Odd Apocalypse (Audio book) – Dean Koontz

I have found a few audio books at garage sales and I thought I would give them a try. Honestly, I think they would work better for longer drives because the five minutes from home to work is hard to keep up on where I leave off and who all the characters are. I liked Odd Apocalypse but keeping track of all the characters really took away from the mystery/thriller. It would have been easier to read on text.

The main character, Odd Thomas, has a really nice sense of humor. I like that he tasks himself with going around saving people but he doesn’t consider himself a hero. In OA, Odd and a friend, Annamarie, are invited to stay at a wealthy estate. Soon upon exploring, Odd finds that things aren’t what they seem to be. He’s warned to stay indoors at night, and many of the introductions to characters involve them scolding him for being outside. He meets a ghost woman on a horse who asks him to save her child, so it seemed this was the reason why he was invited there.

When Odd went outside, he smelled a peculiar Ozone smell and then beasts that seemed half man and half pig chased him around. As he explored more, he found a very unique contraption in the mausoleum. Blueprints for the device were discovered, and it was revealed that Nikola Tesla had created it. As he looked deeper, he found that the device was designed for time travel. The beasts were from a post-apocalyptic world in the future. Along with the device in the mausoleum, he found several similar women who had been murdered and deduced that his host was the lead suspect.

SPOILER***

There was a child who was locked in a room in the house. He had a GPS monitor to tell the owner where he was at all times. The child turned out to be the son of the ghost woman. He was killed as the original owner used the time machine to go back in time to kill the wife, which he seemed to do for fun as he had a collection of her bodies in the mausoleum. The current owner of the house and the original owner were one in the same. The owner had gone back in time and taken his son before he had killed him (time travel can be confusing). Odd figured it out and started going about to save the son. He ended up killing some of the staff on the estate in self defense, and then he used the time machine to go back and destroy the house.

This was a fairly brief synopsis of the story. As I said, it was difficult to keep up as I drove a few minutes here and there switching CDs until the story finished. Overall, it was a nice story. I liked that Koontz wrote in Tesla, he was a great scientist and it was nice to see some recognition in today’s fiction. The book added some details on Tesla which I know to be true, but there were some I had not heard before. It said he was selected as one of the 100 greatest men of the last 1000 years, which I can believe, but I hadn’t heard. I think I will play it again in a few months and try to catch any details I missed the first time. I haven’t read many mysteries, but I liked the new experience.

Rating *******7/10