Art & Creativity Quote by Dean Koontz

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.