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“The dead don't talk. I don't know why.” But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Odd Thomas thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, if possessed of a certain measure of talent at the Pico Mundo Grill and rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn. Maybe he has a gift, maybe it’s a curse, Odd has never been sure, but he tries to do his best by the silent souls who seek him out. Sometimes they want justice, and Odd’s otherworldly tips to Pico Mundo's sympathetic police chief, Wyatt Porter, can solve a crime. Occasionally they can prevent one. But this time it's different.
A mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world's worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like shades following him wherever he goes. Who the man is and what he wants, not even Odd’s deceased informants can tell him. His most ominous clue is a page ripped from a day-by-day calendar for August 15.
Today is August 14.
In less than twenty-four hours, Pico Mundo will awaken to a day of catastrophe. As evil coils under the searing desert sun, Odd travels through the shifting prisms of his world, struggling to avert a looming cataclysm with the aid of his soul mate and an unlikely community of allies that includes the King of Rock 'n' Roll. His account of two shattering days when past and present, fate and destiny converge is the stuff of our worst nightmares—and a testament by which to live: sanely if not safely, with courage, humor, and a full heart that even in the darkness must persevere.
From the Hardcover edition.
“The dead don't talk. I don't know why.” But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Odd Thomas thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, if possessed of a certain measure of talent at the Pico Mundo Grill and rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn. Maybe he has a gift, maybe it’s a curse, Odd has never been sure, but he tries to do his best by the silent souls who seek him out. Sometimes they want justice, and Odd’s otherworldly tips to Pico Mundo's sympathetic police chief, Wyatt Porter, can solve a crime. Occasionally they can prevent one. But this time it's different.
A mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world's worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like shades following him wherever he goes. Who the man is and what he wants, not even Odd’s deceased informants can tell him. His most ominous clue is a page ripped from a day-by-day calendar for August 15.
Today is August 14.
In less than twenty-four hours, Pico Mundo will awaken to a day of catastrophe. As evil coils under the searing desert sun, Odd travels through the shifting prisms of his world, struggling to avert a looming cataclysm with the aid of his soul mate and an unlikely community of allies that includes the King of Rock 'n' Roll. His account of two shattering days when past and present, fate and destiny converge is the stuff of our worst nightmares—and a testament by which to live: sanely if not safely, with courage, humor, and a full heart that even in the darkness must persevere.
From the Hardcover edition.
While still sustaining the requisite level of creepiness, Mr. Koontz manages to tell a breezy, overtly inspirational story that should attract a few fans of its own … Odd Thomas walks a very thin line between the exploitation of horror and the feel-good religious optimism that transcends the darkness -- and will be one of this book's main selling points. … Janet Maslin
Once in a very great while, an author does everything right-as Koontz has in this marvelous novel. Odd Thomas, who narrates, is odd indeed: only 20, he works contentedly as a fry cook in a small fictional California town, despite a talent for writing. The reason for his lack of ambition? A much rarer talent: Odd sees and converses with ghosts, the lingering dead who have yet to pass on, a secret he has kept from nearly everyone but his girlfriend, an eccentric author friend and the local police chief, whom he occasionally helps solve terrible crimes. Odd also has the ability to see bodachs, malevolent spirits that feast on pain and whose presence signifies a likelihood of imminent violence. The proximity of bodachs to a weird-looking stranger in town, whom Odd dubs "Fungus Man," alerts Odd that trouble is brewing; breaking into Fungus Man's house, Odd discovers not only hundreds of bodachs but a shrine to serial killers that helps him deduce that somehow Fungus Man will wreak widespread havoc very soon-so Odd is caught in a classic race against time to deter catastrophe. As with Koontz's best novels, this one features electrifying tension and suspense, plus a few walloping surprises. But Koontz fans know that the author has recently added humor to his arsenal of effects, and this thriller also stands out for its brilliant tightrope walk between the amusing and the macabre; one of the dead with whom Odd interacts frequently, for instance, is Elvis, still pining for his long-dead mother, Gladys. Above all, the story, like most great stories, runs on character-and here Koontz has created a hero whose honest, humble voice will resonate with many. In some recent books, Koontz has tended to overwrite, but not here: the narrative is as simple and clear as a newborn's gaze. This is Koontz working at his pinnacle, providing terrific entertainment that deals seriously with some of the deepest themes of human existence: the nature of evil, the grip of fate and the power of love. (Dec. 9) Forecast: Koontz novels always fly up bestseller lists, and this one will, too, but there's potential for additional sales here. Of all of Koontz's many adult novels, this one, despite some rough scenes, can be, because of its warm, direct voice and inherent moralism, recommended to a mature YA readership, who will love it. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
"I lead an unusual life," is the understatement of the year from Odd Thomas, the young cook at the Pico Mundo Grill. He thinks that his mother meant to name him Todd, but forgot the first letter. The name fits him, however, because he is able to see the dead and the usually invisible harbingers of doom, the Bodachs. When Fungus Man enters the diner surrounded by Bodachs, Odd knows that his life in Pico Mundo will never be the same. As he investigates further, he realizes the horror that is about to transpire. Even his love for the beautiful Stormy Llewellyn cannot protect Odd from the chaos created by the evil that has arrived. Part love story, part horror story, and part supernatural fiction, this novel will appeal to even the most ardent anti-Koontz reader. Odd's simple, honest voice will stay with readers long after the last bit of evil bears down on Pico Mundo. The love affair between Odd and Stormy will take readers expecting a standard-issue horror story by surprise, but their relationship is integral to the story, particularly the ending. The book is a well-written, well-characterized wild ride through the world of the dead and the soon-to-be dead. VOYA CODES: 4Q 4P S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Broad general YA appeal; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult-marketed book recommended for Young Adults). 2004, Bantam, 416p., and pb. Ages 15 to Adult.
