What the Night Knows: A Novel - Softcover

A Letter from Author Dean Koontz

Let's Call It "The Turn of the Phillips-Head Screw"
I was happily working on a novel titled What the Night Knows, the premise of which was already described on various web-site postings, when an idea for a ghost story slammed into me with as much force as an exuberant 60-pound golden retriever playing bowl-dad-off-his-feet. When I picked myself up from my office floor, I didn't need a sticky roller to remove the dog hair from my clothes, but the story I had been working on was entirely Swiffered out of my head to make room for the ghost story. After alerting my editor and my publisher of my intentions, I put aside What the Night Knows and set to work enthusiastically on the new idea.

Over the next few months, as the manuscript pages piled up, I occasionally sent lists of possible titles to my editor and my publisher, and they sent lists of titles to me. None of us liked the same title. We didn't argue. We just quietly declined to be enthusiastic about one another's suggestions. We are a genteel bunch. The only one of us to wake with the severed head of a horse in his bed was me, and that was unrelated to the disagreement about titles. I'm not even sure who sent the horse's head, although I did fail to renew my subscription to Oprah magazine, and their circulation department does play hardball.

Anyway, one day, when I was deep into the still untitled ghost story, I suddenly realized that the title of the novel I had set aside, What the Night Knows, would be a perfect title for the novel I was writing. In fact, it was more suited to the ghost story than to the novel to which it had been previously attached. I emailed my publisher suggesting that I steal this title from myself, and as I sent that email, I simultaneously received one from her--which made the same suggestion. This seemed like destiny at work, and if not destiny, then something even stranger, something with which a wise person would not screw around.

Now, the ghost story, What the Night Knows, is scheduled to land in bookstores on 28 December, and the book I set aside--but to which I will return--doesn't have a title. So here we go again. Sometimes I think that life is nothing but a never-ending series of problems and crises, a dark journey of frustration and anxiety and despair, and I really just want to hijack a gasoline tanker truck and drive it at high speed over a cliff. But then I eat a couple of Reese's peanut-butter cups, and everything's swell again.

Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie. 
From the Hardcover edition.