Parallel Koontz
THE NEWPORT BEACH WRITER HAD NO INTEREST IN ALTERNATE UNIVERSES, MULTIPLE TIMELINES AND SIMILAR SCIENCE FICTION CONCEITS. UNTIL NOW.
Author Dean Koontz had read plenty about things like parallel universes, quantum mechanics and multiverses full of innumerable timelines.
So how excitedwas he to explore all those fascinating theories in one of his own books?
“It never crossed my mind,” says the best- selling author ofmore than 100 suspense thrillers. “I never thought I'd write anything about it because my sense was that as intriguing as the concept is, it would inevitably turn into toomuch of a sci-fi head trip.
“I just never thought that's where I'd go.”
But “Elsewhere,” the latest from the Newport Beach resident, now takes him there. The story of single dad Jeffy Coltrane and his precocious, 11-year- old daughter, Amity, the book, which arrives Tuesday, tells a story set in Suavidad Beach, a fictionalized version of Laguna Beach, or Laguna Beaches, we should say, given the parallel worlds it explores.
Seven years after his wife, Michelle, vanished, Jeffy is solo parenting Amity. That's when an eccentric genius shows up asking them to keep something safe: a so- called “key to everything” that allows its user to jump across timelines in the multiverse. Black ops agents would kill to get their hands on it.
Koontz, who will talk about the novel during a virtual book event with the Southern California NewsGroup onOct. 13, says “Elsewhere” came to him through its characters first.
“I was just noodling around, not even doing anything related to work,” he says. “I don't know how, but this idea came in my head about this fatherdaughter relationship.
“Sometimes, the story idea that comes to you isn't a story idea, it's characters,” Koontz says. “That's how the Odd Thomas series started. This character came into my head and I had no story to relate to him.
“You start thinking, ‘ Well, this is an intriguing idea for a character, but what's the story? What is this character fit for?'”
It struck him that a fatherdaughter pairing was a relationship he'd not done before, and from there he imagined why they might be on their own, left by a wife and mother now presumed dead.
“This is where it all gets mysterious,” Koontz says. “It's why I love the creative process. That's when I suddenly thought: parallel world. What if they had the ability to go into a parallel world where the mother still exists? What if the mother had never married, never had a child, and could be encouraged to fall in love with Jeffy all over?
“There, you start to get a story, and that's where the multiverse comes in.”
Building worlds
Fueled by a sense of excitement for this new terrain, Koontz says he immediately launched into the work.
“I couldn't wait to get to the keyboard to start on it,” the 75-year- old writer says. “Doing something you haven't done before and challenging yourself to do it is what keeps you going at my age. You think, ‘Oh, I haven't done that,' so now it's worth sitting down and trying it.”
Keeping the voices of the characters both real and distinct was one part of the work: Both Jeffy and Amity share the role of narrator, depending on the chapter, while scientist Ed Harkenbach, who created the device they use to port between worlds, appears in several identities.
“Notbeing a genius scientistmyself, it's a little tricky,” Koontz says, thoughhe soon sensedhowtowrite eachEd with a voice to fit the personality of each Ed of the separate worlds.
Working with parallel timelines required a clear set of rules, Koontz says, though keeping the action in the same coastal city made that task much simpler.
“I wanted to create this little picturesque town, and then all of this wild stuff that happens literally takes place in the same town, just in different versions of it,” he says. “It reduces the chance of being confused.
“And I wanted a story in which they inessencealways come home, until the end, where they come to a new home that's even better than the one they once knew.”
Theories and beliefs
While “Elsewhere” has its shares of Koontzian horrors in its parallel timelines, all the science books he'd read gave “Elsewhere” a sense of authority about such esoteric matters.
Project Everett Highways, the name given the search for alternate paths in the book, is named after Hugh Everett III, the reallife quantum theorist who first proposed the existence of “many worlds.” (Fun fact:
The late Everett's son, Mark Oliver Everett, is the founder of the rock band Eels.)
And Koontz is happy to discuss the possibilities — or probabilities — that such theories might be right.
“The more science you read fromthe last 30 years, the more astonishing life is, the more intricate everything is,” he says. “We think, every 10 years, that we now know mostly how things work. And then we find the layer below the layer that we've been thinkingwas the bottom of all, and that becomes more intricate than one above it.
“That's what fascinates meabout the ideaof themultiverse,” Koontz says. “If it's true, and it would seem to me that quantum mechanics tells you that it has to be true, thenwhat does that do philosophically? How does that impact human philosophy of all kinds?”
On the surface, it would seem to “disprove all religions, it disproves Plato.
There's nothing that it leaves undestroyed,” he says.
But Koontz doesn't believe it's that simple, and in “Elsewhere,” he incorporates the view that even if there are many versions of us in different timelines, it's possible philosophy, religion, belief systems still coexist.
“Really, the multiverse is a design of greatmercy because it gives human beings endless chances to correct ourselves,” Koontz says.
Does that mean he believes there are more Dean Koontzes being interviewed in other timelines?
“I like to have some evidence, and a lot of theoretical physics is to some extent totally theoretical,” the Koontz of this timeline says. “What you have to do is take it to some degree on faith. But the other side of it is quantum mechanics in manyways has proved itself.
“I'm basically a believer and I'm an optimist. I'm a person of faith. I believe the world has a purpose and a
meaning. And I believe that we're basically screwed up but struggling to find that meaning.”
Thinking that the multiverse might be real gives him comfort that “if you screwed yourself up in this life or fate intervened, that there's still somewhere else where you have the chance to go forward and make things right and have a happier life,” Koontz says.
“In a sense, the multiverse is just another definition of grace and I find that interesting to think about,” he says. “I don't rule it out. I just don't know. Part of me says I'd like to believe this is true. And I have had a few strange things in my life that have happened that tell me things I've seen are inexplicable.”
Therein may one day lie another book, he adds.
“I'm going to write about them someday when I no longer care if anybody thinks I'm insane,” Koontz says, and laughs.