"In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience"
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Koontz is drawing a moral boundary without turning fiction into a sermon: violence can appear, even dominate a plot, but it must never feel like an easy answer. The phrasing is careful. “In my books” signals craft, not policy; he’s not lecturing the culture at large so much as staking out a personal code in a genre ecosystem where bullets, blades, and body counts can become lazy narrative currency. “Never portray” is an aesthetic promise to the reader: whatever thrills you get will come with friction.
The subtext is reputational. Koontz has spent decades writing high-velocity suspense that often courts horror’s darkest impulses while maintaining a broadly mainstream, mass-market accessibility. This is how you reassure wary readers (and, implicitly, critics) that you’re not selling cruelty as catharsis. Violence, in his framework, is not a fantasy of control; it’s a last resort that extracts a cost.
The most revealing clause is “extreme end of their experience.” He’s defending character integrity. If a protagonist commits violence, the story must first exhaust the alternatives: fear, grief, pursuit, flight, moral argument, community. That demand forces escalation to feel earned rather than convenient, and it keeps the reader’s identification intact. You can root for a character who’s cornered; it’s harder to root for a character who’s merely efficient.
Context matters: post-1970s American popular fiction, shaped by cinematic action and a marketplace that rewards escalation. Koontz’s claim is a quiet pushback against the cultural shortcut that equates power with harm, insisting suspense can be intense without becoming an instruction manual.
The subtext is reputational. Koontz has spent decades writing high-velocity suspense that often courts horror’s darkest impulses while maintaining a broadly mainstream, mass-market accessibility. This is how you reassure wary readers (and, implicitly, critics) that you’re not selling cruelty as catharsis. Violence, in his framework, is not a fantasy of control; it’s a last resort that extracts a cost.
The most revealing clause is “extreme end of their experience.” He’s defending character integrity. If a protagonist commits violence, the story must first exhaust the alternatives: fear, grief, pursuit, flight, moral argument, community. That demand forces escalation to feel earned rather than convenient, and it keeps the reader’s identification intact. You can root for a character who’s cornered; it’s harder to root for a character who’s merely efficient.
Context matters: post-1970s American popular fiction, shaped by cinematic action and a marketplace that rewards escalation. Koontz’s claim is a quiet pushback against the cultural shortcut that equates power with harm, insisting suspense can be intense without becoming an instruction manual.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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