Wesley J. Smith, Chair of Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, wrote an article praising the prolific literature of his friend Dean Koontz, whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide.

Smith finds Koontz both a unique writer and a remarkable person with a powerful story of redemption. Born in poverty in Pennsylvania under the hand of an abusive father, Koontz persevered and pursued novel writing with the help of his wife’s encouragement. The rest is history. Through daily discipline, keen research, and profound imagination, Koontz has written dozens of bestsellers. First and foremost, his books entertain and delight. In addition, however, they deliver their fair share of social commentary and critique. Much of his work explores the development of transhumanism and technological progress gone amuck.

Smith writes,

The perils of transhumanism and the threats to liberty posed by a technologically empowered intrusive national security state are other sources of inspiration, as his plots often involve the catastrophic consequences of hubristic science gone wrong and/or imperiled protagonists having to shed the accoutrements of modernity in order to evade detection by the many methods available to track us as we go about our daily lives.

-Wesley J. Smith, Why You Should Binge Read Dean Koontz – The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

In response to the nihilism that’s often celebrated in contemporary literature, Koontz holds on to the perennial truths of human uniqueness and liberty. In this day and age, we need writers and artists like that more than ever.

Read Smith’s wonderful article in full here.