In this quick follow-up to The Face, a troubled young man named Odd Thomas struggles between past and present, life and death as he tries to head off a catastrophe that only he sees coming. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Adult/High School-Odd Thomas is just that. He works as a fry cook in the fictional California town of Pico Mundo. Should he ever leave that position, he sees a future in selling tires or shoes. What he lacks in ambition, he makes up for with a special gift. He communes with and sees the dead, some of whom enlist his help in avenging their deaths from foul play. His gift is a secret from everyone except his beautiful girlfriend and the Chief of Police, who never questions Odd's tips, advice, or presence at a murder scene. The man sees "bodachs" as well, small, evil creatures, fluid in shape, that feed upon horrific acts of carnage. He is horrified to see hordes of them gathering in his town. He spots a weird looking stranger in whom the bodachs appear very interested, nicknames him Fungus Man, and rightly assumes that he is involved in the impending disaster. Breaking into the man's house, Odd finds a mysterious black room, a shrine to serial killers, and a page from a calendar that tells him the date of the planned event. Now it's a race against time to foil the plot. The rapid pace, eerie circumstances, and bizarre characters will keep readers turning pages. Just when the suspense is almost unbearable, Koontz exhibits his wry sense of humor to break the tension. The last chapters are so powerful and heartrending that they should be read several times.-Katherine Fitch, Rachel Carson Middle School, Fairfax, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Koontz's suspense masterpieces (Intensity, 1996; The Face, 2002) have tight plots or strikingly enclosed worlds. But you can't win 'em all, and despite the lift he strives for, these pages go by on automatic pilot. Suspense here turns on the life of Odd Thomas, 21, an unassuming lad gifted with the power to see dead people who cannot tear themselves from Pico Mundo, Odd's small hometown abroil on the Mojave Desert-as neither can Odd, whose "agoraphobia" has not let him drive or step outside the town. Ever. Koontz focuses on the little world of Pico Mundo itself, its physical layout and the lovable eccentrics who fill it chock-a-block. Among others, there's 400-pound romance-and-mystery novelist P. Oswald Boone (better known as Little Ozzie), and Odd's landlady Rosalia Sanchez, who fears turning invisible. Odd-a flashy fry-cook-works as a kind of Tom Cruise of the griddle at Terri Stambaugh's Pico Mundo Grille. Terri is an Elvis savant who knows what the King was doing every hour of his life. Odd's confidential tie with Police Chief Wyatt Porter has led Chief Porter to varied murderers and artists of mayhem whose victims have hung around and pointed out to Odd just who murdered them. Then to the grille comes strangely fungoid Bob Robertson, followed about by black bodachs, hungry doglike shadows sniffing out folks scented with death. When Odd secretly steals into Robertson's house, he finds first a housekeeping mess, then a computer workroom of Spartan order whose files reveal the mind of a mass murderer. And Odd stumbles upon a room of pure blackness-perhaps an adjunct to King/Straub's Black House? The date August 15 is torn from Robertson's desk calendar. Terri tells Odd, who is oftenfollowed about by the tearful and warning ghost of Elvis, that Gladys Presley died on August 14 and Elvis on August 16. Does the missing date mean Robertson will go berserk on the 15th-and kill Odd as well? With its tender surprise ending, call it It's a Wonderful Sixth Sense, built out of wet pulp and milk.
Name:
Dean Koontz
Also Known As:
David Axton, Brian Coffey, K.R. Dwyer, Deanna Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe
Current Home:
Newport Beach, California
Date of Birth:
July 9, 1945
Place of Birth:
Everett, Pennsylvania
Education:
B.S. (major in English), Shippensburg University, 1966
* Dean Koontz's official web site
He is one of the most recognized, read, and loved suspense writers of the 20th century. His imagination is a veritable factory of nightmares, conjuring twisted tales of psychological complexity. He even has a fan in Stephen King. For decades, Dean Koontz's name has been synonymous with terror, and his novels never fail to quicken the pulse and set hearts pounding.
