When I began Ticktock in early 1994, I had fun with it—but then I hit a wall. Something was wrong. I couldn’t identify the trouble, so I put the book aside. Instead, I wrote Intensity which turned out to be the scariest and fastest-paced novel I had ever written. Even Dark Rivers of the Heart had made room for some humour, if less than usual, but Intensity was perhaps (if reviewers can be believed) as unrelenting as a thriller can be, and I finished it with a deep need to write something lighter.
When I returned to Ticktock, I realized at once what the problem was. The lead character didn’t work. He needed to be a Vietnamese-American. You know why this is so if you have read the book before reading this afterword. Suddenly the story flew. As is the tradition with pure screwball comedy, the humorous elements are quiet at first; the comic chaos builds slowly through the first third of this supernatural thriller, but then escalates page by page.
The revelations in Ticktock left me wide-eyed with wonder as they unfolded, and I came to love the characters—Tommy, Del, their mothers, Scootie the dog—so much that I was dismayed when I reached the final page and couldn’t follow their adventures any further, couldn’t hear what they would say next. After the darkness and intensity of Intensity, writing Ticktock buoyed me.
I doubt that I’ll ever write anything quite like this book again. Indeed, I hope that faithful readers will find that my next novel, Sole Survivor, scares them out of their skins and wrenches numerous other emotional reactions from them. In the meantime, here are the adventures of Tommy Phan, Del Payne, Scootie, and their families, with the hope that you have as much fun with them as I did.
—Dean Koontz May 1996