FOREVER ODD
by Dean Koontz
HarperCollins, £17.99; 400pp
TO SAY THAT Dean Koontz writes some odd stuff would be a statement of the blindingly obvious, Dean Koontz defines “odd”. And never more so than in his expanding series of offbeat novels in which Odd is the name of the hero.
The first, Odd Thomas — Thomas is his surname — introduced us to the mild-mannered Californian fast-food cook who lives with the genuinely odd attribute that he is psychic in a big way: he can see, though not hear, the dead.
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The potential nightmare of this existence in a world of zombies that no-one else can see is relieved by the fact that the dead he sees are mostly well-disposed towards him — except for the occasional bad-tempered ghost whose frustrated rage manifests itself as a poltergeist — and that one of his regular visitors is Elvis.
If you’re a Koontz fan, you will be smiling by now. If not, then you are just getting the hang of the man. While his earlier books alternated between schlock action and psychological terror, his later stuff has been infused with a wry self-conscious humour.
So when the shade of Elvis collapses — as he does regularly — in floods of tears, Odd observes: “The King of rock’n’roll should never cry. He shouldn’t pick his nose either, but occasionally he does. I’m sure this is a joke. A ghost has no need to pick its nose.”
In many an author this could be hard to take, but Koontz’s character’s asides are woven into the surreal, action-packed narrative with such panache that they only add to our sympathy with his hero, mitigating the flashes of nightmare horror.
Forever Odd begins with our hero surprised by a visit from the ghost of a local doctor — surprised because he thought that he was still alive. He has been murdered and his handicapped son abducted by a crazed psychopathic Satanist eager to investigate Odd’s abilities.
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Koontz has an affinity with people with unsual ailments — the hero of his wryly surreal Moonlight Bay trilogy suffers from a fatal susceptibility to sunlight. Here, the kidnapped Danny has Brittle bone disease, making him particularly vulnerable to his captors.
The setting for the showdown is classic Koontz: an earthquake-hit abandoned hotel-casino on an Indian reservation in the Mojave desert. In this wrecked shell — a labyrinth of twisted lift shafts, dark corridors and ghosts aplenty — Odd must hunt down and rescue his friend from a voodoo-obsessed female fiend determined to swallow the essence of his soul to absorb his powers. The result is a blend of humour, humanity and horror, the classic Koontz concoction. It may be a formula, but it’s a winning one.