Koontz has a lifelong love of writing that led him to spend much of his free time as an adult furiously cultivating his style and voice. However, it was only after his wife Gerda made him an offer he couldn't refuse while he was teaching English at a high school outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that he had a real opportunity to make a living with his avocation. Gerda agreed to support Dean for five years, during which time he could try to get his writing career off the ground. Little did she know that by the end of that five years she would be leaving her own job to handle the financial end of her husband's massively successful writing career.
Koontz first burst into the literary world with 1970's Beastchild, a science fiction novel that appealed to genre fans with its descriptions of aliens and otherworldly wars but also mined deeper themes of friendship and the breakdown of communication. Although it is not usually ranked among his classics, Beastchild provided the first inkling of Koontz's talent for populating even the most fantastical tale with fully human characters. Even at his goriest or most terrifying, he always allows room for redemption.
This complexity is what makes Koontz's work so popular with readers. He has a true gift for tempering horror with humanity, grotesqueries with lyricism. He also has a knack for genre-hopping, inventing Hitchcockian romantic mysteries, crime dramas, supernatural thrillers, science fiction, and psychological suspense with equal deftness and imagination. Perhaps The Times (London) puts it best: "Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler."
Shortly after graduating from college, Koontz took a job with the Appalachian Poverty Program where he would tutor and counsel underprivileged kids. However, after finding out that the last person who held his job had been beaten up and hospitalized by some of these kids, Koontz was more motivated than ever to get his writing career going.
When Koontz was a senior in college, he won the Atlantic Monthly fiction competition.
Koontz and Kevin Anderson's novel Frankenstein: The Prodigal Son was slotted to become a television series produced by Martin Scorsese. However, when the pilot failed to sell, the USA Network aired it as a TV movie in 2004. By that time Koontz had removed his name from the project.
Some fun and fascinating outtakes from our interview with Koontz:
"My wife, Gerda, and I took seven years of private ballroom dancing lessons, twice a week, ninety minutes each time. After we had gotten good at everything from swing to the foxtrot, we not only stopped taking lessons, but also stopped going dancing. Learning had been great fun; but for both of us, going out for an evening of dancing proved far less exhilarating than the learning. We both have a low boredom threshold. Now we dance at a wedding or other celebration perhaps once a year, and we're creaky."
"On my desk is a photograph given to me by my mother after Gerda and I were engaged to be married. It shows 23 children at a birthday party. It is neither my party nor Gerda's. I am three years old, going on four. Gerda is three. In that crowd of kids, we are sitting directly across a table from each other. I'm grinning, as if I already know she's my destiny, and Gerda has a serious expression, as if she's worried that I might be her destiny. We never met again until I was a senior in high school and she was a junior. We've been trying to make up for that lost time ever since.
"Gerda and I worked so much for the first two decades of our marriage that we never took a real vacation until our twentieth wedding anniversary. Then we went on a cruise, booking a first-class suite, sparing no expense. For more than half the cruise, the ship was caught in a hurricane. The open decks were closed because waves would have washed passengers overboard. About 90% of the passengers spent day after day in their cabins, projectile vomiting. We discovered that neither of us gets seasick. We had the showrooms, the casino, and the buffets virtually to ourselves. Because the crew had no one to serve, our service was exemplary. The ship dared not try to put into the scheduled ports; it was safer on the open sea. The big windows of the main bar presented a spectacular view of massive waves and lightning strikes that stabbed the sea by the score. Very romantic. We had a grand time.
In the summer of 2006, Dean Koontz took some time out to talk with us about his favorite books, authors, and interests.
What was the book that most influenced your career as a writer?
The high-school grammar textbook with which my teacher, Winona Garbrick, repeatedly rapped my head.
Otherwise, hundreds of books have had an effect on me. Perhaps the book with the most impact on my career, after the aforementioned textbook, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which I did not read until I was in my thirties. The final scene reduced me to tears. More important, I began to think about how modern publishing had compartmentalized fiction into so many narrow genres. A Tale of Two Cities, as a new piece of fiction, would be hard to place on a contemporary publisher's list. It's too much of an adventure story and too much of a love story to win the favor of most editors of "literary" fiction. It is a serious novel of politics and revolution but is also darkly comic in places. Dickens does not shrink from the depiction of evil, and some scenes are horrific, but he also tells a story of redemption and self-sacrifice and hope that some (never me!) would consider almost sentimental.
The more I thought about A Tale of Two Cities, the more determined I became to write novels that bridged genres. This began to bear fruit with Strangers, and to a much greater degree with Watchers. My publisher at the time resisted both the variety I was delivering, book to book, but also the mix of genres within each book. Pressure was exerted to stay within the limits of one label. We had some wonderful rows! In time, readers responded with enthusiasm to my attempts to tell stories with the flavors and the techniques of multiple genres. I doubt I would have had a career half as successful if I had followed another path.
