#saint odd

[briabooknerd]

[shadowsingingsassenach]

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Odd Thomas is a series written by Dean Koontz. This series really meant a lot to me, as a good friend (basically my godfather, even though he was technically my sister’s godfather and not mine) had sent me his copy of the first book, Odd Thomas, and said I would love it. This was around the time he was diagnosed with cancer. The day I learned he died, I went to the book and right there in the bargain priced shelf was a single copy of the final book, Saint Odd, signed by the author. Naturally I bought it. 

The series is made of 7 novels and 2 novellas. They follow the story of a strange young man named Odd Thomas, who has a bizarre gift. He can see and feel the dead. To him the dead feel as solid and warm as a living person. He also has very strong intuition, knowing when something or someone isn’t right. He uses this for good, helping the local chief in his hometown solve murders. And throughout the whole series, all Odd wants is to be  a fry cook or a tire salesman and marry his girlfriend. But the world seems to want to get in the way. 

I love this series. I don’t want to spoil it too much for anyone, but it’s one of those series that just flows beautifully. And Dean Koontz makes it so realistic compared to other books. Even as he faces cults and Satanists, serial killers and terrorists, he struggles and stumbles and most things that happen are all very possible events. Odd is witty, sarcastic, and has a somewhat dark sense of human. He can find the good in any situation. 

I highly suggest this series. There are no cons to it that I can find. I look forward to reading more of Dean Koontz work soon!!

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

||September BPC: Just One Word|| 20. Released. Here’s a stack of series’ final installments (except RoT) that I preordered so I would have them in my hands on the day they were released, because I hate delayed gratification when it comes to books.

[corvidaebreak]

How long I sat there, across the street from the house in which she had lived, I couldn’t be sure. I drove away only when my tremors stopped, only when the world gradually regained its detail and ceased to be just a blur.
Odd Thomas - Odd Thomas series (Dean Koontz)

The quote above is from Saint Odd of the series. Dean Koontz is one of my favorite authors and I’m certain that the Odd Thomas series are my favorite novels from him. Odd himself, as weird as it is to say, is somewhat of a role model for me. I love him to death.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

||September BPC: Just One Word|| 19. Purple. 

[aces-and-blackberry-blossoms]

Saint Odd,  by Dean Knootz *Major spoilers *

Home stretch. Just the last short story after this.Saint Odd opens with Odd on a motorcycle heading back to Pico Mundo, across the California desert. He is soon being chased by an SUV with several novelty car horn tones. He evades this weird car and sends it flying into a ravine.When he arrives in his home town, he heads to the remains of The Green Moon Mall where Stormy was killed. He sits there…

[darklingichor]

Saint Odd, by Dean Knootz *Major spoilers *

Home stretch. Just the last short story after this.

Saint Odd opens with Odd on a motorcycle heading back to Pico Mundo, across the California desert.

He is soon being chased by an SUV with several novelty car horn tones. He evades this weird car and sends it flying into a ravine.

When he arrives in his home town, he heads to the remains of The Green Moon Mall where Stormy was killed. He sits there remembering, talking with Stormy (not literally as she crossed over at the end of the first book), saying that he doesn't think it will be long before they are reunited.

Soon, he hears people, a trio of the Satanists talking about the carnage that was carried out all those months ago and about how they have to find Odd.

They end up finding out that Odd is there and go chasing him. He's helped out by the ghost of one of the shooting victims but finds himself in a part of the mall loaded with bats.

He makes it out, and meets Ozzie Boone and Chief Porter at a park for breakfast. He tells them what he think is happening. That the Satanists are going to attack the town, but he doesn't know how. He assures them that he did not come home to die, and they sit around bemoaning how even criminals aren't how they use to be.

Eventually Odd gets to the home of a couple of Edie Fisher's people who make sure he's armed even if it's just to blink, he then sleeps for a while. Odd leaves again to cruise around the town. While he was asleep he had a dream of Pico Mundo underwater, bodies floating all looking like they died in a rage. He calls Porter to put people on the dam because he fears it's a target.

He then finds out that the carnival is in town, the same one where, at 16 he and Stormy got the fortune that he now carries in his wallet, promising that they would be together forever.

He goes to the carnival and there is much wandering, reminiscing, and ominous foretelling from various members of the carnival.

He finds the trio from earlier dead, calls the cheif.

He's trying to work out how the coven will attack the town, keeps getting air puffed at him from a haunted house attraction. Leaves the carnival, saves some people kills some people, talks with Edie, goes back to the carnival, figures out that the cult has a weaponized form of rabies that they were going to disperse with the air blowing thing in the haunted house. He goes in, gets help from a couple of the carnies that he spoke with earlier, gets the thing that is holding the rabies, gets shot in the chest.

He gets the rabies to chief Porter and dies.

And he goes to the after life, it's just like Stormy said, and Odd is going to fight evil with all the spirits he helped in life, and is finally reunited with Stormy.

Then we switch perspective to Ozzie, who knows Odd is gone because of a storm that broke just as he passed. Then, after a few hours he hears his printer come to life and what comes out was the book we just read with a note from Odd saying all is finished. The book ends with Ozzie saying that he now has the card that Odd carried in his wallet and hopes that it applies to him as well.

First off, I should say that I figured out the whole rabies angle when I first read it, way before Odd. But that is likely because I had read the novel Slumdog Millionaire and rabies was a part of an episode in it. But I do think it was telegraphed pretty hard.

