Odd Thomas

Sometime during the week of Cousin Camp, I finished Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. I saw this book at a K-Mart one day and thought it sounded kind of interesting after reading the jacket, and then later at the Green Valley Book Fair I picked up a copy of the hardcover for like $7.

This is the first Koontz book I’ve read, and since I’m such a big Stephen King fan I thought I wouldn’t like it very much, but it turned out to be pretty good. I’m ashamed to admit that I was utterly suckered by the ending, even though it should have been completely obvious since the clues were everywhere. The parts where Odd dealt with his mother and father were a bit out-of-place, I thought, and a lot of the time I felt like Koontz was refering to events that had happened in previous books. Perhaps this Odd Thomas guy has even been a recurring character. That was the sense I got, at least. Either that, or Koontz did a masterful job of depicting a character that had a rich history.

I don’t know if it was just this book or what, but Koontz seems to have a slightly pretentious writing style. I generally prefer the keep-it-simple approach to writing. It wasn’t a distraction though since the pacing was pretty quick. The style of the first-person narration made me think the character was a lot older than 20, though. No 20-year-old born in this television-soundbite-dominated day and age would write like that.

Anyway, overall I found it “delightfully quirky.” It was humorous, grotesque, strange, and scary.

Random House’s Odd Thomas Site