What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
For three decades, I read no fewer than 200 books a year, and I still read a book a week. Out of that volume, choosing eight or ten as my favorites is no easy task, and a final list inevitably has an arbitrary quality dependent on my mood at the moment. In no meaningful order:
The four books I named are radically different from one another, yet you hear the wonderfully assured and ironic Goldman voice unmistakably on the first page of each. The Color of Light is one of the most dead-on portraits of a writer's struggle ever written, hugely entertaining; but if you learn nothing from it other than the mortal danger of taking the write-what-you-know dictum too seriously, it's worth a hundred times its price.
I could go on for pages. So many writers have made my life so much richer than it otherwise would have been.
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
Films do not move me in the same way that novels do because they lack the ability to explore the interior of a character in any depth. Consequently, I tend to find films of high intellectual intent to be empty shells, and the films that burn themselves into my memory are those that deliver sparkling wit or genuine emotion, or logically crafted suspense. I can watch The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, and other screwball comedies every three or four years, and they are fresh to me because the writing crackles. Contemporary comedies seem incapable of the spot-on hilarious dialogue of so many films in the 1930s and '40s.
Two of the most involving and logically tight suspense films I've ever seen are James Cameron's The Terminator and Aliens. And I'm a Hitchcock fan because of the way so many of his movies blended suspense, humor, and love stories. For their ability to convey intense emotion (and a wide variety of emotions) in the service of important themes, I like Schindler's List, A Simple Plan, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you listen to when you're writing?
I listen to everything from classical to pop, but I particularly favor Big Band, Texas swing, and Zydeco. I've written hundreds of thousands of words listening to Chris Isaac, Paul Simon, and especially Israel Kamakawiwo'ole; Iz, the dynamite Hawaiian singer who died several years ago, had a beautiful voice and the ability to convey longing, joy, and other emotions with an effortlessness that enraptured the listener.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
I give books based on the interests and tastes of the recipients, so I give all kinds of things. What I most like to receive are illustrated books on any period of art or any kind of decorative objects -- by which I mean everything from a book on an artist like Childe Hassam to a full-color book on Art Deco radios or on beautiful engraved rifles.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
I have to wear a five-point hat with five small bells, each of a different metal from the others, and leather gloves with knuckle spikes. Nothing unique about that. All writers have the five-point hat and the spiked gloves. I like the lighting low, music low, stacks of research surrounding me for easy reference, a bottle of flavored water -- usually cherry -- close at hand, which I'll drink either cold or at room temperature. For at least part of the day, though she might be bored, I like the company of my dog; she is a furry muse.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
I sold the first short story I ever wrote. Then I collected 75 rejections before I sold anything else. I was a part-time writer for two years and a full-time writer for eleven years before I had a paperback bestseller. I wrote for another five years before one of my books appeared on the hardcover bestseller lists. By the time I'd had two hardcover bestsellers, a major national magazine made a snarky remark to the effect that I was an overnight success who had "jumped on the bloody bandwagon of the vampire-novel craze." Because more than 18 years of work seems to stretch the definition of "overnight" a tad too far, and because I'd never written a vampire novel, I figured everything else that I was reading in the magazine must be equally empty of fact, and I canceled my subscription.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Most of the criticism you receive will be directed at your unique style. You will be pressured to modify your voice, to adopt the attitudes and prejudices of one herd or another. Thriller writers, science fiction writers, mystery writers, writers in every genre are expected to write like the successful models who have gone before them, with just enough exotic spice to intrigue without seeming dauntingly original. Even if you write experimental literary fiction, you will find that people who write and review experimental literary fiction have dogma that they want to enforce, and even out there on the imagined cutting edge, you will be shown the line that you must walk to be considered a serious writer.
Resist. If you conform, you might be granted admittance to the club, you might be "discovered" and acclaimed, but you will not then be the writer you could have been. If you repress your true voice -- and therefore your passion -- long enough, you will burn out. Walker Percy gave the best advice about writing advice that I know: "The best thing to do with advice, even good advice, is to listen as hard as you can, take it to heart, then forget it."
MY NAME IS ODD THOMAS, THOUGH IN THIS AGE WHEN fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.
I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.
In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.
I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.
Consequently, a demographics expert might conclude that my sole audience is other young men and women currently adrift between their twentieth and twenty-first birthdays.
In truth, I have nothing to say to that narrow audience. In my experience, I don't care about most of the things that other twenty-year-old Americans care about. Except survival, of course.
I lead an unusual life.
By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I'm sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.
I mean only that my life is not typical. Peculiar things happen to me that don't happen to other people with regularity, if ever.
For example, I would never have written this memoir if I had not been commanded to do so by a four-hundred-pound man with six fingers on his left hand.
His name is P. Oswald Boone. Everyone calls him Little Ozzie because his father, Big Ozzie, is still alive.
Little Ozzie has a cat named Terrible Chester. He loves that cat. In fact, if Terrible Chester were to use up his ninth life under the wheels of a Peterbilt, I am afraid that Little Ozzie's big heart would not survive the loss.
Personally, I do not have great affection for Terrible Chester because, for one thing, he has on several occasions peed on my shoes.
