se71

« Eleventh Hour | Main | Books not reviewed »

January 24, 2006

Dean Koontz - Odd Thomas

Some authors spend a years, even decades writing a novel, and it gets loads of publicity and reviews in the press and everyone talks about it for a while, and they go off again and start working on another piece of worthy fiction.

You don't get that with Dean Koontz - like Terry Pratchett, he seems to have the ability to write books faster than a normal person can read them. They don't win any literary prizes, particularly as they fall into the horror genre, but they are excellent page turners.

I have a fifty minute train journey, and I like to count the pages of a novel that I get through during the ride. My average is about a page a minute, and this lets me get through the average 300-400 book in under a week. Odd Thomas was more in the 70-80 pages region. There are no hard sentences to try and fathom, nothing you really need to go back and reread. As an amateur writer myself I've been studying the prose and wondering just how it works. How do you write such readable pages? Does it just flow out of him, surely he doesn't have time to make detailed plans? Some years he manages three novels, sometimes he even wrote under different pseudonymns, as if his public couldn't possbily believe one person could produce so much fiction and so he had to hide some of the books.

And I also wonder, if he just slowed down and spent a year or two thinking about it, could he write a truely great story (apologies to Dean if this has already happened, I have many many more of your novels still to read).

Stephen King is a household name - how has he managed this when Dean Koontz hasn't. It's probably the great movie adaptations of the novels that did it. But also, King has managed to make a few of his stories less horror and more mainstream. "Stand By Me" and "The Shawshank Redemption" both have horrific elements, but the supernatural doesn't make an appearance. The latter I feel, which is normally voted by the public in the top five favourite films of all time, was what legitimised King's work in a way that has never happened with Koontz.

Anyway, back to the novel, Odd Thomas. The eponymous hero is a twenty year old man living in the fictional medium sized town of Pico Mundo in the desert somewhere in California. In an obvious gentle dig at "The Sixth Sense", he claims "I see dead people, but then, by God, I do something about it". Odd can see and communicate with people who have died, but not moved on to the next plane of existence. They cannot talk, but can gesture to him, and though they cannot hurt him, he can feel their touch. Sometimes they have been murdered, and they help Odd to solve the crime and bring the bad guys to justice. Sometimes Odd gets hurt, and though he is scared of physical danger, he is courageous. He is resigned to doing the right thing, knowing he couldn't live with himself if he didn't follow his self imposed rule of righting wrongs.

Along with this gift for seeing the dead, he also has a sixth sense for bad things about to happen. And if he knows the name or physical appearance of someone about to commit a heinous crime, he can walk or drive around the town randomly and this talent will soon bring him to the person. He uses this skill quite a lot.

He can also see black shadowy creatures he calls bodachs, which skulk around always preceeding a great disaster or atrocity.

The story is written as a first person narrative by Odd, and we know that something terrible will happen, but not exactly what or how bad it will be. We do know it will be pretty bad. Many bodachs are abroad, and shadowing a new stranger in town called Bob Robertson. One of Odd's friends has a dream in which she dies with a gunshot to the head. The future is a murky place, and Odd knows that it can be changed, but it is difficult to know exactly what to do. He follows Robetson and breaks into his house when it is empty. There, he finds a calendar with Wednesday February 15th ominously marked; this is only the following day. Odd know that there will be a terrible bloodbath unless he can stop it.

Odd is a very likeble character, who hates violence and guns, but because of his gift is forced to confront them. He is from a really dysfunctional family, but by keeping his life as simple as possible (no car, no bank account, job as a short order cook) he is getting by. His soulmate girlfriend Stormy isn't the only girl who likes him, though he is completely blind to their clumsy advances, and this complete lack of self interest and his self-effacing humour makes him a really down to earth and straightforward man despite his weird life.

As he goes about the day, visiting the Sheriff, and his girlfriend Stormy, and trying to work out what is about to happen, the novel reads much like a detective story. A 400 pound six fingered man is featured, as is a blind man who is a DJ playing plays jazz all night on the local radio station, and a woman who thinks she might wake up and be invisible. These and other colourful characters are reminiscent of the kind of people who show up in Elmore Leonard's books. Koontz could easily write a straight detective book, maybe he has (I notice from searching the web that he is credited with writing an episode of Chips, the motorbike cop show from the 1970s.)

The events of the next 24 hours do involve dead bodies, and culminate in a frenzy of explosives and machine guns. I'm not going to spoil the ending, though you know that Odd survives already, and even as I write this I discover that a sequel has been published less than two months ago. This novel must have been popular, Koontz hasn't written many sequels I think.

All in all, a diverting read, great for commuting or travelling, and a 400 page book you could probably devour in a single sitting if you had a mind to. You will like Odd himself a lot, and want to find out how he gets on after the end. I'm looking forward to reading "Forever Odd"

[Actually if you do want to know the ending, I think I'll create a spoiler page for it. Watch this space]

Posted by se71 at January 24, 2006 08:31 AM

Comments

Post a comment