I love books and stories involving the supernatural. I especially love those stories if they can scare me, and run that chill along my spine. It can be hard to scare me using a story. But there are two authors, who can get me every time. They are Dean Koontz, and Stephen King. Both of them are able to get under my skin, and to make me think. They both are authors who deal with the supernatural, and the weird.
However, they are both very different writers, both in style and plot. A Stephen King novel can rarely be truly compared to a Dean Koontz novel. But they both affect me. How are they so different, and yet so alike? That is the question I seek to answer with this article.
One of the differences between Stephen King and Dean Koontz is the subject matter their plots tend to revolve around. Dean Koontz has many books that involve genetic manipulation and enhancement. He also deals with the ‘other side’ in a lot of his books, with things like ghosts, and spirits.
Part of what can be so chilling about his books is his revelations of the human soul. In his books, the greatest of evils, the most horrifying of monsters, is the dark side of the soul that lies in every human being. Whether it is the minds of the people who invented and carried out genetic experiments, and accidentally created a monster, or people with great powers, who give in to their dark side, the true enemy, the one behind it all, is that dark voice in the mind, the devil on your shoulder.
Stephen King dwells less on what is inside, and more on what is outside. His monsters are from the other side of the galaxy, from another dimension, or are simply there, sometimes unexplained, sometimes known, but always physical. His creatures and enemies are the fears of the inner child in all of us, the creature under the bed, or the monster in the closet. He captures this, not only in the look and feel of the monsters, but also in the unbelievable feel of it all, just like the child’s futile attempts to convince his parents of the monsters existence.
Dean Koontz tends to have happy endings to his stories. That is not to say that they are sappy, or overly dramatic. The characters have been affected, changed, maybe even permanently scarred by their experiences, but they end up happy. Each one is well written, too, so you never feel as if the story has been cut off. Stephen King, however, is more enigmatic with his endings. They are happy sometimes, bittersweet at others. Some have horridly evil endings for the characters, while some are much more enigmatic, and mysterious. And some, he simply leaves to the reader to decipher.
Dean Koontz and Stephen King are both authors of supernatural stories. But for the most part, that is where their similarity ends. Dean Koontz deals with the fear of what is within, while Stephen King shows you the horror of what is without. But there is another, very important similarity they share. They both can chill you to the bone, and rivet you to your chair.
And they will both make you start looking closely at the shadows.
