Dean Ray Koontz was born and raised in Pennsylvania by his parents, Ray and Florence Koontz.
Their family lived in poverty and Dean Koontz had to endure being reared by his alcoholic father who turned violent and unruly every time he got intoxicated. Because of this vice, his father was almost always unemployed and even if he were, he would squander much of his earnings in gambling. In contrast, Dean Koontz’ mother was a very gentle and passive woman. She would often protect Dean from his father’s relentless violence and anger.Throughout his childhood, Dean Koontz found respite from his unpleasant domestic situation in stories, books, cartoons and movies. He was a child who loved to tell stories so much so that he was able to write his own books at the age of eight (Kotker, 1996).
After high school, Dean Koontz left his home to finish college at the Shippensburg State College where he earned a degree in English. After graduation, he married Gerda Ann Cera, his high school girlfriend.While Dean Koontz is popularly known as a writer of the horror genre, he does not consider himself as such because in all of his writings, he tries to convey an underlying message about life and human existence. As Kotker (1996) puts it: “…his underlying message is that human beings have the capacity to create their own happiness—that while we may not be able to choose our fates, we can choose how we respond to those fates and, indeed, we have a responsibility to make such a choice.This is an optimistic outlook, one that tells us that life is what we make of it, that it is in our hands” (Kotker, 1996, 12).
Furthermore, he is said to prefer that his writings be perceived as that of belonging to a cross-genre, that is, a mixture of the science fiction, horror and suspense genres all blended to create his unique style of writing (Wiater, 1989). Cold Fire One example of Dean Koontz’ work that depicts a cross-genre type is Cold Fire.At first, the situations involving the main characters denote a typical horror ambience where creatures are visualized as coming out of walls in decrepit mills to attack the female protagonist, Holly Thorne. The latter is a reporter from an Oregon daily in search of Jim Ironheart, a person with paranormal capabilities that enable him to predict when certain people are going to be killed and prevent the event from happening. While she pursuits Ironheart, nightmares of deserted windmills and creatures coming off the walls begin to haunt her.
It appears that Jim has similar dreams; the origin of which he attributes to an alien that he believes lived in a pond right next to the windmill where he grew up. As the story goes, it turns out that the creatures were not for real and were only the projections of what Jim has hidden in his mind for twenty five years. When his parents were killed in a restaurant shoot-out, Jim blamed himself for not being able to predict that incident given the fact that his psychic powers had already been evident to him at a very young age.As such, he dealt with his grief by delving into fantasies about primeval creatures lurking at the bottom of the pond. This was further aggravated when his grandfather blamed him for the death of his grandmother who broke her neck in the mill. As Jim got lost deeper into his fantasy world, he was able to manifest the ungodly creatures as physical phenomena, thus, creating the alien entity called the Enemy.
Holly Thorne’s role was to enlighten Jim that he was in control of what was happening:‘The Enemy is the embodiment of your rage over the deaths of your parents. Your fury was so great, at ten, it terrified you, so you pushed it outside yourself, into this other identity. But you’re a unique victim of multiple-personality syndrome because your power allows you to create physical existences for your other identities’’ (Koontz, 1991, 350). Once Jim Ironheart was able to accept this as something part of himself, the constant threat to Holly Thorne’s life (as being pursued by ‘The Enemy’) ceased to exist and Jim became a whole person once again.
When the novel progressed to the building of character of ‘The Enemy’, Dean Koontz demonstrated his fondness for Science Fiction, which he juxtaposed into the horror and suspense elements. But while he infused the Science Fiction factor, he still brought readers to a realistic and logical explanation of the surreal events that comprised the story, a style which has been found to be a common element in most of his writings. The Vision Dean Koontz appears to have a penchant for the paranormal sciences, clairvoyance, or in short, psychic powers.Like the character of Jim Ironheart in Cold Fire, the protagonist in The Vision also possesses psychic abilities that enable her to see murders that are about to happen.
The protagonist is Mary Bergen, a newspaper writer who has her own column about anything psychic. Her abilities prompt her to help the police in tracking down killers before they even carry out their beastly acts. As Koontz take the reader to each envisioned crime scene, he describes in great detail the physical set-up – a scene recreation reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock mysteries.As the story unfolds, however, Mary finds her murder visions more and more gruesome and difficult to follow since the face of the killer remains blocked or hidden. Through Koontz’ expositions of details and events, the readers minds are wont to speculate whether the killer who is persistently present in Mary’s terrible vision is someone close to her. This is particularly evident in the scene where the Ouija Board was used to help Mary find out about the mysterious and vicious killer in her visions.
The other significant characters in The Vision are Mary’s husband, Max, and her brother, Alan who despise each other. Both try to help Mary in pursuing the killers in her visions but as they do, they come to hate each other even more. Alan believes Max to be a gold digger, who is out to make a fortune out of his marriage with Mary. Dr.
Cauvel, Mary’s psychiatrist, tries to make a connection between Mary’s visions and her childhood abuse of which she hardly has recollection. He helps her bring back the childhood memories related to her abuse but all she can remember are the flapping of bird’s wings.During one of their therapy sessions, as she is about to reveal the killer’s face, Mary’s telekinetic power goes haywire, shattering the doctor’s glass dogs collection which flew off the shelves towards her. In the end, it turns out that Mary’s brother had abused and brainwashed her when she was just a child. Also, the elusive killer in her most terrible visions was actually her brother who had already planned to kill her. Using her psychic powers of telepathy and telekinesis, Mary was able to defend herself from her brother, who was killed by a flock of bats with whom she communicated through her mind.
Aside from the apparent focus on paranormal phenomena, Koontz has once again demonstrated his inclination towards explaining present events as direct or indirect consequences of past occurrences. His portrayal of Mary as an abused child also reflects his own childhood experience under the tyrannical authority of his abusive father. This element has been cited as something common in most of his novels (Kotker, 1996). While this novel lacked the Science Fiction elements of Cold Fire, it nevertheless blended suspense with mystery to create this thriller of a fiction.