His reason for doing so, as explained by Ozzie, seems credible, but I am not convinced of his truthfulness. I mean to say that I am suspicious of Terrible Chester's veracity, not Ozzie's.
Besides, I simply cannot fully trust a cat who claims to be fifty-eight years old. Although photographic evidence exists to support this claim, I persist in believing that it's bogus.
For reasons that will become obvious, this manuscript cannot be published during my lifetime, and my effort will not be repaid with royalties while I'm alive. Little Ozzie suggests that I should leave my literary estate to the loving maintenance of Terrible Chester, who, according to him, will outlive all of us.
I will choose another charity. One that has not peed on me.
Anyway, I'm not writing this for money. I am writing it to save my sanity and to discover if I can convince myself that my life has purpose and meaning enough to justify continued existence.
Don't worry: These ramblings will not be insufferably gloomy. P. Oswald Boone has sternly instructed me to keep the tone light.
"If you don't keep it light," Ozzie said, "I'll sit my four-hundred-pound ass on you, and that's not the way you want to die."
Ozzie is bragging. His ass, while grand enough, probably weighs no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. The other two hundred fifty are distributed across the rest of his suffering skeleton.
When at first I proved unable to keep the tone light, Ozzie suggested that I be an unreliable narrator. "It worked for Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," he said.
In that first-person mystery novel, the nice-guy narrator turns out to be the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, a fact he conceals from the reader until the end.
Understand, I am not a murderer. I have done nothing evil that I am concealing from you. My unreliability as a narrator has to do largely with the tense of certain verbs.
Don't worry about it. You'll know the truth soon enough.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of my story. Little Ozzie and Terrible Chester do not enter the picture until after the cow explodes.
This story began on a Tuesday.
For you, that is the day after Monday. For me, it is a day that, like the other six, brims with the potential for mystery, adventure, and terror.
You should not take this to mean that my life is romantic and magical. Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.
Without the help of an alarm clock, I woke that Tuesday morning at five, from a dream about dead bowling-alley employees.
I never set the alarm because my internal clock is so reliable. If I wish to wake promptly at five, then before going to bed I tell myself three times that I must be awake sharply at 4:45.
While reliable, my internal alarm clock for some reason runs fifteen minutes slow. I learned this years ago and have adjusted to the problem.
The dream about the dead bowling-alley employees has troubled my sleep once or twice a month for three years. The details are not yet specific enough to act upon. I will have to wait and hope that clarification doesn't come to me too late.
So I woke at five, sat up in bed, and said, "Spare me that I may serve," which is the morning prayer that my Granny Sugars taught me to say when I was little.
Pearl Sugars was my mother's mother. If she had been my father's mother, my name would be Odd Sugars, further complicating my life.
Granny Sugars believed in bargaining with God. She called Him "that old rug merchant."
Before every poker game, she promised God to spread His holy word or to share her good fortune with orphans in return for a few unbeatable hands. Throughout her life, winnings from card games remained a significant source of income.
Being a hard-drinking woman with numerous interests in addition to poker, Granny Sugars didn't always spend as much time spreading God's word as she promised Him that she would. She believed that God expected to be conned more often than not and that He would be a good sport about it.
You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.
He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.
Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for the promises you didn't keep.
In spite of drinking lumberjacks under the table, regularly winning at poker with stone-hearted psychopaths who didn't like to lose, driving fast cars with utter contempt for the laws of physics (but never while intoxicated), and eating a diet rich in pork fat, Granny Sugars died peacefully in her sleep at the age of seventy-two. They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy on the nightstand, a book by her favorite novelist turned to the last page, and a smile on her face.
Judging by all available evidence, Granny and God understood each other pretty well.
Pleased to be alive that Tuesday morning, on the dark side of the dawn, I switched on my nightstand lamp and surveyed the chamber that served as my bedroom, living room, kitchen, and dining room. I never get out of bed until I know who, if anyone, is waiting for me.
If visitors either benign or malevolent had spent part of the night watching me sleep, they had not lingered for a breakfast chat. Sometimes simply getting from bed to bathroom can take the charm out of a new day.
Only Elvis was there, wearing the lei of orchids, smiling, and pointing one finger at me as if it were a cocked gun.
Although I enjoy living above this particular two-car garage, and though I find my quarters cozy, Architectural Digest will not be seeking an exclusive photo layout. If one of their glamour scouts saw my place, he'd probably note, with disdain, that the second word in the magazine's name is not, after all, Indigestion.
The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display promoting Blue Hawaii, was where I'd left it. Occasionally, it moves—or is moved—during the night.
I showered with peach-scented soap and peach shampoo, which were given to me by Stormy Llewellyn. Her real first name is Bronwen, but she thinks that makes her sound like an elf.
My real name actually is Odd.
According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error. Sometimes she says they intended to name me Todd. Other times she says it was Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle.
My father insists that they always intended to name me Odd, although he won't tell me why. He notes that I don't have a Czechoslovakian uncle.
My mother vigorously asserts the existence of the uncle, though she refuses to explain why I've never met either him or her sister, Cymry, to whom he is supposedly married.
