A disappointing Odd book.

Kinda sad to say, but this series might have jumped the shark already. Everything that made the first volume so charming -- a modest young man, deeply embedded in a humble small-town life, surrounded by loving yet eccentric friends, and gifted/cursed with only one extraordinary ability -- has gotten completely blown out of proportion by this fourth volume. Let's just say there is some heavy-duty Saving the World involved here, as well as numerous physical and psychic abilities never even hinted at before. Plot points just dangle all over the place, with Koontz seemingly unable or uninterested in tucking them in; while characters just randomly pop up and randomly disappear. I'll pretend I never read this book, if the author just promises to let Odd Thomas head home to Pico Mundo.

Oh Odd ♡

Odd Thomas is a character that I have fallen in love with over the course of these books. He's fuuny, smart, and humble.

Odd Hours might be even worse than Forever Odd. It introduced new characters that did nothing except be even more pretentious than Odd, and spent at least 50% of its over-abundance of words retelling events from prior books and waxing redundant about Odd's personality. I say redundant because not only does Odd tell us the same things about himself that he's told us in insufferable detail 3 times already (though it felt like 5), he uses the exact same words. It feels like Koontz pasted his 200 page "Odd Thomas Template" into a new document and then inserted story bits every few pages until there were enough words to satisfy his publisher.

Koontz continues to write Odd with all the realism of an old man who's spent five or six decades accumulating a ridiculous vocabulary and is out of touch enough to apply it to a 21 year old high school dropout who shouldn't have time to write these manuscripts in between adventures, let alone sift endlessly through thesauruses and dictionaries to bloat said manuscripts to their maximum possible ridiculousness.

I wanted so badly to like this character--and I genuinely did in the first book--but he's just completely insufferable now. Koontz has already let it slip that there will be 10 novels (why not keep reprinting that template if people want to buy it), and that he "knows what will happen in the last one, just not how". Subtle, dude.

So I've already got a couple of the graphic novels from the library and I'll probably go ahead and look at them. After that I'm out. Maybe I'll come back for that 10th book and let him drag me through the interminable template one more time so I can see it finally end.

Wondering why there are only seven...:)

I'm a huge fan of Dean Koontz, and I fell behind reading this series after the first three books. I'm excited to read the last four and finally get caught up. They're a little more quirky than his "standard fare", but still an enjoyable read.

I really enjoy the whole concept of the Odd books and while I have enjoyed some more then others they have all been fun reads.

Not my favorite one of the series, but the new characters that came along were sweet and fun. I wonder what Odd has in store next!