Rereading Dean R. Koontz

Rereading Dean R. Koontz makes me want to write again. He's not a humiliating author to read, not like Borgès, or Matthieu Terence, or Volodine, or who knows? No, Koontz offers simple stories, simple characters, simple language, and the whole thing is enjoyable and effective. A storyteller's work.

The elitist conception of literature, that of academics and critics, is increasingly repugnant to me. As far as I'm concerned, the novel is only incidentally a major art form designed to explore the possibilities of language and narrative; it didn't emerge in human history to culminate in the french "Nouveau Roman". For all men, including the humblest and most limited, and even especially them, it is a tool for understanding the world and for consolation; for consolation, for compensation, for life by proxy, for wishful thinking too, and for memory. Cavemen were probably already inventing stories around the fire, in which the hero saved the clan, and his questions, perhaps, enabled the most limited of warriors to formulate their own questions through the mouth of the storyteller. That's what literature is, fundamentally.

An added charm of this 80s fantasy/horror literature: the book cover illustrations...