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Odd Thomas
Dean Koontz
The 400 million copy worldwide bestseller Dean Koontz is at his very best in this critically-acclaimed page-turner – soon to be a major motion picture. Find out why Odd Thomas is the master storyteller’s most-loved creation.Odd by name, a hero by nature.He’s Odd. Odd Thomas, to be precise. Genius fry-cook at the Pico Mundo grill; boyfriend to the gorgeous Stormy Llewellyn – and possibly the only person with a chance of stopping one of the worst crimes in the bloody history of murder…Something evil has come to the desert town that Odd and Stormy call home. It comes in the form of a mysterious man with a macabre appetite, a filing cabinet full of information on the world’s worst killers, and strange, hyena-like shadows following him wherever he goes. Odd is worried. He knows things, sees things – about the living, the dead and the soon to be dead. Things that he has to act on. Now he’s terrified for Stormy, himself and Pico Mundo. Because he knows that on Wednesday August 15, a savage, blood-soaked whirlwind of violence and murder will devastate the town.Today is August 14. And Odd is far from sure he can stop the coming storm…
To the Old Girls:
Mary Crowe, Gerda Koontz,
Vicky Page, and Jana Prais.
We’ll get together. We’ll
nosh. We’ll tipple. We’ll
dish, dish, dish.
Hope requires the contender
Who sees no virtue in surrender.
From the cradle to the bier,
The heart must persevere.
—The Book of Counted Joys
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u3564c0df-fad0-5d55-9b75-84e5950fe126)
Dedication (#ua22e6612-e772-5a38-8e54-b619510f71b6)
Epigraph (#uf28e1551-0951-5163-9e0b-0fd1a7496ed2)
Chapter 1 (#uc127d589-a6d7-5e56-a08c-439b3992cf94)
Chapter 2 (#u33515cb2-6cfd-54cb-b2a6-d430a1516ab4)
Chapter 3 (#u4fbc1c51-5c81-57df-bdd8-56118b63c36e)
Chapter 4 (#u19e3e534-ef36-5f75-a90e-1297236759af)
Chapter 5 (#u6d71ef87-42a2-5a2f-b42b-89dfcc3d3150)
Chapter 6 (#u82bc54bf-3fa9-5622-af3c-8f6f2f655074)
Chapter 7 (#u9cd1dabe-76b2-5cf3-8f29-a1143bb13976)
Chapter 8 (#ub956b198-4705-57d6-9450-86cb8ef4701a)
Chapter 9 (#u92098f3a-7f80-5348-9023-45c076b19a53)
Chapter 10 (#u09c1318f-4e7e-5a85-95fe-33f8988273a3)
Chapter 11 (#u8de8a73e-6a01-599f-a3a5-6574e0207b55)
Chapter 12 (#ud4a7bd47-f254-5545-aa42-e9ebfad2d885)
Chapter 13 (#u10f772a7-1d57-5275-836b-f801e4967e91)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Dean Koontz (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_5b93223d-0e46-5697-bfd4-4ad0eb056673)
MY NAME IS ODD THOMAS, THOUGH IN this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.
I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.
In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.
I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I’m old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.
Consequently, a demographics expert might conclude that my sole audience is other young men and women currently adrift between their twentieth and twenty-first birthdays.
In truth, I have nothing to say to that narrow audience. In my experience, I don’t care about most of the things that other twenty-year-old Americans care about. Except survival, of course.
I lead an unusual life.
By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I’m sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.
I mean only that my life is not typical. Peculiar things happen to me that don’t happen to other people with regularity, if ever.
For example, I would never have written this memoir if I had not been commanded to do so by a four-hundred-pound man with six fingers on his left hand.
His name is P. Oswald Boone. Everyone calls him Little Ozzie because his father, Big Ozzie, is still alive.
