Shadowfires (66 page)

In early 1987, Leigh published her fifth book,
Shadowfires
, with a new house—Avon Books—that promoted her with more vigor. By then, however, my novel
Strangers
had become a hardcover bestseller in 1986, and
Watchers
would shortly do better. I had no reason to write under pen names any longer. With breathtaking ruthlessness, I pushed Leigh down a long flight of stairs, and when she survived that assault, I dragged her to the top and pushed her down again. But after she likewise survived six rounds from a revolver and an assault with a fireplace bellows, she had been sufficiently weakened to make her easy prey for the alligator in the basement.

Even before my career under my own name—Dean Koontz, if you’ve forgotten—had begun to take off, my wife, Gerda, and I had seen that success was coming at us like a runaway truck, whether we liked it or not. Consequently, we had bought back the rights to all of my old novels, under my name and pen names, either to keep the early (and not so good) science fiction out of print or to be able to resell the suspense novels when their value had risen. To reacquire rights to those books, most publishers made us pay at least a hundred percent of the advance I had originally been paid, even if it had earned out. We didn’t complain.

When my agent approached Pocket Books, Leigh’s first publisher, and asked for a buyback price for the four titles of hers that they owned, they offered to return them for nothing. This would have been a magnanimous act, a lovely human gesture, if the executive who made the offer had not coupled it with this statement: “They’re worthless anyway. They’ve been fully exploited. Trying to squeeze additional sales out of them would be a waste of money.” Considering that books under my name were beginning to sell very well and that most of my readers had never seen Leigh’s books, the executive seemed not only to be dissing those four novels but dismissing the idea that I was on the rise and that I had good prospects.

We smiled through the insult, politely thanked him, and took back the books at no cost to us. Within only a year,
The Servants of Twilight
was republished under my name by Berkley and spent six weeks at #1 on the
New York Times
Paperback Bestseller List. Following Leigh’s tragic demise, all five of her books became bestsellers and have sold continuously for two decades, in thirty-six languages. In the most sincere gratitude to Leigh Nichols, every once in a while we purchase a cool pair of sequined shoes and place them on the alligator’s grave, which is, of course, also Leigh’s grave.

Now my friends at Berkley Books, who have been supporters of my work longer than anyone in this business, are reissuing
Shadowfires
in a handsome new package, with this new afterword. As I said above, this is a horror novel, and I won’t argue that point. It is a riff on genetic engineering, and as such I think it’s timelier now than it was when it first appeared twenty-one years ago. We live in an age when a scientist at a Chinese university has recently cloned a pig whose genes were fiddled with to make it glow a fluorescent green. (I’m not doing shtick now; this is real.) The trait has proved inheritable, as the cloned pig’s offspring also glow green. You can see what a fun century we have entered; considering humankind’s arrogance and infinite capacity to screw up, it will also be a terrifying new century.

Judging by reader mail,
Shadowfires
is considered one of my scariest novels, although let me gently suggest that it is also a bit of a love story, a story about the perils of a bad marriage, and a cautionary tale about the hubris of scientism. And the indomitable female lead might be seen as my preparation to write Chyna Shepherd, the protagonist of
Intensity
, a straight suspense novel, a few years later.

After all this time, I still like
Shadowfires
and am pleased to have it under my name. One of the best things about the book is that no one in Hollywood has ever wanted to make a film of it. If you have read the other afterwords in the reissues of my Berkley titles, you know that one more experience with film development might well plunge me into insanity, a condition around which I’ve been cockily capering for a long time.