Although my father acknowledges the existence of Cymry, he is adamant that she has never married. He says that she is a freak, but what he means by this I don't know, for he will say no more.
My mother becomes infuriated at the suggestion that her sister is any kind of freak. She calls Cymry a gift from God but otherwise remains uncommunicative on the subject.
I find it easier to live with the name Odd than to contest it. By the time I was old enough to realize that it was an unusual name, I had grown comfortable with it.
Stormy Llewellyn and I are more than friends. We believe that we are soul mates.
For one thing, we have a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine that says we're destined to be together forever.
We also have matching birthmarks.
Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely. I would throw myself off a high cliff for her if she asked me to jump. I would, of course, need to understand the reasoning behind her request.
Fortunately for me, Stormy is not the kind of person to ask such a thing lightly. She expects nothing of others that she herself would not do. In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.
She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty cents that she found in the change-return slot of a pay phone. At last she mailed it to the telephone company.
Returning to the cliff for a moment, I don't mean to imply that I'm afraid of Death. I'm just not ready to go out on a date with him.
Smelling like a peach, as Stormy likes me, not afraid of Death, having eaten a blueberry muffin, saying good-bye to Elvis with the words "Taking care of business" in a lousy imitation of his voice, I set off for work at the Pico Mundo Grille.
Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon.
The town of Pico Mundo is in that part of southern California where you can never forget that in spite of all the water imported by the state aqueduct system, the true condition of the territory is desert. In March we bake. In August, which this was, we broil.
The ocean lay so far to the west that it was no more real to us than the Sea of Tranquility, that vast dark plain on the face of the moon.
Occasionally, when excavating for a new subdivision of tract homes on the outskirts of town, developers had struck rich veins of seashells in their deeper diggings. Once upon an ancient age, waves lapped these shores.
If you put one of those shells to your ear, you will not hear the surf breaking but only a dry mournful wind, as if the shell has forgotten its origins.
At the foot of the exterior steps that led down from my small apartment, in the early sun, Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on a shore. She wore red sneakers, white shorts, and a sleeveless white blouse.
Ordinarily, Penny had none of that preadolescent despair to which some kids prove so susceptible these days. She was an ebullient twelve-year-old, outgoing and quick to laugh.
This morning, however, she looked solemn. Her blue eyes darkened as does the sea under the passage of a cloud.
I glanced toward the house, fifty feet away, where my landlady, Rosalia Sanchez, would be expecting me at any minute to confirm that she had not disappeared during the night. The sight of herself in a mirror was never sufficient to put her fear to rest.
Without a word, Penny turned away from the stairs. She walked toward the front of the property.
Like a pair of looms, using sunshine and their own silhouettes, two enormous California live oaks wove veils of gold and purple, which they flung across the driveway.
Penny appeared to shimmer and to darkle as she passed through this intricate lace of light and shade. A black mantilla of shadow dimmed the luster of her blond hair, its elaborate pattern changing as she moved.
Afraid of losing her, I hurried down the last of the steps and followed the girl. Mrs. Sanchez would have to wait, and worry.
Penny led me past the house, off the driveway, to a birdbath on the front lawn. Around the base of the pedestal that supported the basin, Rosalia Sanchez had arranged a collection of dozens of the seashells, all shapes and sizes, that had been scooped from the hills of Pico Mundo.
Penny stooped, selected a specimen about the size of an orange, stood once more, and held it out to me.
The architecture resembled that of a conch. The rough exterior was brown and white, the polished interior shone pearly pink.
Cupping her right hand as though she still held the shell, Penny brought it to her ear. She cocked her head to listen, thus indicating what she wanted me to do.
When I put the shell to my ear, I did not hear the sea. Neither did I hear the melancholy desert wind that I mentioned previously.
From the Hardcover edition.
