For decades a religious vision has suffused Koontz’s work, making him the most popular explicitly Catholic novelist in the world. Two questions arise about Dean Koontz: First, is he to be listed among serious novelists at all? Second, what makes him a Catholic novelist? One exception is Jon Sweeney, who called him in America (7/4/16)“the best-selling writer of fiction in the world today who happens to be Catholic” (emphasis added). This spring, when PBS launched its Great American Read campaign, his 1987 novel Watchers was on the campaign’s list of “ America’s 100 most-loved books.” Yet he is rarely mentioned in the recent debate on the decline of Catholic literary culture. They are found in every bookstore, and several have been made into movies (with mixed results, as he is the first to note). His books have sold over 450 million copies in dozens of languages, and many of his novels have been at the top of the The New York Times bestseller list. This brings us to one of the most wildly successful novelists in the world: Dean Koontz.
“Perhaps,” wrote O’Donnell, “the successful Catholic writer is the writer who depicts faith by stealth, flying under the radar to avoid detection.” Recalling that Catholics had to practice their distinctive faith covertly during the English Reformation and in the early American colonies, she concluded: “Like her comrades of old, the successful Catholic writer has not disappeared-she’s just hiding in plain sight.” A Masterpiece of Creation 20, 2014, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell noted exceptions, like Alice McDermott-but her “very Catholic novels” are often set a few generations ago, “when faith was still considered a respectable option,” so secular critics can admire her work while dismissing the religious content as historical detail.
In perhaps the most substantive lament, the poet and critic Dana Gioia wrote in First Things in December 2013 that “Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts-not in literature, music, sculpture or painting.” He said there seems to be a tacit agreement on both sides of the divide that “Catholicism and art no longer mix.”
Powers received critical and popular acclaim within and beyond the Catholic community, we see a vast wasteland today. Compared to the “golden age,” when novelists like O’Connor, Graham Greene, Walker Percy and J. Religion may appear in contemporary fiction as part of the landscape, a plot device or even a threat, wrote Paul Elie in “ Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” in the New York Times Book Review (12/19/12), but one searches in vain today for a serious writer working, in the words of Flannery O’Connor, to “make belief believable.”Įlie’s challenge evoked extensive commentary in America and elsewhere, much of it lamenting that he is right.
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