Photo: David Livingston/Getty Images (2009)
Sample of authors
Koontz, Dean R.
Dean Ray Koontz is an American author of suspense literature. He was born in Everett, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a dysfunctional family with a violent, alcoholic father and a suppressed mother. He found comfort in reading and watching movies, and he began to write short stories, which he sold to friends and relatives when he was eight years old. He attended Shippensburg State College (now...
Literary figures
Penny (Pennington) Wise
Gender: Male
The young and rather self-assured Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise is an artist, as well as a famous – at any rate in the books by Carolyn Wells – ‘psychic’ detective. It means that he solves cases that seem to be inexplicable, and often have supposedly ‘supernatural’ elements. Which do, of course, in the end transpire to have completely natural explanations. His assistant is the teenage film actress Zizi.