In this quick follow-up to The Face, a troubled young man named Odd Thomas struggles between past and present, life and death as he tries to head off a catastrophe that only he sees coming. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Adult/High School-Odd Thomas is just that. He works as a fry cook in the fictional California town of Pico Mundo. Should he ever leave that position, he sees a future in selling tires or shoes. What he lacks in ambition, he makes up for with a special gift. He communes with and sees the dead, some of whom enlist his help in avenging their deaths from foul play. His gift is a secret from everyone except his beautiful girlfriend and the Chief of Police, who never questions Odd's tips, advice, or presence at a murder scene. The man sees "bodachs" as well, small, evil creatures, fluid in shape, that feed upon horrific acts of carnage. He is horrified to see hordes of them gathering in his town. He spots a weird looking stranger in whom the bodachs appear very interested, nicknames him Fungus Man, and rightly assumes that he is involved in the impending disaster. Breaking into the man's house, Odd finds a mysterious black room, a shrine to serial killers, and a page from a calendar that tells him the date of the planned event. Now it's a race against time to foil the plot. The rapid pace, eerie circumstances, and bizarre characters will keep readers turning pages. Just when the suspense is almost unbearable, Koontz exhibits his wry sense of humor to break the tension. The last chapters are so powerful and heartrending that they should be read several times.-Katherine Fitch, Rachel Carson Middle School, Fairfax, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Koontz's suspense masterpieces (Intensity, 1996; The Face, 2002) have tight plots or strikingly enclosed worlds. But you can't win 'em all, and despite the lift he strives for, these pages go by on automatic pilot. Suspense here turns on the life of Odd Thomas, 21, an unassuming lad gifted with the power to see dead people who cannot tear themselves from Pico Mundo, Odd's small hometown abroil on the Mojave Desert-as neither can Odd, whose "agoraphobia" has not let him drive or step outside the town. Ever. Koontz focuses on the little world of Pico Mundo itself, its physical layout and the lovable eccentrics who fill it chock-a-block. Among others, there's 400-pound romance-and-mystery novelist P. Oswald Boone (better known as Little Ozzie), and Odd's landlady Rosalia Sanchez, who fears turning invisible. Odd-a flashy fry-cook-works as a kind of Tom Cruise of the griddle at Terri Stambaugh's Pico Mundo Grille. Terri is an Elvis savant who knows what the King was doing every hour of his life. Odd's confidential tie with Police Chief Wyatt Porter has led Chief Porter to varied murderers and artists of mayhem whose victims have hung around and pointed out to Odd just who murdered them. Then to the grille comes strangely fungoid Bob Robertson, followed about by black bodachs, hungry doglike shadows sniffing out folks scented with death. When Odd secretly steals into Robertson's house, he finds first a housekeeping mess, then a computer workroom of Spartan order whose files reveal the mind of a mass murderer. And Odd stumbles upon a room of pure blackness-perhaps an adjunct to King/Straub's Black House? The date August 15 is torn from Robertson's desk calendar. Terri tells Odd, who is oftenfollowed about by the tearful and warning ghost of Elvis, that Gladys Presley died on August 14 and Elvis on August 16. Does the missing date mean Robertson will go berserk on the 15th-and kill Odd as well? With its tender surprise ending, call it It's a Wonderful Sixth Sense, built out of wet pulp and milk.
Name:
Dean Koontz
Also Known As:
David Axton, Brian Coffey, K.R. Dwyer, Deanna Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe
Current Home:
Newport Beach, California
Date of Birth:
July 9, 1945
Place of Birth:
Everett, Pennsylvania
Education:
B.S. (major in English), Shippensburg University, 1966
* Dean Koontz's official web site
He is one of the most recognized, read, and loved suspense writers of the 20th century. His imagination is a veritable factory of nightmares, conjuring twisted tales of psychological complexity. He even has a fan in Stephen King. For decades, Dean Koontz's name has been synonymous with terror, and his novels never fail to quicken the pulse and set hearts pounding.
Koontz has a lifelong love of writing that led him to spend much of his free time as an adult furiously cultivating his style and voice. However, it was only after his wife Gerda made him an offer he couldn't refuse while he was teaching English at a high school outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that he had a real opportunity to make a living with his avocation. Gerda agreed to support Dean for five years, during which time he could try to get his writing career off the ground. Little did she know that by the end of that five years she would be leaving her own job to handle the financial end of her husband's massively successful writing career.
Koontz first burst into the literary world with 1970's Beastchild, a science fiction novel that appealed to genre fans with its descriptions of aliens and otherworldly wars but also mined deeper themes of friendship and the breakdown of communication. Although it is not usually ranked among his classics, Beastchild provided the first inkling of Koontz's talent for populating even the most fantastical tale with fully human characters. Even at his goriest or most terrifying, he always allows room for redemption.
This complexity is what makes Koontz's work so popular with readers. He has a true gift for tempering horror with humanity, grotesqueries with lyricism. He also has a knack for genre-hopping, inventing Hitchcockian romantic mysteries, crime dramas, supernatural thrillers, science fiction, and psychological suspense with equal deftness and imagination. Perhaps The Times (London) puts it best: "Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler."
Shortly after graduating from college, Koontz took a job with the Appalachian Poverty Program where he would tutor and counsel underprivileged kids. However, after finding out that the last person who held his job had been beaten up and hospitalized by some of these kids, Koontz was more motivated than ever to get his writing career going.
When Koontz was a senior in college, he won the Atlantic Monthly fiction competition.
Koontz and Kevin Anderson's novel Frankenstein: The Prodigal Son was slotted to become a television series produced by Martin Scorsese. However, when the pilot failed to sell, the USA Network aired it as a TV movie in 2004. By that time Koontz had removed his name from the project.
Some fun and fascinating outtakes from our interview with Koontz:
"My wife, Gerda, and I took seven years of private ballroom dancing lessons, twice a week, ninety minutes each time. After we had gotten good at everything from swing to the foxtrot, we not only stopped taking lessons, but also stopped going dancing. Learning had been great fun; but for both of us, going out for an evening of dancing proved far less exhilarating than the learning. We both have a low boredom threshold. Now we dance at a wedding or other celebration perhaps once a year, and we're creaky."
