity, take place primarily at night. References to the moon seem common.
And there it was. Mid-way through the book, Koontz steps into a great big, glaring, moon-phase error. Repeatedly. During a long night, Koontz uses the progress of the moon to chronicle passing time. The problem is that beginning at 1:00 a.m., he talks about the “thinnest silver shaving of a new moon.” This “fragile crescent” is high in the sky, and it’s pretty much up there all night. He makes two more references to this moon across the course of the chapter, the night.
Read the full article @ The Other Stuff
Some references from Devoted
December 2, 2019
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Elliot and Haunted House Pinball
Dean Koontz dominates 6 of the top-10 Kindle e-book sales for the holiday by Joshua Fruhlinger
November 27, 2019
Chances are good that many people will be reading on Kindles and smartphones in order to conserve luggage space (and to avoid awkward conversations about book covers), and chances are just as good that many people have already loaded up their devices for the trip. So we took a look at Amazon’s ($NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Store sales ranks for the past couple weeks as we head into Thanksgiving.
And what we found is total Dean Koontz dominance. That’s partially because Koontz is a best-selling author who has sold more than 450 million books, has written more than 100 books, and has had 14 of them hit #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list.
But this time around he doesn’t need book stores or even the New York Times. That’s because he just released a series of six books (yes, six), and all of them have immediately jumped to the Amazon Kindle top-10 list.
The series is called Nameless. Five of the six books took the top-5 spots in the Kindle Store, and the sixth one took spot 8.
Read the full article @ Thinkum Alternative Data
What’s New & Updated November 25, 2019
November 25, 2019
This week I filled in a hole in my collection with a first edition paperback of Strangers and then got my hands on two ARCs of Devoted. (I’m giving one away.) Let’s say this was a great week.
- Devoted ARC, details for other editions based on the ARC, and marketing images
- Strangers (DRK) mass market paperback, image added and details corrected.
- Supernatural s14e05: Proverbs 17:3 to Ephemera