{"id":1235,"date":"2007-11-27T20:28:34","date_gmt":"2007-11-28T01:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=1235"},"modified":"2007-11-27T20:28:34","modified_gmt":"2007-11-28T01:28:34","slug":"book-review-brother-odd-by-dean-koontz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=1235","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Brother Odd, by Dean Koontz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our commenter Aitchmark recommended<\/strong> Dean Koontz\u2019 Odd Thomas books to me. I dragged my feet, because I\u2019d read one Koontz and wasn\u2019t terribly impressed. I didn\u2019t think he used language very skillfully.<\/p>\n

But I picked up Brother Odd<\/a><\/i> last week, and frankly it turned my world upside down and gave it a good shake.<\/p>\n

I still don\u2019t think Koontz is a very good wordsmith. Time and again it seemed to me he was aiming for effects he wasn\u2019t achieving.<\/p>\n

But in Odd Thomas he has created a character who won my heart, and I\u2019ll bet he\u2019ll win yours too. You should not pick up this one first, though, but go back to the earlier books in the series to get the tragedies in sequence, because it does make a difference.<\/p>\n

Odd Thomas (Odd is his first name. He explains it as a typo on his birth certificate, where it was supposed to say, \u201cTodd.\u201d Koontz doesn\u2019t seem to be aware that Odd is an uncommon but not unknown Norwegian name, a variant of \u201cOdin\u201d) is a young man who makes his living as a fry cook. He is totally unremarkable (disregarding the pain he has suffered in his life) except for his unusual gift. Like the kid in The Sixth Sense<\/i> and that girl on the TV show, he sees dead people.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s harder for him than it is for them, because the dead don\u2019t speak to him. The ghosts who linger in this world, in these stories, are mute. They are usually the victims of murder, and it\u2019s Odd\u2019s task to figure out their unspoken secrets and give them rest.<\/p>\n

This all sounds very New Age, but it\u2019s anything but that. Odd is a devout, practicing Roman Catholic.<\/p>\n

In Brother Odd<\/i>, in fact, he has left his California home and entered a Colorado monastery, overwhelmed by the personal losses he experienced in earlier adventures. It\u2019s fairly quiet there for him\u2014the only resident ghost is a monk who hanged himself in the bell tower and appears only occasionally.<\/p>\n

But it doesn\u2019t stay quiet. Besides ghosts, Odd is able to see spirits he calls \u201cbodachs,\u201d dark, shadowy figures that always gather in advance of acts of massive death and violence.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the story, Odd sees three of them. And they head straight for the monastery\u2019s associated school, where the nuns care for retarded and handicapped children.<\/p>\n

In his efforts to prevent whatever unknown horror is threatening the children, Odd must uncover the secrets of the monastery residents.<\/p>\n

But these aren\u2019t the kind of secrets you expect in a contemporary thriller. The monks and nuns are not practicing secret sexual rituals, or abusing the children, or plotting the overthrow of democracy. They are, by and large, sweet souls, the kind of people you can believe have given their lives in service to God and their fellow man. (I have to give Koontz tremendous props for these characterizations. As C.S. Lewis noted [I think] in The Four Loves<\/i>, good characters are \u201cthe very devil\u201d for an author.)<\/p>\n

No, the secrets are deeper than that, and the evil resides in a place Dan Brown would have never imagined.<\/p>\n

Koontz got completely past my reservations about his style, and grabbed me with the characters and the story. I don\u2019t often cry over a book, but Brother Odd<\/i> got to me.<\/p>\n

Highly recommended. I\u2019ve got to read the earlier installments, Odd Thomas<\/i> and Forever Odd<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our commenter Aitchmark recommended Dean Koontz\u2019 Odd Thomas books to me. I dragged my feet, because I\u2019d read one Koontz and wasn\u2019t terribly impressed. I didn\u2019t think he used language very skillfully. But I picked up Brother Odd last week, and frankly it turned my world upside down and gave it a good shake. I … Continue reading Book Review: Brother Odd, by Dean Koontz<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[411,706,2073],"class_list":["post-1235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-brother-odd","tag-dean-koontz","tag-odd-tales"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}