Seeing ghosts in Pico Mundo

ODD THOMAS

By Dean Koontz

Bantam, $26.95, 399 pages

REVIEWED BY JACK MATTHEWS

If a novelist names a character Odd, that character won’t have much of a shot at being normal. The 20-year-old narrator/protagonist of Dean Koontz’s new novel is a good example, for he is haunted by silent ghosts — “I see dead people,” he says, “but then, by God, I do something about it.” (His doing will, of course, help drive the plot.)

He also sees “Bodachs” — dark, ill-defined figures (a little like the classical Furies) who are attracted to violence and death. And then there’s The Fungus Man, whom everybody sees and whose real name is “Bob Robertson” — a name as wholesome and every-day normal as a chocolate milkshake.

But readers should not be deceived, for Bob will be one of several devilish antagonists they will meet in this spooky and suspenseful novel about a young hero who can vaguely sense the imminence of some awful and murderous doom (as the Bodachs signify), but not knowing exactly what it is, doesn’t know how to combat it.

Odd works in a diner in the small Southern California town of Pico Mundo, where it’s his modest ambition to be the best short-order cook in town. He keeps insisting that he’s just an average fellow, which is hard to believe, although he does come across as a very likeable, decent and pretty much realistic character (no more than “pretty much” because his level of sophistication doesn’t quite fit the rest of him; he often talks like a successful 45-year-old novelist).

“I hate violence,” he says. “I hate injustice even more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.”

By page three, we know that we’re in for a wild ride, because we’re told that two characters “do not enter the picture until the cow explodes” (a good clue for solving that bit of whimsy lies in the answer to the question, “When is a cow not a cow?”).

And there’ll be plenty of suspense, evidently (according to the dust jacket blurbs) something that Dean Koontz is famous for; although in this novel, it can prove too much of a good thing, and one can hear the wheels of invention creaking too often for a sustained suspension of disbelief.

Nevertheless, the invention is lavish and well-furnished with surprises. Mr. Koontz achieves something like real horror in the wickedness of his villains, who are generally believable because they’re mostly kept slightly out of focus and seen only briefly, from a distance — the best way for monsters to be presented.

The novel is also enriched by such secondary characters as Police Chief Wyatt Porter, a sensitive and amiable man, gratifyingly free of the Hollywood stereotype of the mean and ignorant small-town lawman; Odd’s girlfriend, Bronwen “Stormy” Llewellyn; and fat P. Oswald Boone, who weighs 400 pounds and is known as “Little Ozzie.”

There is also the ghost of Elvis Presley, who doesn’t even talk, much less sing. He doesn’t eat, either, which we’re told is only natural for the ghostly supernatural: “You can always spot the dead in a diner because the dead don’t eat.”

Odd is so thoroughly amiable that when he says of a woman, “Her shy smile of pride made me love her,” you can’t help liking him. You also have to like his girlfriend, Stormy Llewellyn, for saying that she loves Odd for his “brains and innocence.”

This chaste love and their fidelity towards each other are among the novel’s virtues, although there are times when their dialogue is self-consciously clever and cute. Still, these are nice people who are also believable — a rare combination in fiction.

The evil in the book is vivid and startling, if at times unconvincingly melodramatic. The characters are quite emphatically divided between good guys and bad guys (Odd’s divorced parents being two of the ugliest) and therefore somewhat lacking in human complexity.

The rain of horror effects (their occasional contrivance notwithstanding) is enough to shake the most jaded reader, and will be especially effective for young readers, because Mr. Koontz’s wild and melodramatic inventiveness is well-calculated to appeal to those who have just been weaned from television and special-effects movies. It is also very much a quality of the bestseller list, where Mr. Koontz’s novels often appear.

Nevertheless, even the good things in “Odd Thomas” have a tendency toward excess. Almost halfway through the book, Chief Porter says, “I don’t find the supernatural to be entertaining anymore.” The reader might feel a bit like this as well, although those feelings are mixed with pleasure in a vivid, colorful tour through a ghastly and poisonous world of horrors that seems to be very much a Dean Koontz specialty.

Jack Matthews is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.