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.