After I forced myself to finish Odd Thomas, I pondered why Odd bugged the hell out of me. He felt too much like the other Koontz stereotype, the person who has gone through hell but remains preternaturally unscarred by their experiences.
The book itself didn’t work for me because I couldn’t stretch my suspension of disbelief far enough to encompass the shear amount of astonishing coincidence Koontz managed to stuff into the story. A generic Satanic-baddy plot just happens to settle into this little town, but thankfully a (sighted) baddie loses the Braille card he happens to carry in his pocket and there happens to be a blind DJ who explains the card to the hero, during a break of spinning old classic tunes. Though every character had tragedy neatly inserted into their backstory, Koontz told us instead of showing us, and I couldn’t bring myself to give a damn about any of them.
I like Koontz. However, my major objection to him is that I think the majority of his books have a lame ending. For the most part, he writes a very good novel and then ends it in a way that is quite unsatisfactory and earns a big “WTF?” from me.
I’ll be honest with you; until his most recent books, I was really, really sick and tired of Dean Koontz.
Basically, he got into a rut. Every single book had the same basic format:
Guy or girl, who is a strong person inside but has a mundane job (baker, bartender, desk clerk) gets into some kind of trouble with a psychopath who seeks them out for whatever reason. Guy or girl goes on the run in an extremely predictable car chase. At some point, be it before or after the car chase, guy or girl meets the Love Interest, who is similarly humble yet strong on the inside.
At some point, there was always the moment where the guy, brandishing a gun, goes off to Face the Trouble. He tells the girl to stay back, wait here. The girl pushes forward relentlessly, showing she is a Strong Woman.
Invariably, there is either a precocious child or a precocious dog that helps them along the way.
Now, in recent years, Koontz has improved immeasurably. His books are always entertaining, but they became somewhat repetetive. Now, they are still repetetive, but in a different way than they used to be, which is a nice change.
Exactly. So now, would someone please kill Dean Koontz, grind him into a fine paste, and distill that paste into a clear, colorless and odorless extract which we could then feed to Patricia Cornwell?
