Thomas and Mercer publishing
have released two remarkable novels this January that are difficult to pigeon-hole.
These two novels were not crime fiction per
se, nor horror fiction per se but
they were page turners that combined elements of both genres that kept me up
way past my bedtime. They also provoked deep introspection.
So what were these two books?
We had Paul Finch
with his harrowing THE
LODGE and now hot of the presses comes Dean Koontz with his
extraordinary THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY,
which is a treat for the bibliophile …..
…….Koontz’s
tale commences in 1930 with a teenage girl Alida, one of the attractions of the
‘Ten-in-One’ show at McKinsey’s Travelling Carnival. The girl has a beautiful
face, but beneath her shoulders lies hideous body deformations akin to the
British human exhibit John Merrick [aka The Elephant Man]. Alida is exploited
by being paraded nearly naked by the odious Forest ‘Captain’ Farnham for the
amusement of the curious and the uncouth. Alida escapes the indignities she is
forced to endure by her voracious appetite for books, especially Dickens……
Read More HERE
Following our review, I had a few questions for this
prolific author.
Last time I had a chance to chat to Dean Koontz was close
to two decades ago, at the London Book Fair on a video screen via Margaret Atwood’s Long
Pen.
Our short exchange is archived at Jeff Peirce’s The Rap Sheet
HERE
So with
the release of THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY, we present Dean Koontz in conversation
with Shots Magazine, recorded on Wednesday January 28th 2026.
To
indicate the scale of Dean Koontz’s as an author – his books are published in
38 languages and he has sold over 500 million copies to date.
Let
that sink in.
Ali:
Welcome to Great Britain’s Shots Magazine and thanks for speaking with our
readers.
Dean:
Thanks for inviting me. I’ll try to be on my best behaviour.
AK: So
let me ask you firstly, after so many years publishing, do you still remain
excited when a new book is released?
DK:
I’ve always been more excited by writing than by having written. Undeniably,
however, I still get a thrill when I hold the first finished copy in my hands.
In a curious way, it’s never real to me until it’s a finished book. I’m a
creature for whom tactility is the most confirming of our senses. If the day
came when novels were available only as eBooks or audiobooks, I’d probably stop
writing. I have over 8,000 editions of my own books in 39 languages, and there
are days when walking into the room that holds them is what motivates me to go
on.
AK:
Right off the bat, where did THE
FRIEND OF THE FAMILY originate
as an idea?
DK:
Three things. 1) Growing up, I lived across the highway from the county
fairgrounds. The best part of the year was when the carnival came to town. I
was fascinated with carnies, their culture and the rules by which they worked
and lived in a community of their kind. I’ve made a sort of study of them my
whole life. 2) I grew up feeling like an outsider because we were poor and my
father was a notorious alcoholic and gambler and womanizer, which in a small
town meant constant humiliation for my mother and me. And so I tend to like
writing about outsiders——Odd Thomas,
Leilani Klonk in One Door Away from Heaven, both Addison and
Gwyneth in Innocence, and so many others. 3) I love Art Deco,
big band music, movies, and the literature of the 1930s and ‘40s. This
was a novel that began with a character, Alida, perhaps the ultimate outsider.
She arrived suddenly in my head, complete in all details. I don’t know why or
from where. So much of inspiration is mysterious, which is one thing I love
about this work——the sense of being connected to some mysterious source of
creativity that is beyond oneself. Because freak shows were pretty much
outlawed in the 1970s, the story needed to have a historical setting——and I
chose my favourite historical period. With that much having fallen together, it
was time to start writing.
AK:
And did you just follow the muse [as is your method these days], or was there
heavy plotting ahead of the writing?
DK: No
plotting. I stopped writing outlines with Strangers and have
never gone back to that tedious approach. I begin with a premise and a couple
characters——and set them loose to do what they want. At some point in most novels,
I experience a brief period of raw terror that I won’t be able to pull all the
strings together and tie them in a nice knot. But after a glass of good
cabernet sauvignon (perhaps two) and a chunk of dark chocolate, I recover from
panic and go on. It always works out.
AK: If
memory serves, the carnival backdrop features in your novelisation of The
Funhouse [a
film by Tobe Hooper and screenplay by Lawrence
‘Larry’ Block] as well as your novel Twilight
Eyes and now The
Friend of the Family –
so what is the allure of greasepaint and candy floss for the novelist?
DK:
Growing up as an outsider, as the class clown in school, with a sense that I
would never belong anywhere, it is not surprising that I fantasized about
running away with the carnival, where every member of the troupe was an
outsider by the standards of the rest of the world but not within the world of
the midway. I wouldn’t have been able to run a 10-in-one (a freak show), but I
think I’d have been able to put together a funhouse like no other.
AK: I
thought the opening was reminiscent thematically [though much less grimy] of William
Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley?
DK: I
know the novel. I am not a fan of it. In spite of growing up in a family that
never knew where next week’s food would come from or whether we’d have a roof
over our heads, or whether my father’s frequent talk of suicide (and of taking
us with him) would suddenly prove more than idle talk, I have always been an
optimist. I’ve never wasted time on despair or anger. I don’t know why. Maybe
because I’ve always had a sense of time running out, of the preciousness of our
days, and haven’t wanted to waste any.
