Phantoms (60 page)

We all make mistakes. Maybe you’ve been at a tony dinner party, where you’ve eaten your entire salad before realizing you’ve used the wrong fork. Faux pas. Maybe you’ve been a worker in a nuclear power plant, where you’ve pushed the wrong button, contaminating dozens of fellow workers with plutonium. Oops. In a drunken haze, high on cheap red wine spiked with Listerine, perhaps you have mistaken the neighbor’s golden retriever for an attractive blonde and eloped with it to a wedding chapel in Vegas, only to be told by the minister—who is dressed in a sequined jumpsuit and pomaded like Elvis—that the state of Nevada will not permit you to marry a canine without the written consent of its trainer plus a six-figure line of credit in a major casino. Woof. Perhaps you have tried to kill a spider with a nail gun, only to spike your foot to the floor. Ouch. It is possible, I suppose, that on a cold, rainy day in Manhattan, you have stepped out of an open window on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise, thinking you were passing through a door into a stairwell, that you plummeted like a wingless ox toward the street below, that you were spared death only because you fell onto a fruit vendor’s cart of mush melons, that you then stepped out of the cart into the path of a bus, were knocked aside like a mere rag doll, rolled in a tangle of broken limbs into an open manhole, fell into a storm drain, were swept by surging torrents from one end of the city to the other, and were flushed into the sea, where in your desperation you mistook a shark for a marker buoy, resulting in the loss of two pinkie fingers, an ear, and half a kneecap. Get insurance. Maybe, in an argument with a Hell’s Angel, you’ve used the words “kissy-lipped girly man.” Maybe you’ve eaten live fire ants. Maybe you’ve left a waffle iron plugged in, on the floor beside your bed, and then awakened in the middle of the night and mistook it for a slipper. Maybe, in spite of the printed warning, you tore the manufacturer’s tag off a sofa cushion; and now you are serving twenty years in a federal prison, making crocheted license-plate cozies for three cents an hour. Maybe one of you reading this has made
all
these mistakes, in which case you are not merely exhibiting the fundamental human tendency to err: You are as dumb as a sump pump.

Writing
Phantoms
was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life, ranking directly above that incident with the angry porcupine and the clown, about which I intend to say nothing more.
Phantoms
has been published in thirty-one languages and has been in print continuously for fifteen years, as I write this. Worldwide, it has sold almost six million copies in all editions. It has been well reviewed, and more than a few critics have called it a modern classic of its genre. Readers write to me by the hundreds every year, even this long after first publication, to tell me how much they like
Phantoms
. I enjoyed writing the book, and when I had to reread it to create a screenplay for the film version, I found it to be just the thrill ride that I had originally hoped to produce. Yet it is this novel, more than any other that earned for me the label of “horror writer,” which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed.

As I have written in another of these afterwords, I enjoy reading horror novels, have considerable respect for the form, and admire the finest writers who have worked in the genre. I believe, however, that 95 percent of my work is anything
but
horror. I am a suspense writer. I am a novelist. I write love stories now and then, sometimes humorous fiction, sometimes tales of adventure, sometimes all those things between the covers of a single volume. But
Phantoms
fixed me with a spooky-guy label as surely as if it had been stitched to my forehead by a highly skilled and diligent member of the United Garment Workers Union—making a far better wage than that poor bastard crocheting license-plate cozies.

So why did I write it?

In 1981, after
Whispers
had become a bestseller in paperback, I wanted to follow it with an equally strange novel of psychological suspense, an edgy and chilling tale in which the only monsters were the human kind. My publisher believed the other book had succeeded because readers had thought—solely because of packaging—that
Whispers
was a horror novel. Horror was then a hot genre. Prior to
Whispers
, I had never earned a great deal of money from a book, and the
Whispers
royalties then due were slowly, slowly, slowly moving through a long pipeline. Meanwhile, I needed to pay the bills, and my agent and publisher made it clear that I could not get a substantial advance for another book like
Whispers
, only for a horror novel. I was also told that a horror novel would be backed with major advertising, but that a mere suspense novel would not get much support. If I wanted to build upon the success of
Whispers
, I had no choice but to write a highly promotable horror novel. Against my better judgment, I wrote
Phantoms
.

I thought I would cleverly evade their horror-or-starve ultimatum by making
Phantoms
something of a tour de force, rolling virtually all the monsters of the genre into one beast, and also by providing a credible, scientific explanation for the creature’s existence. Instead of fearless vampire hunters armed with wooden stakes, instead of werewolf trackers packing revolvers loaded with silver bullets, my protagonists would save themselves by using logic and reason to determine the nature of their mysterious enemy and to find a way to defeat it.
Phantoms
would be a horror story, yes, but it would also be science fiction, an adventure tale, a wild mystery story, and an exploration of the nature and source of myth.

When I delivered the book, there was little enthusiasm for it. Only five thousand hardcovers were printed and, prior to publication, I was told by most people in my professional life that this was
too much
of a horror story and, therefore, could be of no interest to the broader audience that had made
Whispers
a paperback bestseller. I was flummoxed. I felt I had delivered precisely what had been asked of me, only to be crushed like that Hell’s Angel crushed the guy who called him a “kissy-lipped girly man.” The reviews began to come in, and they were largely excellent, although this praise did not result in a bigger first printing or any promotion, which led to festivals of self-pity and wild storms of depression in the Koontz household. Fortunately, enthusiasm for my work remained strong at the paperback house, and one year after the hardcover bombed,
Phantoms
followed
Whispers
onto the paperback bestseller list, ensuring that my career would not lose momentum. Thereafter, it sold and sold and sold; and as I write this, it is nearing its sixtieth printing in paperback in the United States.

Do I like
Phantoms
? Yes. Do I wish I’d never written it? Yes. Am I happy to have written it? Yes. Am I a little schizo on this issue? Yes. Although as a matter of career planning,
Phantoms
was a major strategic blunder, the writing of it brought me considerable pleasure, and readers’ outspoken delight in the book has provided a gratification that has sustained me through some bad days.

The lesson, I suppose, is that beneficial developments can flow even from a mistake. If you work in a nuclear power plant, however, triple check yourself before you push that button.

THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
THE FUNHOUSE
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
DARKFALL
SHATTERED
THE VISION
THE FACE OF FEAR