At 79, Dean Koontz Won’t Be Retiring Anytime Soon

What advice would you give to young writers today?

A lot of common wisdom in publishing is common, but it isn’t wise. So be careful about what advice you take. Secondly, perseverance is as important as talent, because talent isn’t always recognized. Everybody in the business except one turned down all the Harry Potter books. And yet one publisher out of all the rest had the ability to see the value. You just have to keep plugging away at it. Perseverance can be a very difficult thing when you’re getting a lot of rejection.

What do your fans most want to tell you?

Until email, we got anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 letters a year. We’ve responded to all of them, to one extent or another. They all want to tell you how your work affected them. That’s very sweet and important, too, because you think you’re doing one thing, and you may find out you’re doing more than you thought you were.

Tell me about the inspiration behind your book about your dog, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie.

We work with a charity called Canine Companions for Independence, which provides assistance dogs for people with severe disabilities. They kept saying year after year, “We want to give you a release dog,” which is a dog that didn’t quite make it through two years of training. We kept saying, “No, we’re too busy.” I said to my wife one day, “We’re going to always be saying we’re too busy, and we’ll end up being 90 and haven’t taken a dog.” So we took a first one, Trixie, and that dog utterly changed our lives. We’ve had three golden retrievers now, and every one of them has that golden retriever sensibility, which is very sweet, very affectionate, but each — they’ve all been girls — is her own personality. And every one has brought something important to our lives.

Who’s your current dog?

We have a lovely girl named Elsa. They come to us with the name; we don’t change it. They said Elsa got through 21 months of training but “failed out” — except they no longer say “failed out”; they say “had a career change.” We don’t want to embarrass the dog. [Laughs.] She had a career change because she didn’t want to work. She wanted to cuddle all the time. And we said, “Oh, that’s perfect. Let’s bring her home.” And we did.

Does having a dog help keep you physically active?

To a degree. It always depends on the dog. The first two [Trixie and Anna] would walk any distance, miles and miles, and want to keep on going. Elsa will walk about four blocks, and then she turns around and looks at you, and sits down in what we call “bucket bottom,” because it’s like a bucket full of concrete — you can’t move her. Then she won’t go anywhere but back home. So she’s not a big walking dog. But they keep you active anyway just playing with them. If Elsa didn’t want to walk that day, I walk anyway. I used to lift weights, but that’s 30 years in the past. All my friends [who] have played golf or have run marathons, all of their knees and hips are ruined. I think it’s good that I’ve been just a walker.

I read you recently had culled your own library down to 20,000 books.

Yeah, it once was way over 50,000. Finally, we moved and we were going into — it’s not a small house, but it’s smaller. My wife said, “You keep all these books that you bought and you couldn’t read because you said they weren’t well written, and yet here they are on the shelf.” And I said, “Yeah, because I always want to have an example of how you don’t do something.” And as I heard myself talk, I realized how silly that was. So I started getting rid of the books that I couldn’t read. And that amounted to quite a few, actually.

How do you store 20,000 books?

Well, in the current house, they had an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, and I thought, that’s kind of ridiculously redundant. And secondly, the interior smells like chlorine. So we took out the indoor pool and made it into a library.

What’s your favorite book in the collection?

Oh, there’s so many favorite books, but I think the one I’m most pleased with was many, many years ago when I started collecting hardcovers. We could buy a new hardcover, but we couldn’t afford going back in time and buying ones that had become collectible. And yet, I saw a first edition of The Maltese Falcon. Price was $250. I talked my wife into it. I said, “This will go nowhere but appreciate in value. It’s a pristine copy, and it’ll be a great investment.” She said, “Yeah, the problem is, with books, if you make an investment, you’ll never sell them.” She was quite right. But I paid $250 for that [book], and I saw an equivalent copy go for $25,000 at a recent auction. So it was a good investment, but she’s right — I won’t sell it.