AK:
Unlike William Lindsay Gresham, your work [of which The
Friend of the Family is
no exception] is always upbeat, optimistic despite the darkness of the world.
Would you care to comment?
DK: I
know there’s evil in the world, but I see no reason to submit to it by taking
it too seriously. One thing I saw from the example of my father’s life was that
every time he did the wrong thing——the wicked thing, if you will——it worked for
a while, it profited him for a time, but too soon it led to one catastrophe or
another, often an amusing catastrophe. I learned early that evil is
self-defeating. Likewise, so is negativism in all its forms. It sounds very Beatles-in-India, but the world is to a
large extent what we make it, and attitude shapes results. At least in part,
the world becomes for us what we think it is, which is why I’ve tried to steer
clear of all the competing ideologies that try to pack all of existence into
one small box or another.
AK:
Like the character Alida [aka Adiel] in your new book; how important are novels
and reading fiction to you, and wider society?
DK:
Growing up, novels were my salvation. They provided desperately needed escape.
But they also taught me that all families were not like mine (which is what a
kid in a dysfunctional family often thinks——that behind closed doors, every
family is dysfunctional). When Gerda and I were married with $150, a used
car, and our clothes, we couldn’t afford a TV, so we read novels in the
evenings. After a while, we came to feel that, being as happy as we were, we
might find that a TV made us less so. Therefore, we lived without one for ten years.
During that period, each of us read about 200 novels a year. That was a far,
far better education than I received during my four years of college.
AK: I
read some of your Science Fiction Novels in my youth and enjoyed them, and your
later work often has a little of the ‘weird’ striating the narrative, so can you tell us a
little about what it is about SF [and ‘the weird’] that interests you?
DK:
I’ve always felt that the world is something more than we are able to perceive,
that our five sense are inadequate to the challenge of fully knowing reality.
As an adult, both Gerda and I have had experiences that seem to confirm a
depth, a complexity, beyond what we know in our daily lives. And we’ve never
done drugs! One day I might write about those experiences/events, for they have
confirmed my perception that the world is mysterious (quantum mechanics further
confirms it), and that perception has affected what I write.
AK:
Your Leigh Nichols books are favourites of mine, so can you tell us a little
about this pen name, and why it came about?
DK:
When I wrote the first Nichols, my agent at the time and the publisher felt it
was too different from what I’d written previously, would destroy my budding
career, and thus required a pen name. I was naive enough to believe that the
“publishing wisdom” they cited was in fact wise. Years later, I recovered the
rights to the 5 Nichols novels. When we published The Servants of
Twilight under my name, it
was #1 for 6 weeks and sold two million paperbacks in its first six months. It
didn’t destroy my career. Neither did the other four. Lesson learned——if you
don’t have belief in yourself and what you’re writing, neither will anyone
else.
AK: I
read you’re an enthusiast of the Richard Stark Parker Novels by Donald
Westlake [even penning the Brian
Coffey novels]. What other
crime-fiction did/do you
enjoy?
DK:
Westlake was a genius. He could go from ice-water-in-your-face crime fiction to
hilarious comic novels as easily as changing his hat. I also read everything by
Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), Rex Stout,
The magnificent John D. MacDonald, Len
Deighton, Patricia Highsmith, on and on.
AK:
You have a huge body of work, of which WHISPERS, WATCHERS,
STRANGERS, LIGHTNING, PHANTOMS, INTENSITY and the Leigh Nichols series
rank as favourites of mine – so what are your own favourites and why?
DK: I
have a fondness for those that were suspenseful but also made room for
humour: Life Expectancy, The Odd
Thomas series, The Bad Weather Friend, One Door Away
From Heaven. But I also like the go-for-the-throat books like Intensity,
the 5 Jane Hawk novels, The
House at the End of the World. And if I find a book indefinable, I’m
especially fond of it——From the Corner of His Eye, The Friend of the Family .
. .
AK: A
huge thank you for your time, so in closing what are your plans for 2026 and
beyond?
DK:
I’ve got a forthcoming novel, A Storm So Bright and Beautiful that
was a challenge unlike any I’d taken on before. This time, in spite of my
optimism, I wondered if I had at last destroyed my career, just 50 years after
an agent had predicted as much. Happily, everyone in my publishing life loves
it. Now I’m working on a novel set in 1961, a meaningful year historically. I
hope I never have to retire. I’d rather just fall dead at the keyboard——but not
with a manuscript unfinished.
Shots
Magazine would like to Thank Dean Koontz and Katrina Power of FMcM for
organising this interview in-conjunction with Thomas and Mercer Publishing.
More information CLICK HERE
Bibliography CLICK HERE and HERE
Movie Adaptations CLICK HERE
If you are suffering from a ‘reading slump’ or hooked on an
addictive ‘doom scrolling’ cycle on your Smartphone – The Friend of the Family is the antidote, because as a novel it is
a hell of a thing.
The full Shots Magazine review is HERE
Text © 2026 Dean Koontz and Ali Karim
Images © respective publishers
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