Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1)

by Dean Koontz

Hope requires the contender Who sees no virtue in surrender. From the cradle to the bier, The heart must persevere.

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.

Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

In her gentle madness, she would not acknowledge that they were dead.

“Well,” I said, “at least you’re visible this morning. You’ve got another whole day of visibility to look forward to, and that’s a blessing.”

Rosalia’s biggest fear is that on the same day when her loved ones are made visible again, she herself will vanish.

Awake, I am as vulnerable to mortal surprises as anyone is.

More than a few folks in Pico Mundo think that I’m some sort of psychic: perhaps a clairvoyant, a thaumaturge, seer, soothsayer, something. Only a handful know that I see the restless dead.

I didn’t say to her that death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

After I circled the kitchen, trying but failing to find meaning in a mug half filled with cold coffee, in a browning banana peel left on a cutting board, in the unwashed dishes in the sink, and in the ordinary contents of drawers and cupboards,

My favorite body part is my heart because it is the only thing I have to give Stormy Llewellyn. Furthermore, the beat of it, when I wake each morning, is my first best evidence that I have not, during the night, joined the community of the stubbornly lingering dead.

To me, however, the most daunting mysteries of existence—death and what lies beyond—have no fright factor because I deal with the dead each day.

In spooky movies, do you rail at the beleaguered characters to get the hell out of the haunted house, to get smart and leave?

I’m not stupid, but I am one of those who will never flee the haunted place. The special gift of paranormal sight, with which I was born, impels me to explore, and I can no more resist the demands of my talent than a musical prodigy can resist the magnetic pull of a piano; I am no more deterred by the mortal risks than is a fighter pilot eager to take flight into war-torn skies.

My sense of spatial reality and my ability to gauge distance with accuracy abandoned me,

This small house, of course, could not contain such a vastness as I imagined lay before me.

At the start, I warned you that I lead an unusual life.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness.

I’m less skilled at extracting myself from trouble than I am at plunging into it.

Big-browed physicists tell us that two objects cannot under any circumstances occupy the same place at the same time. They warn that any effort to put two objects in the same place at the same time will have catastrophic consequences. When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

You are not, as I am, compelled to action by a paranormal talent that you do not understand and cannot fully control. Lucky you.

I wondered if a man living behind a perpetual half-wit smile, a man incapable of keeping a neat house, a man conflicted enough to split his reading time between skin magazines and romance novels, could be a closet supergenius who, with electronic components from Radio Shack, would be able to transform one room of his humble home into a time machine. Year by year, weird experience has squeezed all but a few drops of skepticism from me, but the supergenius explanation didn’t satisfy.