Kudos for Koontz

I decided to park my blogging, editing, and writing over the Thanksgiving holiday and take it easy. There would be one family-filled day, but there were many other hours free to enjoy. I opted to splurge for a book. But it needed to be an escape. Take me away, author, set me free for several sweet hours…and I want it to be effortless ‘cause I’ve used up my quota of effort for the time being. You know the feeling.

This is not as easy as it sounds. More and more it’s difficult for me to enjoy commercial novels, a la The Da Vinci Code, because I come across so much poor craft that my hand itches for a red pen.

Luckily, on a drugstore book rack, I came across Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. I’ve read Koontz before and, while sometimes his writing seemed a little overly informative to me, he surely has an imagination and can tell a tale, and it had been a few years. A cover blurb from Publishers Weekly promised that Odd Thomas was “Marvelous…this is Koontz working at his pinnacle.” I took a chance.

I was well rewarded, but with more than an entertaining story. Mr. Koontz’s firm grip on craft made me forget for a time previous abuses by less apt authors. Here are some of my thank-yous.

Dialogue tags: Deliciously few and far between. And, when they occurred, 99% of the time it was “said.” So clean, so smooth. You get a bonus lesson in dialogue tags in this book.

Storytelling: Sure, there were blurbs on the book cover that let me know about paranormal elements in the novel, but there wasn't much of a hint in the first 15 pages of the story. No, Koontz started with a charming, self-effacing character, narrating in the first person to lay down delicious little foreshadows. For example, he wakes on the morning of the story and sees, in his room…

The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display promoting Blue Hawaii, was where I’d left it. Occasionally, it moves—or is moved—during the night.

That’s the first clue that not all is normal in this man’s world. But Koontz drops it there and we carry on with no more hints. Odd Thomas leaves for work and finds a girl waiting outside.

Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on a shore. She wore red sneakers, white shorts, and a sleeveless white blouse.

This is on page 9, and all seems perfectly normal. The girl leads him to a confrontation with the man who killed her. Yep, she’s a dead person, but Koontz doesn’t let us know that until page 15.

Characterization & tone: Koontz’s writing is fun and his character spins the yarn with a tongue-in-cheek tone that lightens the story throughout. For example, when Odd’s (that’s his first name) girlfriend wonders if his gift for seeing dead people is a gift or a curse, our protagonist says,

“It’s a gift.” Tapping my head, I said, “I’ve still got the box it came in.”

With a simple gesture and a twist of imagery, you get a feeling for the man. Here’s a swift turn of phrase characterizing the man who murdered the girl…

“…a diseased and twisted bramble of a soul, thorny and cankerous.”

Shudder. But then we meet a friend’s fearsome cat, Terrible Chester, that likes to pee on the protagonist’s shoes.

He regarded me appraisingly with contempt so thick that I expected to hear it drizzle to the floor with a spattering sound.

Thanks to foreshadowing and the gradual accumulation of events in this alternate reality, you are not surprised when our hero gets into a car and finds the ghost of Elvis sitting in the passenger seat. Apparently Elvis hangs out in this small town.

Odd Thomas is quirky and packed with wall-to-wall with impossibilities, but Koontz’s skill with storytelling makes it what I wanted for the holiday—a good read.

However…lest you think this is some kind of paean, I think there were opportunities to make the opening of the novel more compelling. Koontz spends a page or so with a tensionless (though well written) rendition of how unqualified and uninteresting his character is. Then he springs the line that I thought would make a great beginning:

I lead an unusual life.

Given that at the very beginning to raise questions and then the contrast of seeming mediocrity would have generated tension in me right from the start. The cachet of Koontz’s reputation allows him to ease into a story, but I wonder if he would have been as low-key in his early years.

Nonetheless, thank you, Dean Koontz, for a fun story and, even better, smooth craft that let me take it all in without thinking of my red pen.

If I can help with a question about writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

Comments

[Deb Borys]

Hi Ray--interesting that this Koontz book is the one you selected to comment favorably on. As for me, it is the one book of his that I got thoroughly disgusted with and quit 1/3 of the way in. I even left it on the seat under the bus shelter when my bus came.

