But the other Odd wondered if the claim of righteous purpose, exerted so often in these past two years, was always true–or if it might be overused. The darker Odd Thomas thought his violence must be righteous, in the service of good, for the protection of the innocent. I felt as if there were two Odds in the same skin–the fry cook who had written poetry for the girl he loved and wept at movies like “Terms of Endearment,” but also the ruthless killer who could shoot men in the back. “A cold, controlled fury had gripped me, greater than any anger I had experienced before. Here, at random, a paragraph near the end, after I’d been gripped by the danger and the pathos of Odd’s brief life: As I read, I had planned to mark passages I especially liked but I’d have underlined the book, so I quickly abandoned the task. It combines breathtaking suspense with deadpan humor, adventure with irony. Saint Odd, the stunning conclusion of the acclaimed Odd Thomas series, is perhaps Koontz’ greatest masterpiece to date. An atheist can’t be too careful reading Koontz eventually, he’ll concede cause-and-effect, seek the first Cause, and realize he’s been had. Through page-turning narrative, Koontz schools his readers in bioethics and on the value of friendship, and spurs even nonbelievers toward the reluctant admission of objective truth. Koontz is a secular writer, yet the pages of an Odd Thomas book are infused with Christian morality. Odd nudges the reader to turn an eye toward the inevitability of death and the soul’s emergence into eternity, with all of its implications. It hurts to say goodbye.Īfter digesting the seven books in the series which bears his name, I’ve learned to trust Odd Thomas to inject humor into tragedy, to smother political correctness with a dollop of wisdom, to expose the mental gymnastics that insist that wrong is right.

I know that his lost love, Stormy Llewellyn, didn’t really die in a burst of gunfire in the Green Moon Mall.īut I am grieving. I know Odd’s not real, he didn’t really die, he felt no pain. On a conscious level, I know that Dean Koontz cooked up the 20-year-old fry cook from Pico Mundo in his imagination.

I don’t know–but I’ll tell you this: I didn’t want to see Odd Thomas die. So how in the world did I fall in love with a character who sees dead people, and whose path is crossed by shadowy purply-black death-chasers called “bodachs” who somehow show up every time there’s an impending cataclysm?

Odd thomas book