"On my desk is a photograph given to me by my mother after Gerda and I were engaged to be married. It shows 23 children at a birthday party. It is neither my party nor Gerda's. I am three years old, going on four. Gerda is three. In that crowd of kids, we are sitting directly across a table from each other. I'm grinning, as if I already know she's my destiny, and Gerda has a serious expression, as if she's worried that I might be her destiny. We never met again until I was a senior in high school and she was a junior. We've been trying to make up for that lost time ever since.
"Gerda and I worked so much for the first two decades of our marriage that we never took a real vacation until our twentieth wedding anniversary. Then we went on a cruise, booking a first-class suite, sparing no expense. For more than half the cruise, the ship was caught in a hurricane. The open decks were closed because waves would have washed passengers overboard. About 90% of the passengers spent day after day in their cabins, projectile vomiting. We discovered that neither of us gets seasick. We had the showrooms, the casino, and the buffets virtually to ourselves. Because the crew had no one to serve, our service was exemplary. The ship dared not try to put into the scheduled ports; it was safer on the open sea. The big windows of the main bar presented a spectacular view of massive waves and lightning strikes that stabbed the sea by the score. Very romantic. We had a grand time.
In the summer of 2006, Dean Koontz took some time out to talk with us about his favorite books, authors, and interests.
What was the book that most influenced your career as a writer?
The high-school grammar textbook with which my teacher, Winona Garbrick, repeatedly rapped my head.
Otherwise, hundreds of books have had an effect on me. Perhaps the book with the most impact on my career, after the aforementioned textbook, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which I did not read until I was in my thirties. The final scene reduced me to tears. More important, I began to think about how modern publishing had compartmentalized fiction into so many narrow genres. A Tale of Two Cities, as a new piece of fiction, would be hard to place on a contemporary publisher's list. It's too much of an adventure story and too much of a love story to win the favor of most editors of "literary" fiction. It is a serious novel of politics and revolution but is also darkly comic in places. Dickens does not shrink from the depiction of evil, and some scenes are horrific, but he also tells a story of redemption and self-sacrifice and hope that some (never me!) would consider almost sentimental.
The more I thought about A Tale of Two Cities, the more determined I became to write novels that bridged genres. This began to bear fruit with Strangers, and to a much greater degree with Watchers. My publisher at the time resisted both the variety I was delivering, book to book, but also the mix of genres within each book. Pressure was exerted to stay within the limits of one label. We had some wonderful rows! In time, readers responded with enthusiasm to my attempts to tell stories with the flavors and the techniques of multiple genres. I doubt I would have had a career half as successful if I had followed another path.
What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
For three decades, I read no fewer than 200 books a year, and I still read a book a week. Out of that volume, choosing eight or ten as my favorites is no easy task, and a final list inevitably has an arbitrary quality dependent on my mood at the moment. In no meaningful order:
The four books I named are radically different from one another, yet you hear the wonderfully assured and ironic Goldman voice unmistakably on the first page of each. The Color of Light is one of the most dead-on portraits of a writer's struggle ever written, hugely entertaining; but if you learn nothing from it other than the mortal danger of taking the write-what-you-know dictum too seriously, it's worth a hundred times its price.
I could go on for pages. So many writers have made my life so much richer than it otherwise would have been.
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
Films do not move me in the same way that novels do because they lack the ability to explore the interior of a character in any depth. Consequently, I tend to find films of high intellectual intent to be empty shells, and the films that burn themselves into my memory are those that deliver sparkling wit or genuine emotion, or logically crafted suspense. I can watch The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, and other screwball comedies every three or four years, and they are fresh to me because the writing crackles. Contemporary comedies seem incapable of the spot-on hilarious dialogue of so many films in the 1930s and '40s.
Two of the most involving and logically tight suspense films I've ever seen are James Cameron's The Terminator and Aliens. And I'm a Hitchcock fan because of the way so many of his movies blended suspense, humor, and love stories. For their ability to convey intense emotion (and a wide variety of emotions) in the service of important themes, I like Schindler's List, A Simple Plan, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you listen to when you're writing?
I listen to everything from classical to pop, but I particularly favor Big Band, Texas swing, and Zydeco. I've written hundreds of thousands of words listening to Chris Isaac, Paul Simon, and especially Israel Kamakawiwo'ole; Iz, the dynamite Hawaiian singer who died several years ago, had a beautiful voice and the ability to convey longing, joy, and other emotions with an effortlessness that enraptured the listener.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
I give books based on the interests and tastes of the recipients, so I give all kinds of things. What I most like to receive are illustrated books
| Book: | Odd Thomas |
| Author: | David Aaron Baker Dean Koontz |
| ISBN: | 073930819X |
| ISBN-13: | 9780739308196 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Publishing Date: | 2003 |
| Publisher: | Random House Audio Publishing Group |
| Language: | English |
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