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He had an alcoholic, schizophrenic, abusive father. His father held forty-four jobs in thirty-four years, often getting fired when he punched out his bosses - so the family was poor, and Koontz often spent time living with relatives and friends of the family. 

He became obsessed with comic books and science fiction novels and began writing books himself, which he sold for a nickel a piece to people in his neighborhood. 

He published his first book, a science fiction novel called Star Quest, in 1968.

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He finally made the hardcover bestseller list with his novel Strangers (1986), about a group of people across the country who slowly realize that they've been brainwashed by the government. ...

Almost every book he has published has been a bestseller, and copies of his books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide. His most recent book is The Taking..

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God was here before the marine corps, so you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the corps. /// 

There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here, you are all equally worthless.

The raw recruits, shorn of their hair and so their individuality, become crack combat troops under the tutelage of the archetypal Marine drill instructor... 

Tearing down their defenses, their relationships, realigning their sex drives, he marries love and violence, the soldier to his rifle.

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The stories that she tells so masterfully hark back to the brutality of her childhood in the rural South and the women who loved but could not protect her from her violent stepfather. 

Allison made that world jump off the page in her much-acclaimed, best-selling novel Bastard Out of Carolina.

Her newly published novel, Cavedweller, already on the New York Times bestseller list, moves forward in time, but is still very much an effort to understand the struggles of women -- young and old -- trying to make their way in the rural South. 

"I write who I can write -- people I can understand. I can understand deeply wounded, hidden kinds of girls," she says.

She had originally sold the rights to Bastard Out of Carolina because she needed the money and she thought that, as people told her often happens in the industry, the movie would never be made.

Overall, Allison is generous with director Anjelica Houston's work. "Actually, considering who she is and where she came from I think she did a damn fine job." ....

"She got the incest beautifully. You can't watch that rape scene without the hair on the back of your neck comin' up, and she did it in a way that it's never been done before. 

"She made it completely plain what was going on. This is not sex; this is about destroying that child." ///

Allison was disappointed by the large sections of the book that were omitted, including the lesbianism. "I miss desperately the parts they didn't use. They left out all the parts where [the girl] Bone has agency, where she's not a victim. 

"I complained about that with the script, but they didn't get it. I kept thinking I must not've done the book good enough if they didn't get it, so I'll try harder next time."

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Patrick Bergin, Julia Roberts in "Sleeping With the Enemy"
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You might even be tempted to think that since the characters played by Goldie Hawn and Julia Roberts prevail through their own efforts over the murderous men stalking them that these are even in some sense feminist films.

Don't you believe it; both are sheerest patriarchal propaganda pieces masquerading as women-friendly.

Both films are filled with what feminist theorist Mary Daly calls reversals, where the real message is just the opposite of the ostensible one.

But by portraying the husband as an elegant, wealthy madman.. the underlying text suggests that abusive husbands are insane and, by implication, rare.

This belies the reality that it is an all too common practice in the United States, engaged in by "normal" males, who are criminal, but not considered insane in a society that encourages men to dominate women. ....

Another reversal is that the wife is depicted as having the resolve and ability to plan and carry out an ingenious escape from this hideous marriage while the subtext seems to confirm the truth of the abusers standard threat that he will track her down no matter where she goes should she run away from him.

How could that have anything but a horrifying effect on real women contemplating escape from an abusive situation?

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Here is a movie about barbaric practices against women, who were locked up without trial and sentenced to forced, unpaid labor for such crimes as flirting with boys, becoming pregnant out of wedlock, or being raped. 

And they are not ancient history. The Magdalene Laundries flourished through the 1970s and processed some 30,000 victims; the last were closed in 1996. ///

Raised in the Catholic Church in America at about the same time, I had nothing but positive experiences. 

The Dominican Sisters who taught us were dedicated, kind and brilliant teachers, and when I see a film like this I wonder what went wrong in Ireland -- or right at St. Mary's Grade School in Champaign-Urbana.

"The Magdalene Sisters" focuses on the true stories of three girls who fell into the net. As the film opens, we see Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) lured aside by a relative at a family wedding, and raped. 

When she tells a friend what has happened, the word quickly spreads, and within days it is she, not the rapist, who is punished.

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She is weeping and shamed, her face is as scarlet as her red-hot bottom... 

But life is dirtier than porn, and I didn't get the idea from a wank book. I got it out of the newspaper. 

It was a small story reprinted in the "No Comment" section of Ms., and it reported that, somewhere in the Midwest, a lawyer running for public office had been revealed to have abused his former secretary by spanking her and videotaping her standing in a corner repeating, "I am stupid." 

On being revealed, he sought to make things right by apologizing and giving the woman $200.

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On reading it I smiled, then shook my head in dismay, then thought, what a great story--funny, horrible, poignant, and gross, the misery of it as deep as the eroticism; the misery in fact giving the eroticism it's most pungent force. 

The wank-book aspect was clearly indispensable, but what interested me most was: Who is this girl? The Hopeful Innocent in the porn story, the cipher in the news story? What would she be like in real life?

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from review by Roger Ebert [suntimes.com 10/14/1988]

"The Accused" demonstrates that rape victims often are suspects in their own cases. Surely they must have been somehow to blame. How were they behaving at the time of the crime? 

How were they dressed? Had they been drinking? Is their personal life clean and tidy? Or are they sluts who were just asking for it?

I am aware of the brutal impact of the previous sentence. But the words were carefully chosen, because sometimes they reflect the unspoken suspicions of officials in the largely male judicial system. 

She goes to a sleazy bar and has too much to drink, and does a provocative dance to the jukebox, and begins to flirt with a man in the bar's back room. 

And then things get out of hand. The man, also drunk, picks her up and lays her down on top of a pin-ball machine, and begins to assault her.  ///

The film shows most of this sequence only later, in a flashback. Its opening scenes deal with the immediate aftermath of the rape, as the woman (Jodie Foster) is moved through the emergency care and legal systems, where she meets professionals who are courteous and efficient, but not overly sympathetic. 

Then she meets Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis), the assistant district attorney who will handle her case.

"I wanted to see what makes a modern-day Beethoven-Janis Joplin tick," explains Gigi Gaston [above]. ... 

Sophie B. Hawkins [right] and the film makers explored the dark secrets of Sophie's childhood [including sexual abuse] and the murky memories that have held her captive in isolated pain... the pain soulfully heard so often in her songs. 

She discusses these memories and all of her childhood issues with her mother after years of silence. She searches for the truth in order to expel feelings of hidden shame, all the while struggling with the ever present dichotomy of an artist -- to be publicly private.

Gaston says she admires the honesty on both sides which made these revelations possible. ... 

"Sophie has had to face that darkness in order to evolve into a whole person -- I think she knows who she is now, and I think she's incredibly brave to let me photograph it while it's happening.

That's why this movie will be great for kids. ... Whether you're five or fifty you can do anything you want -- you follow your dream, and nothing can stop you: no parents, no family traumas, nothing. She's proof of that."

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[You say in your video that you think you were never meant 
to be damaged, that you are a phoenix. Is music your rebirth?]

Sophie B. Hawkins : Yes. Absolutely. It's in that struggle with music. Everyone has to have their own way of doing it. Some people can get into certain religions the way it has been done before, but for me, everyone has to find their own way to be reborn, to purify themselves. 

Drums are so open, and that's why I study lots of instruments. To find my own music is a struggle, to search and my soul finally says, "ahhh". The lyrics come out as if they've been waiting for me to find them. That's the key: Beauty. Struggle. But when you find it, what liberation.