Watchers was chosen as one of the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults in 1987, and his novels
Lightning and the juvenile
Oddkins were both selected by the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Young Adult Advisory Board in its Youth-to-Youth reading list.
Koontz's own youth was one he was happy to escape. An only child, he grew up in Pennsylvania. As he once commented, "I began writing when I was a child, for both reading and writing provided much needed escape from the poverty in which we lived and from my father's frequent fits of alcohol-induced violence." While still in college, Koontz started selling his fiction and won an Atlantic Monthly fiction contest. Having married and graduated from college in the same year, Koontz took teaching positions for a while, writing in his spare time and selling stories and then novels. Finally he decided to make a try at full-time writing, using an assortment of pseudonyms in various genres, including science fiction, mystery, and thrillers. "The curse lies in the fact that much of the early work is of lower quality than what came after," Koontz remarked, "both because I was so young and unself-critical and because the low earnings from each book forced me to write a lot of them in order to keep financially afloat."
A Real Writer
Koontz marks Chase, a suspense novel written under the pseudonym K.
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