Over the years, I’ve become known for mixing different genres of fiction with reckless abandon – suspense and terror and mystery and love story and a little science fiction – changing the mix with every novel. In a number of books – Watchers, Lightning, The Bad Place, Hideaway, Mr. Murder, to name a few – I had even blended large measures of humour into the mix, though according to the common wisdom of modern publishing, this is a sure sales squelcher. These became some of my most successful novels, however, and readers responded to them enthusiastically. Consequently, after Dark Rivers of the Heart I decided to tackle a new and strange mix of genres: the supernatural thriller and the screwball comedy.
Good screwball comedy – exemplified by splendid old movies like Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story -is different from all other comedy in that its form is nearly as strict as that of the sonnet. Some basic requirements include: a male lead who is smart, witty, sensible, but befuddled by the other eccentric characters with whom he becomes involved; an appealing female lead who appears to be an airhead but who turns out, by the end, to be the wisest of all the characters; she should also be an heiress; she should have an astonishingly eccentric but lovable family; all of the screwball characters should be largely unaware of the way in which they leave the male lead in a state of perpetual confusion; the dialogue should be of a rarefied type that has characters talking at cross purposes, that allows the most outrageous things to be said with convincingly deadpan seriousness; the story should be propelled by surprising character twists and revelations that delight us and that are logical within the given structure of the story; and if possible, there ought to be a dog.
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 won-der 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