Dean Koontz will never forget the moment he was kissed by the inspiration that would possess and obsess him for a series of eight books about a goodhearted fry cook with a supernatural talent for fighting the forces of evil.
What he’s never been able to figure out, though, even after more than a dozen years of writing about the uncommonly monikered character of Odd Thomas, is why: Why did this idea blossom from his imagination; from where had it come?
“I was sitting in my office, perfectly happily working on a book called ‘The Face,’ and having a good time with it,” Koontz says, sitting in a lounge chair at his home in Newport Coast, his golden retriever Anna asleep at his feet. “And the words, ‘My name is Odd Thomas, I lead an unusual life,’ popped into my head as if somebody in the room had spoken.”
It made no sense. It had nothing to do with “The Face.” But the name and the sentence intrigued him. Koontz picked up the yellow legal pad he keeps on his desk to make notes as he’s working and wrote it down and spent the rest of the afternoon writing longhand, ignoring the manuscript in progress on his computer screen, until he finished 30 pages, a first chapter.
“Nothing like that every happened to me before,” Koontz says, a note of wonder in his voice even after all these years. “I knew that would be the next book. And I couldn’t wait to get to it because it was so mysterious, where this book had come from.”
“Saint Odd,” the final book in the series, arrived in January, and it’s a bittersweet moment for Koontz, who’d come to care for Odd almost as if he were real.
“I liked him so much, there were times in real life, this may sound silly, but I’d come to something and I’d have to make a decision, and a couple of times I thought to myself, ‘What would Odd do?’” he says. “Because I knew that Odd would probably do something better than what I’d do.
“He’s going to be a hard one to follow, as a character.”
A TOUGH SELL
The 69-year-old Koontz is by any measure Orange County’s most prolific and successful author. He’s sold more than 450 million books. A bibliography at Deankoontz.com lists 132 titles. He’s had 15 books hit No. 1 on The New York Times hardcover best-sellers list.
Even so, Odd Thomas was a difficult sell to his publisher at first, Koontz says.
“He just did not like this character at all,” he says. “And it was because he felt, I eventually learned, you couldn’t have a character in an action hero role, which is partly who Odd is, who had this kind of humility about himself. All those characteristics were so outside the box for a hero of a novel like this that he just thought, ‘Nobody’s going to like this.’”
Eventually, after the book earned 120 or 130 good reviews with not a single bad one, his publisher acknowledged he’d been wrong and backed Koontz’s desire to continue the series, though he did ask him to mix it up with more standalone novels, which is exactly what he did over the next 12 years.
Odd Thomas, like much of Koontz’s work, falls in the suspense thriller genre. The series is typical for him in that his hero has special skills that reach beyond those of real world, and his adventures lead to epic, often paranormal clashes between good and evil.
“I think it was because of my home life,” he says in response to a question about the source of his interest in that latter theme. “My dad was eventually diagnosed as a sociopath. The first time he ended up in a psych ward, he was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic with tendencies to violence complicated by alcoholism.”
His father drank and chased women, seldom had steady work – “He held 44 jobs in 34 years,” Koontz says – and all of that childhood strife and trauma helped shape Koontz’s world view, and later his fiction. “I grew up, I think, with a real recognition that there is real evil in the world.
“So I think that’s where it came from in the sense that I do see it around me all the time. T.S. Eliot could say so bluntly, I forget the exact line, ‘For all the changes, one thing does not change, and that one thing is the battle between good and evil.’ I think that’s true.”
POPULARITY IS UNPREDICTABLE
Koontz is well into the writing of his next novel, a thriller named “Ashley Bell,” a story in which a young woman is mysteriously cured of an inoperable, deadly brain tumor after a dream-like visit from a therapy dog. (A golden retriever, he notes, unnecessarily – his love for his golden retrievers Anna and her predecessor Trixie is well-known among readers.)
“Suddenly she has her life back and she becomes obsessed with the idea that she had her life back because she’s meant to save the life of somebody else,” Koontz says. “But she doesn’t know who and this leads her into really strange places, dark places.
“I know a couple of the developments and I can’t wait to write about them because they’re so cool,” he says. “It’s about the biggest surprise I think I’ve ever written in a book.”
Will it find the same popularity as Odd Thomas series? You hope, but you never know, Koontz says, offering up a story about the 2014 novel “The City,” which his wife, Gerda, told him not to change at all from its manuscript – the only time she’s said that in 48 years of marriage, he notes – and which his editor and publisher loved deeply, too.
It ended up not selling as well as they’d all expected. Perhaps the cover or the title didn’t do justice to the story within – but Koontz says it’s still one of his favorite, if overlooked, books, partly for what it revealed about him without his knowing it.
It’s the story of a black musician, recounting events that happened when he was a child. Reading a scene with the character’s nightclub singer mother to Gerda one night, Koontz says he got so unexpectedly emotional he had to leave the room. He told his wife he’d been emotional throughout the writing and had no idea why.
“Gerda looked at me and said, ‘Because it’s about you and your mother and your relationship,’” Koontz says. “And I looked at her and said, ‘My God, you’re right.’”
Even here, the events of his past, things he’d not felt capable of writing about directly, had seeped into his storytelling, Koontz says.
“When I finally wrote about it I tricked myself,” he says. “By making him a musician and black. And then, of course, I understood why I fell in love with the character: Because he’s me.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
