Our friend Hunter Baker praises Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas books over at Touchstone Magazine:
Years of major market success gain an author freedom to do what he wants. In the last decade, Koontz has invested his considerable artistic capital in becoming a more intentional instructor of the soul. His device for moral and spiritual teaching is a young man named Odd. Odd, like Koontz, is a Catholic. He is bright, handsome, and athletic. His parents are divorced and both highly dysfunctional. Odd’s inattentive, playboy father comes from a family with a lot of money. His mother doesn’t deserve the name. Given his upbringing, Odd is a miracle. He is God’s child more than he is the child of two people who refuse to grow up.
Years ago I read something about how 9-11 changed Dean Koontz as a writer because he realized that he was witnessing *evil* in action. This experience changed the focus of his books from evil as entertainment to portraying evil *as* evil. I’ve read several of his novels, including some of his Frankenstein series and a couple books of the Odd Thomas series, and there are passages, and arguments in the mouths of characters, that sound like Thomas Aquinas’s analysis of virtue and vice. Our culture has become increasingly pagan in its outlook and tastes, and I’m not entirely sure that Dean Koontz is successful in his attempts at moral education of the masses through his books because of the confused mixture of pagan worldview and Christian worldview in his artistic choices.
C.S. Lewis was very concerned about art and its role in moral education and disliked Flannery O’Connor’s work because she didn’t draw clear distinctions between good and evil in her art. I see the same problem with Dean Koontz’s work. Just reading the article, the statement that Odd is a “new kind of Christian hero” should raise serious questions–at least it does for me.