{"id":2662,"date":"2007-03-07T12:46:29","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T12:46:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/st-odd.html"},"modified":"2007-03-07T12:46:29","modified_gmt":"2007-03-07T12:46:29","slug":"st-odd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/st-odd.html","title":{"rendered":"St. Odd?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Drake on novelist Dean Koontz in NCR(egister)<\/a><\/p>\n

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Koontz\u2019 books \u2014 more than 50 to date \u2014 often feature ordinary people facing extraordinary evil. It\u2019s a theme Koontz draws from his own life, as he was raised by a father whom Koontz has described as a sociopath. Later in his life Koontz\u2019s father made two attempts on the author\u2019s life, one involving a struggle with a knife after which Dean found himself facing two police officers with drawn guns. It\u2019s material that he has used in his work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI used a version of that incident in my novel, Mr. Murder<\/em>,\u201d said Koontz. \u201cEverything becomes material to a novelist.\u201d<\/p>\n

While his books tell dark stories, many readers have found Koontz\u2019 work increasingly spiritual. Some have even compared his work to that of author Flannery O\u2019Connor.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the Corner of His Eye<\/em> struck me very clearly as being about the mystical body of Christ,\u201d said Christopher Check, executive vice president of the Rockford, Ill.-based Rockford Institute. \u201cIt\u2019s about how the death of one of the members diminishes all of us and how the good acts of one of the members improves all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are very obvious Catholic elements in many of Koontz\u2019s novels,\u201d said Check. \u201cHe tackles themes of redemption, heaven and, in his latest series, shows that he understands the necessity of sacramental confession.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Odd Thomas is to at all resemble a saint, \u201cThat raises the stakes of what I\u2019m going to have to do with this character,\u201d said Koontz. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to see where it goes next.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wesley Smith agreed. In the books, the character, as described by Smith, is becoming increasingly selfless.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s simplifying his life \u2026 away from what the world sees as important,\u201d says Smith.<\/p>\n

The spiritual component is something that Koontz says has always been present in his work.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpirituality has always been an element of my books,\u201d said Koontz. \u201cPeople who see it as a sudden development were just not perceiving it previously, when it was less central to the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can walk in the rose garden, watch the joyful capering of my dog, and see the indisputable work of God. The key is beauty,\u201d says Koontz, who converted to the Catholic faith while in college. \u201cIf the world is merely a complex and efficient machine, beauty is not required. Beauty is in fact superfluous. Therefore beauty is a gift to us. If we were soulless machines of meat, the survival instinct would be all we needed to motivate us. The pleasures of the senses \u2014 such as taste and smell \u2014 are superfluous to machines in a godless world. Therefore, they are gifts to us, and evidence of divine grace. The older I\u2019ve gotten, the more beauty, wonder, and mystery I see in the world, which is why there are ever more of those three things in my books. \u201c<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Drake on novelist Dean Koontz in NCR(egister) Koontz\u2019 books \u2014 more than 50 to date \u2014 often feature ordinary people facing extraordinary evil. It\u2019s a theme Koontz draws from his own life, as he was raised by a father whom Koontz has described as a sociopath. Later in his life Koontz\u2019s father made two…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSt. Odd? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/st-odd.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"St. Odd? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tim Drake on novelist Dean Koontz in NCR(egister) Koontz\u2019 books \u2014 more than 50 to date \u2014 often feature ordinary people facing extraordinary evil. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}