David Aaron Baker

Book Review: Forever Odd

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Forever Odd
Odd Thomas #2
by Dean Koontz
Read by David Aaron Baker

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Paranormal thriller

When Odd’s best friend’s recently deceased (like, super recently) father visits him, Odd starts off on a mission to find his friend and save him from whoever seems to have abducted him and killed his father.

After finding the first book in the series interesting but a bit slow, this book is just as slow and less interesting. I still like Odd himself as a character. He’s very different from what you normally see in fiction in a lot of ways, a kind of throwback to a different time. Some reviewers seem to see this as a fault with the book, but I appreciate that his gifts have led him to live a simpler life—he has no real ambition, no need for vices, and in fact, what most people would see as a minor complication would throw his life out of whack completely. However, the first book really felt like a stand-alone. There’s usually a very different feel to a book that is the intentional first in a series compared to a book that was written to be a one-off, and though plenty of times a sequel or two may come after an original stand-alone, to me, this just didn’t work as a sequel. The main thing that I felt was seriously lacking in this book was the use of Odd’s gifts. His psychic magnetism gets plenty of play (and a new angle, unless I’m just forgetting something being mentioned in the first book), and he does see a few ghosts, but it seemed like a huge chunk of the book was just trying to escape from, hide from, and outwit the bad guys. It dragged down what was already a fairly slow read for me. Good thing I listened to the audiobook, or it might have taken me a really long time to get through this book. As for recommendations, if you haven’t read the first book, you probably shouldn’t start here, since it definitely references back and spoils some things. If you have and liked it, you may or may not like this one, depending a lot on which aspects of the first book you particularly liked or didn’t. That’s all I can really say.

Find out more about Forever Odd

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!

Book Review: Odd Thomas

/ Kristi / Leave a comment

Odd Thomas
Book #1
by Dean Koontz
Read by David Aaron Baker

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Paranormal thriller

Odd Thomas can see dead people, but he can also see dark shade-like creatures that tend to congregate at sites of future disaster. Between these two things, Odd is drawn to help bring justice for victims and prevent future tragedies. He works as a short order cook in a small town in California, and when he sees a large congregation of these creatures, which he calls bodachs, interested in a particular customer, he does his best to investigate so he can try to stop whatever future catastrophe might have drawn so many bodachs.

Leaving aside the paranormal aspects, this book is a thriller mystery and a race against time to stop a massacre. Adding the paranormal aspects back in, and the overall story here is engaging and inventive. Odd himself is a sympathetic hero, if maybe a little too naïve and Gary Stu-ish. He tends to draw people to himself by being a nice, quiet guy and has more than one mentor-type character. The background Koontz shows us for Odd make me happy for him that he has these other people in his life to counter-balance some truly awful parents.

I’ve only read one Koontz before this, and I loved it, but this time, I found that his tendency to describe things in way more detail than necessary slowed the story way down. There was also a lot of focus on sex and references to body parts for a book with a main character that isn’t sleeping with his girlfriend. And a couple of the major side characters I did not particularly care for. They were just over the top in their personalities. I listened to the audiobook, and I don’t know if it would have been better to read it, so I could skim some of the descriptions or worse, because then I would have struggled to get through some of it and taken a lot longer to read it. Either way, I enjoyed the book more than not and was actually kind of annoyed with myself for not clocking the slight twist at the end before it happened. Also, I am very glad that I had already read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie before reading this book, because Koontz full-on spoils it! Overall, I like the world Koontz has set up here and Odd Thomas himself enough to continue the series. I think most people who enjoy paranormal thrillers would enjoy it, but just keep in mind the slowness.

Find out more about Odd Thomas

See what I’m reading next.

If you’ve read this book, or read it in the future, feel free to let me know what you think!