It's Kooooontzerrific!

I love Koontz's writing. I enjoy his more pedestrian early writings, and I love his more recent novels such as "Ticktock" and "Dark Rivers of the Heart", which tend to have more depth, more heart, and more composite characters than some of his earlier works. Until recently, my favorite novel was "Ticktock"; I felt that it offered a little more versatility, and displayed a slightly different facet of Koontz's usual writing with its dark comedy. However, "Odd Thomas" has zoomed to the top of my list of favorites, because it reveals yet another facet of Koontz's growth as a writer of horror. I could barely set down this book. It hooked me immediately, from its perhaps homage to the film "The Sixth Sense"; to the realistic characterization of the hash-slinging protagonist, Odd; to the whirlwind of just plain "life" that gets twisted into a terrible cyclone of horror by events in the small town of Pico Mundo.

The hero, Odd Thomas, has an affinity for communicating with the dead who have been unable to let go of their past lives. Odd has a big heart and a strong sense of duty to bridge the rift between the deceased and the living by resolving the issues that, for various reasons, keep the departed tied to life: Murder, rape, and other crimes that were committed against them. As he resolves some of these issues, the story becomes a chilling, fast-paced foot race to unravel the mystery at the core of the tale; namely, the appearance of a frightening, evil-exuding character Odd dubs "Fungus Man", and a host of dark ghost-like "bodachs" whose appearance in droves are the harbingers of some impending cataclysmic doom. Odd has very little time to unravel the connections and save his town. We are taken through a rollercoaster ride of a psychotic mind in the guise of the Fungus Man, and Odd stumbles through proverbial roadblocks to solve the mystery with the aid of his friends and the woman he loves. And, just when you think you have things figured out, WHAM! -- we take off in another direction. The resolution of the story is unsettling, dark, and a rather different approach by Koontz than his usual fare. There are small bits of dark humor scattered throughout the story -- the appearance of a maudlin Elvis, and the whackiness of Odd's landlady who fears that she is going to wake up one day "invisible" -- that pique the reader's interest and make the story more rounded, more in-depth. The characters are believable, and we learn to care about them. The reader experiences the heart-wrenching horror of child abuse and a mother's psychotic inability to accept the world -- including her own child -- on anything short of her own twisted terms. We run the gamut of emotions in this wicked symphony of iniquity, and the rider has little chance to catch his breath, even up to the strange twist at the end.

Compelling, artful, insightful, and visceral, "Odd Thomas" is one freaky ride.