Dean Koontz, said to feel that everyone has Multiple Personality, has it in at least three of his novels—Cold Fire, Mr. Murder, and Innocence

Biography

“Dean indicates, all of us may be schizophrenic (which is a misunderstanding of the term as a dual personality). Yet splitting ourselves into two minds allows us to cope with life better than if we were integrated.” (1, pp. 173).

Thus, according to his biographer, Dean Koontz feels that multiple personality is an aspect of normal psychology, that everyone has it, and that it helps people cope. Nevertheless, he has serious misgivings about it, as implied by the following anecdote:

“In this one bathroom, Gerda [his wife] and I kept finding folded twenty-dollar bills on the counter. We’d each think it was the other who was leaving it lying around. One day I asked her about it and she said, ‘I thought you were leaving them.’ Now, either we’re completely insane or something odd was happening there…It happened about a dozen times. It wasn’t a fortune. We never really figured out whether one or the other of us was just being forgetful, but it was more fun to tell it as a ghost story” (1, p. 210).

Since ordinary forgetting does not happen twelve times, the implication of this amusing anecdote is that the $20 bills had been left on the counter by someone’s alternate personality. “Insane” and “ghost story” may express his fear that normal multiple personality could become multiple personality disorder.

Cold Fire

The protagonist does have multiple personality, but it is literary multiple personality, like Dostoevsky’s The Double, in which the alternate personality is dramatized by giving it a separate physical existence.

In Cold Fire, the diagnosis is made by Jim Ironheart’s girlfriend, Holly, who says, “you’re a unique victim of multiple-personality syndrome because your power allows you to create physical existences for your other identities” (2, p. 271).

Mr. Murder

Martin Stillwater, a novelist, dictating a letter into a tape recorder, feels that he had “lost his concentration for only a few seconds,” but when he listens to the tape, he discovers that he has lost a full seven minutes. He “remembered none of it” (3, p. 13). He had lost time. He had amnesia.

He compared his episode of amnesia to what happened with a character in one of his novels. She had had “blackouts” or “fugues,” which, he explains, is “a serious personality dissociation” (3, p. 25). [Note: multiple personality, also known as dissociative identity, is a personality dissociation.]

Furthermore, his young daughter has noticed that there were times when “Daddy wasn’t Daddy” (3, p. 16).

Following the same literary convention used by Dostoevsky and Koontz, himself (see above), the alternate personality is then incarnated as a “doppelgänger” or “double” (3, p. 111) or, to be more modern, a clone. 

Innocence

This novel is much more subtle about multiple personality than the previous two. But multiple personality is a pervasive subtext in regard to mirrors, “Fogs,” and hiddenness.

According to his biographer, Dean Koontz has felt that people are split into two minds, one of which is “disgusting, ugly.” In this novel, these Jekyll and Hyde, alternate personalities, are personified as two types of people: the rare, innocent souls (e.g., Addison Goodheart, the narrator/protagonist) and the common, ugly souls, almost everyone else. Ironically, the latter misperceive Addison as looking horrifyingly ugly, because he is like a mirror to their own ugly souls, which they find so horrifying that they try to kill Addison at first sight.

Where did Dean Koontz get such an idea? Perhaps—like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sigmund Freud (see past posts)—Koontz, or someone he knows, has occasionally had a problem with mirrors. Some people with multiple personality have a problem with mirrors, because one personality may see an alternate personality when they look in the mirror.

A second way that multiple personality becomes a subtext in Innocence is in regard to “the Fogs and the Clears.” These are supernatural beings, seen by Addison Goodheart throughout the novel, but not seen by most people. Fogs are probably evil and Clears are possibly good, but otherwise their significance is never explained.

A Fog is described in Innocence as being like “an eel” (4, p. 90). Well, on page two of Cold Fire, the protagonist (who has multiple personality) “began to shudder, not because of the air-conditioning but because a series of inner chills swam through him, like a wriggling school of eels” (2, p. 2). So a Fog, according to Koontz, is the kind of thing that a person with multiple personality would experience.

The third way that multiple personality becomes a subtext of Innocence is the repeatedly emphasized fact that the protagonist lives a hidden existence. His home is a subterranean bunker during the day, he comes out only at night, and he goes only where people are unlikely to see him: because people would be so horrified by his appearance that they would feel compelled to kill him. Thus, hiddenness is a major theme in this novel.

Well, among clinicians familiar with multiple personality, perhaps the biggest cliché is that multiple personality is a condition of hiddenness. It is usually hidden from both the people who have it—i.e., from the host personality, who often has amnesia for the comings and goings of the alternate personalities—and from the people who know them, who may think of the person as having puzzling inconsistencies or out-of-character moods.

1. Katherine Ramsland. Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography. New York, HarperPrism, 1997.

2. Dean R. Koontz. Cold Fire. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991.

3. Dean Koontz. Mr. Murder. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993.

4. Dean Koontz. Innocence. New York, Bantam Books, 2014.