From the beginning with the bats, and Odd musing that a good number of the bat population has rabies, to the dream of water and the expression of rage on the faces of the people in it. The clues weren't subtle.

Okay, this book, as I said before should have come after Brother Odd and we could have done without all the weird underground resistance stuff, could have dispensed with all of the out of no where supernatural beings and maybe we could have figured out the origins of the *orginial* paranormal things.

If we just stuck with Bob and his buddies being sickos who wanted to kill people to be famous instead of part of a large conglomerate of evil with actual access to the devil, Saint Odd would have made a lot more sense. One of the group was a cop and is in prison. It would have made much more sense if he escaped and came after Odd andbthe town, maybe with a couple of other losers that were a part of the group from the first one but not at the shooting. Maybe one of them works for one of these labs that research bio weapons and gets a hold of the rabies and the group of dudes LARPing Dante's Inferno could set this up and the whole plot could have unfolded just like it did, you know, without all the stupid folded in.

If this had happened, maybe we could have gotten rid of one element that made me grind my teeth even when I read it the first time.

Edie and her group helped Stormy when she was a little girl.

Stormy lost both of her parents when she was very young, she was adopted by a couple and the husband molested her. After a few months she got up the courage to tell a social worker and she got her out of there. After that Stormy lived in an orphange in Pico Mundo attached to the church where her uncle was a priest.

She grew up, and was determined to make her dreams come true. This we learn in the first book.

In this book we learn that Stormy's adopted parents as well as the original social worker that placed her were a part of the Big Evil and would have trafficked Stormy off somewhere to be bought, but the new social worker was one of Edie's Big Good and got her out of there. Edie spent an evening with the little girl, then called Bronwen, and was there when she changed her name to Stormy.

I *hate* this. First because not everything needs to be connected and not everything needs to be us verses them.

Second, the implication here is that Big Good can stop what ever evil they choose because you can't have someone that is just cracked, they're cracked *and* they are connected to the goverment conspiracies. So where were they when the 12 year old girl whoes spirit opened the first book, was murdered?

Only gotta help the plot significant people? Or mayhap, the author went off on a tangent and lost his focus.

Third, this also implies that Pico Mundo was on someone's radar at some time because Edie knew Stormy. So, if the orginal gang of people were connected to Big Evil, why the fuck didn't Edie's wonder brigade with their tricked out cars and perma-armed minons stop the mall attack in the first place?

The fourth reason I hate this is because it takes Stormy's story away from her.

Stormy was a pawn in Big Good vs Big Evil. She wasn't a person in her own right who went through trauma and sorrow, and found happiness, who had her own existence outside of Odd's orbit, her very existence is to just be another plot point, at least that's how it felt to me. And it is annoying.

I just feel like the introduction of the government conspiracies, the cultists and the resistance made the plot too big for the story that was trying to be told. It reminds me of when I would pick a topic for a paper in college and the teacher would tell me to narrow my focus because a paper on the silk road in general would need a lot more than the 15 pages they wanted to grade. If we would have kept the focus small, on Odd and the way his abilities shape his life, it wouldn't have felt so disjointed.

If we skipped the perpetually pregnant lady, the demons, the Bilderberger Group from hell stuff, maybe we could have found out some of Odd's why's and what's

Why does he see the lingering dead? Why does he have prophetic dreams? Why does he see the shadow harbingers of doom, the bodachs? While we're at it, what are the bodachs? Why does anyone who acknowledge them end up dead very soon after? What happened in Brother Odd when Odd thought he almost called up Stormy?

Of course if we would have done this we also wouldn't have certain questions, that were also not answered. Like, just what were Edie and Annamaria? Right after Odd dies he sees Annamaria and she tells him that she is an Avatar, a repusentation of St. Anne (she doesn't say it that simply because apparently she is unable to make short statements) but fully human. I got the feeling that Edie is of the same stripe. What does this mean? Dunno.

What was with the weird behavior of the animals that Odd encounters? In Deeply Odd he sees a group of rats walking in an orderly way through a rain storm, he and Edie encounter a road full of writhing snakes when it was too cold for them to have been active.

One could argue that the rat thing was foreshadowing the rabies thing, but rabies isn't known to be orderly. The snakes symbolizing the devil? Okay but why? We already knew we were dealing with Satanists.

What was going on with storm drains whispering to Odd? Which happened in both Hours and Deeply. Also in Deeply, there was a doll's head that morphed into Odd's face as it went down the gutter....

The storm drains, is it cause of the water and the dream he would have later? But that makes no sense because a big chunk of Hours takes place on the water, and Odd didn't hallucinate at that point.

Is the doll's head a symbol of... Yeah, no I got nothing on that bit of nonsense.

I mean I get that the book is Deeply Odd but was it just supposed to be a string of weird shit never to be explained?

Also, this was explained, but I thought the resolution was stupid: The spirit of Alfred Hitchcock? Yeah he was a kinda... angel thing sent to help Odd.

The spirit of the guy who tormented and traumatized Tippi Hedren with live fowl is an guiding spirit... Meanwhile, Odd comments that he was glad that he didn't have to help them spirit of Kurt Cobain.

More than happy hang with the guy who used birds as projectiles, but didn't want to help the dude who committed suicide at 27... I get the feeling that whatever afterlife Odd went to, I wouldn't like the company I would have to keep.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

||March BPC: Just One More Page|| 19. OTP. I don’t normally have OTPs, so the only one I see when I look at my bookshelf is Odd and Stormy.