Bestselling novelist narrowly escapes
spending the rest of his life
gutting fish on an Alaskan halibut trawler

Blazing Reader,

My fiction has been described as a mix of "gravitas and comedy." Using humour to stop the reader from becoming emotionally overwhelmed by the story is a technique I learned from Dean Koontz, for which I am most grateful (today being Canadian Thanksgiving and all). Koontz's earlier thriller novels were all suspense, but later he started experimenting with more and more humour, as he explains in a GoodReads interview:

“A long time ago — so long ago that saber-toothed tigers were still prowling shopping centers hoping to snare a tender child coming out of Chuck E. Cheese and the internet was not yet a big deal — I began slipping little humorous moments into my novels, to the dismay of the agent and the publisher with whom I worked at that time. They gently but firmly advised me that in novels meant to be suspenseful, humor would destroy the desired mood. I was given to understand that if I kept doing this, I’d destroy my career and have to work gutting fish on an Alaskan halibut trawler.

“I thought if we laughed with the characters now and then, they would be more appealing and seem more real, because humor is how we all — if we’re sane — cope with adversity and peril. I tried to be humorless for the next book, Midnight. At the keyboard, I was a grim, doom-mongering, tornado of paranoia. Then came The Bad Place, which was dark and scary but, at the same time, funny enough that my agent and publisher were not amused.

“In those days, before email, I was receiving as many as 10,000 snail-mail letters each year from readers, and one day it occurred to me that not one of them complained about my often mixing a little humor into the books. In fact, many of them liked it. Thereafter, when I felt the need to wear two hats — the black hood of a grim reaper and a bell-festooned jester’s cap — I didn’t worry about it. So there followed the Odd Thomas series and From the Corner of His Eye and Life Expectancy, among others, and I never had to gut a single fish.”

Of course, just as in life, if humour is overused, a novel never achieves any real psychological heights or emotional depth (depending on which analogy you want to use). But if kept in balance, I think it makes the story even harder to put down.

Now, if you've never read a Dean Koontz novel and would like a story that's amusing, spooky and philosophical, I recommend you check out the Odd Thomas series at https://blazingpinecone.com/shop/odd-thomas

Stay sane & read great books,
John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/