by Dean Koontz
will make it impossible for family and friends to recognize them from a photograph in the Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am? feature carried in every major newspaper. They sense in their bones that they were writers in their former lives, but being unable to recall a byline, they must reinvent themselves. Some will choose simple names related to the genres in which they wish to write: Joe Mystery, Bob Sci-fi, Brenda Romance. Others will be creative: Mickey Mysterioso, Robert Rocketblast, Britney Heather Slinkythighs. Still others will choose hopelessly improper names like Luke Phlegm and Kathleen Gastroenteritis, and their careers will flounder.
Compared to some reasons for using a pen name, my reasons for publishing The Door to December as by “Richard Paige” were prosaic if not downright boring, which is why I cleverly left the discussion of them for the latter part of this afterword. In 1984, when I wrote this novel, I was publishing successfully under my real and true name (Dean Koontz) and also under the pseudonym “Leigh Nichols.” A nice gentleman who published the Koontz titles at Berkley Books had moved to New American Library, a competitor, and though he knew that I was unlikely to shift work under my own name to the new house at which he now labored, he also knew I was not entirely happy at Pocket Books, which at that time was publishing my Leigh Nichols titles. I had one unwritten Nichols book to deliver under contract. The nice gentleman suggested that I sign a contract with him for a book that fit the Nichols profile but under yet another pen name—Richard Paige; when I had delivered the final Nichols that I owed to Pocket Books, I could move Nichols to New American Library, where that established pen name could be applied in place of the Paige byline on the book that was under contract to him. This sounds nefarious, even demonic, but it was all on the up-and-up.
Then, as I was delivering the Nichols title to Pocket Books and had barely begun the Paige novel, the nice gentleman changed jobs again—moving to Pocket Books. He became Leigh Nichols’s publisher and promised to solve the problems I had been having at Pocket Books. I embraced this serendipitous development—but wasn’t able to persuade New American Library to accept repayment of my advance and cancel my contract. As a result, I wrote The Door to December and published it in 1985 as the first and last Richard Paige novel.
Nine years later, books under my own name were selling so well (in spite of the fact that I had declined Satan’s final offer for my soul) that I no longer used any pen names. I had been reissuing the Leigh Nichols books under my name (The Servants of Twilight, The Eyes of Darkness , The House of Thunder, The Key to Midnight, Shadowfires), and they had all been paperback bestsellers upon reissue; therefore, New American Library suggested that the same be done with The Door to December. We worked out a new deal, they shipped two million copies into stores in 1994, and everyone but Satan was happy with the sales.
These days, when people ask me whatever happened to Richard Paige, I always tell them the (metaphorical) truth: I bludgeoned him with a blunt instrument purchased at a Kmart blunt-instrument sale, fed him into a wood chipper in my backyard, and stole his small but lucrative literary estate.
In an annotated bibliography in The Dean Koontz Companion, a book about my work, the generous bibliographer writes of The Door to December: “Its exploration of the corrupting influence of power and the totalitarian urge is as dark as anything the author has written, but this is nicely offset by the character of Dan Haldane, whose dialogue is frequently as witty as it is acerbic.” Whether it’s nicely offset or not is for the reader to judge, but the stated theme is indeed the one I intended to explore, though I’m also writing here about the power of family and love to overcome those ominous forces.
Those of you who have been my constant readers will know that I always write about the power of family, love, faith, hope. As I have written elsewhere and more than once: none of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light. I try to live by this philosophy, and except for that one episode with the wood chipper, I think maybe I’ve done so more successfully than not.
