Odd Dean Koontz and Odd Hours

Cover of Odd Hours

Odd Hours is now out on paperback and was released last year. It's the story of a hero who can see dead people. The hero, Odd, has an instinctual sense that leads him towards plots of great doom. There he attempts to thwart said plots while speaking to dead celebrities.

I need to take a moment and discuss my relationship with Dean Koontz and his beloved character Odd before I get into the review.

After college I jumped into a heavily emotional disturbing career--I'm still there actually. I was recently married and with some financial struggles I was truly stressed. I picked up Odd Thomas from a drugstore and read it at home after my wife would crash nightly. I loved this book.

I didn't see it for anything more than what it was--a great character in a heavy, swift moving plot. The humor was there, the execution, the evil of the antagonists seemed ever-present.

Simply put: Odd Thomas made me read fiction again. Weird huh? It had been years since I had traveled out of my main love, history, but Odd Thomas did it. I them jumped to other Koontz, earlier Koontz, King, and then on to some classics. I started writing again. Odd Thomas was a catalyst for the 23 year old me and fiction. And for that I look on Koontz fondly.

But for what he's done since I wish I could throw a handful of poop at him. It's hard to put into words what's changed, but it's not. Over the last three installments, especially the second and fourth, Koontz has taken a large story and turned it into micro-installments of the hero--Odd Hours only chronicling several hours of Odd's day. In a way, I understand the sentiment, or maybe a desire for a ratcheted suspense level, but on the other side of that, Koontz once gave us a buffet of awesomeness, and now he's happy to throw us a gnawed on biscuit.

And that's not to say that the presence of evil hasn't grown in the subsequent stories. The first book was about stopping a mall shooting and the latest is about stopping (spoiler) a ship with a nuclear warhead.

But given a limited story line, a limited setting in the book, the character Odd Thomas simply ceases to work. Odd's humor becomes campy and the interactions with new characters seem forced. When a scene, such as the one where Odd is hiding underneath a pier, takes as long as it does in Odd Hours--the whole story becomes daunting. But that's what a writer has to do when he focuses on a plot that is supposed to be a day long. It doesn't work with this world, this mythology.

Odd Hours is left with an open ending, a promise of a new trek, and for the readers' sake, I hope Dean takes his time with this one and shells out a large chunk of life story centering on Odd's powers, bodarks, anything substantive and long lasting.