Book #340 – Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

First, I want to celebrate a small milestone. With this book, I’ve read 50 books from The list. It’s certainly been a fun year of reading so far. I hope anyone reading these reviews has had as much enjoyment from them as I have had writing them.

This 2003 thriller began the Odd series, about a short order fry cook that sees ghosts. Using his ability, he aids the Pico Mundo police chief to solve crimes or sometimes…prevent them from occuring. In an interesting twist, Odd (yes, his name is Odd) can see ghosts, and they can touch him, but he can’t hear them. This may or may not be so Koontz doesn’t have to give Elvis dialogue.

In thi first installment into Odd, Odd sees the spectres of disasters, which he calls bodachs. Following the foreboding meaning of their arrival in Pico Mundo, he has to stop a possible terrorist attack. In between shifts at the Grille and dating Stormy, of course. So, it’s part mystery thriller, and part mundane look into Odd’s life.

The problem with the plot being possible terrorists in the introductory novel is that Koontz has to stall the plot pretty often to make character profiles. This yanks the reader out of the urgency of Odd’s search in order to make sure integral characters in later books are given enough page length to have background. The fact that the whole plot takes place in a little over 24 hours means a lot of it is rushed, then halted to a crawl for a new character or large plot point. In reality, most of the book was character introduction, with the plot sandwiching it.

As for the characters themselves, Odd is not the only interesting creature in Pico Mundo, so it’s more due to outlandishness of some of the characters that the plot stops in some areas. While Odd gives decent descriptions to his closest friends and relations, it’s their personalities you remember. Between his rose and gun weilding mother and the writer of a bulemic detective series, Odd’s ghost-sight seems almost mundane. I just wish their introduction, as amusing as some of them were, had flowed a little better with the storyline.

Seeing ghosts alone would have landed this book on the October reading list, but the real “spook” factor was the bodachs. In between rather sweeping descriptions of the buildings and surrounding areas of Pico Mundo are these shadow-like shadow-like shapes. In the book, they are given a menacing air and they linger where fear and death will be strongest, but they appear to be merely shadows without discernible features. They also don’t seem to actually interact with people except to feed off fear. The movie from 2013 made them a tad more terrifying from the screenshots I’ve seen. (The real horror of this book was the ending because wow, that was foreshadowed but still felt like the rug being pulled out from under you.)

Overall, it was a good read. I’m hoping with the main characters introduced in book one, the sequels have a bit smoother plot line. None of them ended up on the List, but who knows, maybe I’ll read the sequels as freebies down the line.

Fate isn’t one straight rode…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path – Dean Koontz

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