Dean Koontz

When he was a senior in college, Dean Koontz won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition and has been writing ever since. His books are published in 38 languages. He has sold 375,000,000 copies, a figure that currently increases by more than 17 million copies per year.

Eleven of his novels have risen to number one on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list (ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN, FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE, MIDNIGHT, COLD FIRE, THE BAD PLACE, HIDEAWAY, DRAGON TEARS, INTENSITY, SOLE SURVIVOR, THE HUSBAND and ODD HOURS), making him one of only a dozen writers ever to have achieved that milestone. Fourteen of his books have risen to the number one position in paperback. His books have also been major bestsellers in countries as diverse as Japan and Sweden.



Odd Thomas is a thriller novel by American writer Dean Koontz, published in 2003. The novel derives its title from the protagonist, a twenty-year-old short-order cook named Odd Thomas.

Odd Thomas is silently approached by the ghost of a young girl brutally raped and murdered, and through his unique ability to understand the dead, is psychically led to her killer, a former schoolmate named Harlo Landerson. With this opening, we are introduced to Odd's world. Koontz soon discloses how Odd was named and begins, layer by layer, to show how Odd's disfunctional upbringing has shaped his life, and as those details are uncovered, his supernatural abilities begin to make more sense.

We see Odd at work as a short order cook in a California desert town, and in a fateful 24-hour period, he meets a suspicious-looking man in the diner followed by bodachs, shadowy spirit creatures who appear only during times of death and disaster. This man, who Odd nicknames "Fungus Man" (due to his waxy complexion and blonde hair that resembles mold), has an unusually large swarm of bodachs following him, and Odd is convinced that this man is connected to some terrible catastrophe that is about to occur. To gather more information about him, Odd uses his gift of supernatural intuition, which his soulmate Bronwen (a.k.a. Stormy) Llewellyn calls "psychic magnetism," to track him down.

Odd's sixth sense leads him to Fungus Man's home, and Odd begins to uncover more details about the man and a mysterious other-worldly link to the dark forces about to be unleashed on the town of Pico Mundo. Accompanied sometimes by the ghost of Elvis Presley and encountering other memorable spirits, including a murdered prostitute, Odd is soon deeply involved in an attempt to prevent the disastrous bloodshed he knows will happen the next day.