Contemplating Evil

Novelist Dean Koontz on Freud, fraud, and the Great Society

Nick Gillespie & Lisa Snell from the November 1996 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Reason: Governmental abuse of power is a recurring theme for you. In Dark Rivers of the Heart, you included an afterword highly critical of asset forfeiture laws, and you wrote an introduction to Ambush at Ruby Ridge, Alan Bock's book about Randy Weaver.

Koontz: Over the past decade, we've developed police agencies that are paramilitary. We've never had that in this country. And now we're starting to have a lot of trouble with them--incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco. That's going to get worse before it gets better. When I wrote Dark Rivers, Waco had been accepted. Nobody was talking about Ruby Ridge. Nobody even knew what it was. It was weird that after my book came out, that these two cases came back up. They still haven't been resolved in any way that makes sense. Some of the agents involved in Ruby Ridge got commendations.

Reason: Have you taken much heat for your public stances on these sorts of issues?

Koontz: Some readers assume that I removed the afterword to Dark Rivers from the paperback edition because I couldn't take the heat. But circumstances had changed: The afterword sounded dated because some of the things it called for--like Congress passing a law making itself subject to the laws it passes for the rest of us--happened. I took it out rather than rewriting it. But the book says what it says. I didn't want a lot of people to read the book and think it was all fiction. I thought it was important that people who read it saw asset forfeiture laws dramatized and realized that this was really the way they work. A couple of times when I've been on radio talk shows, callers essentially wanted to blame me for the Oklahoma City bombing. TheNew York Times called me right after the bombing. They wanted to know if I thought that writing books like this would give people these kind of ideas. I said, "Have you read the book? Because if you read the book, no, it's impossible." This again is simplistic thinking. Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate. It would be nice to think like this--how easy to solve all the problems! But it doesn't work that way.

Reason: You say that people don't get ideas from the media, but you yourself have said you realized that your life didn't have to be the way it was partly by reading books. You throw in an overtly political afterword to your novels--doesn't that have an effect on your readers?

Koontz: We're talking about two different things. Politicians or people who are against sex in movies or violence in movies--there's people who are against religion being shown in these things--never make any kind of differentiations. When the subject is violence, say, they never differentiate how the violence is portrayed. In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience. In Dark Rivers of the Heart, I even make the statement that guns are less important than knowledge--although one of the characters says that sometimes guns are the only way. They don't kill people in the story until the very end, when they must. Generally, it's the bad guys who have to go. So it's how it's portrayed: Does it have a moral context?

To some extent, the action always takes place inside the reader's head, and from that viewpoint, no matter how innocuous something is, somebody can always take it the wrong way. I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence--there's the cop who is just going to start blowing people away as his first choice of how to deal with the situation--I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society. I don't think anybody should be restricted from showing that. But kids should be raised and educated in a way that gives them the skills necessary to judge these things. Reason: Although your books often have a political dimension, you've said that you pay just enough attention to know when the next bat is going to hit you in the head.

Koontz: I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics. If you really look at any issue, historically, what was done to relieve one condition created a worse one. So if I don't really believe that something is going to have a profound effect on any of us, I try to ignore it.

Reason: Do you vote?

Koontz: I keep saying, "Damn it, I'm not going to vote!" (laughs). But then somehow or another, there's always a couple of things that you want to go and vote for. Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it's like two of the scariest movies I can imagine. The first is a remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with Bob Dole in the Bette Davis role--we can see him serving the rat on the silver tray. Even scarier is Bill Clinton, who vacillates between this airheaded, feel-good, Bubba sort of character and a predatory, immoral sleazeball. The airheaded, sort of sweet image he projects is a Tom Hanks role. The other one is like an Anthony Hopkins role. So you have Hannibal Gump, starring Bill Clinton. With a choice like this well, I probably will vote.

In 1992, I went into that booth saying I might not vote for president. Finally, I pulled the lever for Bush. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. There was no passion. It was being stuck with the least of three evils. I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent that I've never been able to define them as heroic figures.

You know, every time a poll comes out that shows the public has so little faith in this politician or that party, there's a hue and cry. But I actually find that hugely healthy. If 70 percent of the public believes nothing the president says--and an even higher number for Congress and the press--that's actually pretty healthy. It means people will think for themselves, and that's the way it should be. A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power, even if they're not putting their hand in the cookie jar.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 8:36PM|#

kjhg

log in or register to reply