Early Novels
1968 - 1977



Many thanks go out to:

Phil Stephensen-Payne - For release dates and other information, as well as rare UK scans.
Jim Olson - For very rare images and info.
Paul Evans - For very rare images and info.
Allen Norby - For very rare early proofs, as well as other images and info.
Tom Daniels - For very rare Oval & Cameo Library images.
All the people who have worked so hard to gather obscure Dean Koontz items, through the years.
YOU - Contribute to Koontz Project and your name will be added to the credits list.

Thank you all!!
Without your kind efforts, this would not be possible.




Star Quest
The Fall Of The Dream Machine
Fear That Man
The Dark Symphony
Hell's Gate
Anti-Man
Dark Of The Woods / Soft Come The Dragons
Beastchild
The Crimson Witch
Starblood
Time Thieves
A Darkness In My Soul
The Flesh In The Furnace
Warlock
A Werewolf Among Us
The Haunted Earth
Demon Seed
Hanging On
After The Last Race
Nightmare Journey
Night Chills
The Vision

NOTE: No titles were released, using his own name, in 1978 or 1979.












"In a universe that had been ravaged by a thousand years of interplanetary warefare... there seemed now but one thing that could bring the destruction to an end..."










"When all the world's a stage, director Cockley will run it."










"The Galaxy had forgotten war and evil - until the man without a past had intervened...
But... was that his purpose?  Or was he there to save all Hope from a threat even deadlier than the one he himself presented?"










"Earth was easy prey, for there was little left after the last of the atomic wars, except for pathetic mutants picking a living in the ruins... and others, creatures no longer even remotely human..."











"Strictly a fun book for Gerda to remind her of plasticine porters, glass onions - and that nothing is real.  Nothing foorthwith is real."











"Sam was a miracle being - and a curse to a dangerously overpopulated planet."











"The First bit of trouble came even as they were leaving the starship..."
Dark Of The Woods

"And what will you do when the soft breezes come and the dragons drift in to spread death?"
Soft Come The Dragons











"The naoli came to Earth as conquerors...The two races, human and naoli, were the most powerful intelligences in the galaxy - and destined to be immediate and perpetual enemies!  It was only through treason that the future of each race could be assured!"











"A young man's struggle with destiny and desire in a post-nuclear world"

"Jake Turnet's overdose of the drug PBT had opened the psychic doorway into a world where nuclear disaster had happened in a much earlier century  - a world where sorcery had replaced science.
Then Jake met Cheryn, a witch whose will to conquer was surpassed only by her exquisite beauty.  Here was the one woman Jake must resist, yet whose magical powers he must rule if he was to find his way back to his own earthly civilization."











"Timothy was not human - not if by human you mean a man with two arms, two legs, two eyes.  Of the first criteria, he had none at all; of the last, only one.  And even that one was misplaced."











"'Mr. Mullion,' one of the triplets said, looming up twent feat away as Pete followed the smooth railing.
He stopped, his heart racing, but he felt a break in the railing as he did so.  He edged forward a foot or two and felt around with his boot until he discovered a step.  In a moment, blood pounding in his temples, he was halfway down towards the lower level, taking two risers at a time, no matter what the danger of a fall.
He heard the mechanical man start after him as he set foot on the cement floor."











"The gene-tamperers produced two supermen - one a defiant mentalist, the other a defiant...God?"











"A race of living puppets, bound to the puppet master, fearing him, hating him, planning..."











"New magic clashes with old science in the final battle to win a world reborn!"











"He was a cyberdetective - A super-man"











"The Maseni were Humanoid, but no creature with bulbous forehead, slit mouth and tentacles where fingers should be would ever be mistaken for a man.  The Maseni had been on Earth for ten years - years in which the Human Race reeled under the shock not only of meeting an alien intelligence, but of knowing for the first time that Earth did not belong to men alone.  For the Maseni held the secret of contacting the worlds of the supernatural, and now all the creatures of legend and mythology had been released from their ancient bondage.  Not all of them were happy about the new freedom, however - even a vampire is apt to resent the interference when he's stopped in mid-bite by the precise wording of a decision handed down by The Supreme Court of The United Nations."











"In the privacy of this woman's room... Against her will ...A sensually self-programmed, murderously intelligent non-being commits the inconceivable act of terror!"











"The tension was doing funny things to Major Kelly's men's minds...which meant anything could happen - and you can bet your last C-Ration it did!"











"Edgar and Annie are tired of living by the rules.  Hard work has earned only debt and loneliness.  They want wealth - no matter what the risk.

Fearful but determined, they plan a clever, hideously dangerous robbery.  The target: a thoroughbred race track on Sweepstakes Day.  The goal: steal every dollar from the cash room and the mutuel windows - plus one million dollars that is on display as a promotional gimmick.  The attempt draws into their lives many unexpected, sharply delineated characters, including an arsonist, a psychopathic killer, a cancer-stricken gambler on his last fling, and a wise young track detective..."











"One hundred thousand years in the future - mankind long ago made its first interstellar flights, encountered alien races, and discovered that its own place in the hierarchy of intelligent beings is about where the goldfish ranks on earth.  Unable to cope with his clear inferiority, stunned into paralysis by culture shock, man puled back to his own planet and applied what little spirit of experimentation he retained to bizarre self-altering genetic stunts.  Racial self-disgust led to wars and finally to a colossal holocaust, from which man has spent dozens of centuries stumbling back toward some sort of civilization.

The earth now is inhabited by the weird descendants of the genetic experiments - some scaled, some furred, some huge, some tiny, some four-legged, some winged - and by Pures, of the original human genetic code.  And into the world are being born with increasing frequency men with telepathic powers - who are hunted down and killed summarily, out of superstitious terror.  Jack, a Pure, and Tedesco, a great bear with a human brain, the product of the ancient experimentation, are telepaths thrown together (to the horror of both) in a flight for their lives that becomes a quest for the secret of the Black Presence - which may be the key to mankind's place in the cosmos."











"When Paul Annendale arrived in Black River, he expected to enjoy a quiet six weeks of vacation, camping in the mountains with his children, visiting with his old friend, Sam Edison, and renewing his budding romance with Sam's daughter, Jenny.  Instead he found a nightmare: the town ravaged by a mysterious epidemic of night chills and fever that ordinary drugs didn't seem to cure; old friends and acquaintances behaving in a strange and frightening manner.

Black River, had, in fact, fallen prey to the diabolical experimentations of Ogden Salsbury, a mad scientific genious who, with the help of the power-hungry millionaire Leonard Dawson, and a greedy Pentagon official, General Ernst Klinger, intends to gain mastery of the world by gaining control of the minds of people.  The frantic efforts of Paul and Sam to discover the key to his mania and defuse the psychological time bomb he has planted in Black River before it is too late..."











"Twenty-four years ago, when Mary Bergen was a child, someone tortured and tried to kill her.  When she got out of the hospital, she discovered that her flirtation with death had left her with a bizarre gift - clairvoyance.  Since then she had used her psychic talent to assist the police in the solution of a hundred murders.

Now, more than two decades later, Mary is again the target of a homicidal maniac.  She must use all her wit, courage, and psychic ability to find him before he finds her.  And as the case unfolds, she begins to suspect that the man she is after is somehow connected to the man who stabbed her twenty-four years ago.

To save herself, Mary must remember every detail of the horror she endured in childhood.  Gradually she realizes that she was the victim of more than attempted murder.  Something worse.  Something strange.  She must confront a terrible truth in her past if she is to have a future."