Here's where Koontz disappointed me. The sheriff--or police sergeant or whatever rank he was--is one of the few people who knows of Odd's special talent and is extremely supportive of him. So what does Odd do when he finds a dead body in his house, when he knows he's been set up? Does he call his friend the policeman? No, he does one of the most clichéd things that happens in mystery stories when an innocent man realizes he's being framed. Koontz has the talent that he could have convinced me that Odd's actions were the only ones he could take under the circumstances--but he didn't. The justification had the same stale ring to it as a bad tv movie. And I was left sitting there screaming--no! don't go down the basement--like I was watching some teen horror movie.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Deb

[Matt]

Hey Ray, it's me Matt. I'd like to chime in on Dean Koontz.

I read one book by Koontz, Mr. Murder, which I thought was fantastic at the time. I thought what a find! here's a writer I like and he's written a whole library of books! So I started reading and I soon discovered that about a hundred pages into each one of his thrillers I would begin to get a hot, itchy feeling somewhere behind my eyebrows, as if my brain was having an alergic reaction. I would force myself to continue, remembering the pleasure I got from Mr. Murder, but eventually I would have to put the book down and I would find myself sitting there, reeling, blinking in confusion, unable to track on the story any longer.

On about the sixth book I tried, which was, I think, called Desperation, no, Intensity, I gave up and swore off Koontz forever for my own good. But I blew it and started another one recently about a psychic golden retriever ... I realized as I threw the thing out that the pain and discomfort was my brain reacting to having my intelligence not just insulted, but assaulted. It's not just that Koontz dishes out absolutely silly crap, it's that he has so little imagination that he dishes out the same silly crap over and over again.

However, it seems to work for him, so I've boiled the formula down to its essentials for anyone that wants to write a bestseller. Start with some kind of mutant that's part of a government experiment, add a beautiful woman desperate for love (who is an artist of some kind) then throw in some dejected ex-marine, or cop, or fireman (who is also desperate for love because of some loss or trauma in the past) make them fall in love and force them to heroically overcome the mutant and then live so happily ever after that you get sick all over yourself.

When Koontz is really pushing the envelope he switches up his ingredients. His next book is called The Dark Edge of Terror, it's about a super-intelligent psychic gorilla named Skip that has escaped from a secret government laboratory in New Mexico because despite its genetic programming it doesn't want to be air dropped into the desert to hunt Osama Bin Laden. Skip wants to be an oil painter. When Skip meets Bruce, a gruff Navy Seal who has lost his family in a fire(or was it a tornado?) the attraction is immediate. Together they must evade a huge government man (and gorilla) hunt headed by a beautiful but evil she-agent. In the end Skip and Bruce flee to the Congo and live out their lives in a plush tree house, financially comfortable from the sales of Skip's expressionist paintings which are hailed as works of genius.

Interestingly, Dean Koontz says that John D. MacDonald is his favorite novelist of all time. MacDonald, for his part, admired Hemingway and Steinbeck and managed to fill his cheap, formulaic thrillers with stunning prose and to base his plot developements on psychological realities. Koontz only got the formulaic thriller part. I would advise anyone who is about to pick up a Dean Koontz book to resist the urge. Do as Koontz would do and find yourself a John D. MacDonald book.

[Patrick]

Koontz is my favorite author, but I definitely like some of his books better than others. I happened to like Odd Thomas quite a bit.

When I hit the line, "I lead an unusual life," I also thought in the back of my head that this was a line that I might have used to start the book.

What I liked most about the book was that he set me up fairly early on for a plot device he used toward the end of the book; I knew the trick...I knew how it would work if it was used. Yet when he did use it a second time, I still missed it because there was enough going on that I was sufficiently distracted so as not to notice that I was being tricked...again.

It's one thing when you can pull off such a trick for a reader; when the reader is a would-be novelist and still falls for it, that strikes me as a story that is worth reading.