That all said, Koontz does weave a prediction-or perhaps a warning-of sorts into his new thriller, DEVOTED, a chilling and yet heart-tugging tale about a mother, her autistic son, and Kipp, a remarkable golden retriever with telepathic abilities. In a tweet that has since been widely shared, a reader said that Koontz had predicted the coronavirus outbreak based on a screenshot of a page in his 1981 novel, The Eyes of Darkness. “As it relates to coronavirus, my powers of prognosticator are greatly exaggerated considering I can’t even predict what I’m having for dinner.” “We’re well past 1,000 requests for interviews about it, and I’ve turned them all down,” Koontz says, though he echoes a quote he gave to one publication in a rare interview about the topic.

“It’s not even a novel about a pandemic.”īut knowing all this hasn’t stopped some conspiracy theorists from manipulating the facts-even going so far as to link text from The Eyes of Darkness to Sylvia Browne’s 2008 book, End of Days, which also alleges to have “predicted” the virus. “When the book was reissued in 1989, the Soviet was gone, so I just changed it to Wuhan,” Koontz says, which was a nod to the biological warfare labs that have been in existence in the area for more than 50 years. In fact, in the original version of the book, the weapon was called “Gorki-400” in reference to a Russian locality-Wuhan wasn’t mentioned at all.

While it’s true the novel does make reference to the Wuhan-400-a biological weapon brought to the US by a Chinese scientist-Koontz says that’s where the similarities end. Let’s get this out of the way right here-no, Dean Koontz did not predict coronavirus in his 1981 thriller The Eyes of Darkness. Did Dean Koontz Predict a Global Pandemic?

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