{"product_id":"odd-hours-isbn-9780553591705","title":"Odd Hours","description":"\u003cb\u003e#1 \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Only a handful of fictional characters are recognized by first name alone. Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas is one such literary hero, who has come alive in readers’ imaginations as he explores the greatest mysteries of this world and the next with his inimitable wit, heart, and quiet gallantry. Now Koontz follows Odd as he is drawn onward, to a destiny he cannot imagine. Haunted by dreams of an all-encompassing red tide, Odd is pulled inexorably to the sea, to a small California coastal town where nothing is as it seems.\u003cp\u003e“Koontz’s most likable creation.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Koontz forges the kind of sweeping melodrama complete with screwball laughs, nail-biting moments, and surprises that is the bedrock of American narrative fiction.”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “One of the most remarkable and appealing characters in current fiction . . . a page-turning account . . . beautifully written . . . another literary home run.”\u003ci\u003e—The Virginian-Pilot\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Takes off at breakneck speed . . . a superb story from one of our contemporary masters.”—\u003ci\u003eSan Antonio Express-News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eDean Koontz,\u003c\/b\u003e the author of many #1 \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirit of their goldens, Trixie and Anna.\u003ci\u003eChapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s only life. We all get through it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all of my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I’d call it a triumph.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I raised the window shades in my bedroom, the cocooned sky was gray and swollen, windless and still, but pregnant with a promise of change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOvernight, according to the radio, an airliner had crashed in Ohio. Hundreds perished. The sole survivor, a ten-month-old child, had been found upright and unscathed in a battered seat that stood in a field of scorched and twisted debris.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout the morning, under the expectant sky, low sluggish waves exhausted themselves on the shore. The Pacific was gray and awash with inky shadows, as if sinuous sea beasts of fantastical form swam just below the surface.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring the night, I had twice awakened from a dream in which the tide flowed red and the sea throbbed with a terrible light.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs nightmares go, I’m sure you’ve had worse. The problem is that a few of my dreams have come true, and people have died.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile I prepared breakfast for my employer, the kitchen radio brought news that the jihadists who had the previous day seized an ocean liner in the Mediterranean were now beheading passengers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYears ago I stopped watching news programs on television. I can tolerate words and the knowledge they impart, but the images undo me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBecause he was an insomniac who went to bed at dawn, Hutch ate breakfast at noon. He paid me well, and he was kind, so I cooked to his schedule without complaint.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHutch took his meals in the dining room, where the draperies were always closed. Not one bright sliver of any windowpane remained exposed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe often enjoyed a film while he ate, lingering over coffee until the credits rolled. That day, rather than cable news, he watched Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEighty-eight years old, born in the era of silent films, when Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino were stars, and having later been a successful actor, Hutch thought less in words than in images, and he dwelt in fantasy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeside his plate stood a bottle of Purell sanitizing gel. He lavished it on his hands not only before and after eating, but also at least twice during a meal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike most Americans in the first decade of the new century, Hutch feared everything except what he ought to fear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen TV-news programs ran out of stories about drunk, drug-addled, murderous, and otherwise crazed celebrities—which happened perhaps twice a year—they sometimes filled the brief gap with a sensationalistic piece on that rare flesh-eating bacteria.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eConsequently, Hutch feared contracting the ravenous germ. From time to time, like a dour character in a tale by Poe, he huddled in his lamplit study, brooding about his fate, about the fragility of his flesh, about the insatiable appetite of his microscopic foe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe especially dreaded that his nose might be eaten away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLong ago, his face had been famous. Although time had disguised him, he still took pride in his appearance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had seen a few of Lawrence Hutchison’s movies from the 1940s and ’50s. I liked them. He’d been a commanding presence on screen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBecause he had not appeared on camera for five decades, Hutch was less known for his acting than for his children’s books about a swashbuckling rabbit named Nibbles. Unlike his creator, Nibbles was fearless.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFilm money, book royalties, and a habit of regarding investment opportunities with paranoid suspicion had left Hutch financially secure in his old age. Nevertheless, he worried that an explosive rise in the price of oil or a total collapse in the price of oil would lead to a worldwide financial crisis that would leave him penniless.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis house faced the boardwalk, the beach, the ocean. Surf broke less than a minute’s stroll from his front door.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the years, he had come to fear the sea. He could not bear to sleep on the west side of the house, where he might hear the waves crawling along the shore.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTherefore, I was quartered in the ocean-facing master suite at the front of the house. He slept in a guest room at the back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWithin a day of arriving in Magic Beach, more than a month previous to the red-tide dream, I had taken a job as Hutch’s cook, doubling as his chauffeur on those infrequent occasions when he wanted to go out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy experience at the Pico Mundo Grill served me well. If you can make hash browns that wring a flood from salivary glands, fry bacon to the crispness of a cracker without parching it, and make pancakes as rich as pudding yet so fluffy they seem to be at risk of floating off the plate, you will always find work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt four-thirty that afternoon in late January, when I stepped into the parlor with Boo, my dog, Hutch was in his favorite armchair, scowling at the television, which he had muted.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Bad news, sir?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis deep and rounded voice rolled an ominous note into every syllable: “Mars is warming.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We don’t live on Mars.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s warming at the same rate as the earth.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Were you planning to move to Mars to escape global warming?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe indicated the silenced anchorman on the TV. “This means the sun is the cause of both, and nothing can be done about it. Nothing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, sir, there’s always Jupiter or whatever planet lies beyond Mars.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe fixed me with that luminous gray-eyed stare that conveyed implacable determination when he had played crusading district attorneys and courageous military officers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sometimes, young man, I think you may be from beyond Mars.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nowhere more exotic than Pico Mundo, California. If you won’t need me for a while, sir, I thought I’d go out for a walk.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHutch rose to his feet. He was tall and lean. He kept his chin lifted but craned his head forward as does a man squinting to sharpen his vision, which might have been a habit that he developed in the years before he had his cataracts removed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Go out?” He frowned as he approached. “Dressed like that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was wearing sneakers, jeans, and a sweatshirt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was not troubled by arthritis and remained graceful for his age. Yet he moved with precision and caution, as though expecting to fracture something.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot for the first time, he reminded me of a great blue heron stalking tide pools.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You should put on a jacket. You’ll get pneumonia.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s not that chilly today,” I assured him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You young people think you’re invulnerable.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not this young person, sir. I’ve got every reason to be astonished that I’m not already permanently horizontal.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIndicating the words mystery train on my sweatshirt, he asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t know. I found it in a thrift shop.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I have never been in a thrift shop.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You haven’t missed much.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Do only very poor people shop there or is the criteria merely thriftiness?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“They welcome all economic classes, sir.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Then I should go one day soon. Make an adventure of it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You won’t find a genie in a bottle,” I said, referring to his film The Antique Shop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No doubt you’re too modern to believe in genies and such. How do you get through life when you’ve nothing to believe in?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Oh, I have beliefs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLawrence Hutchison was less interested in my beliefs than in the sound of his well-trained voice. “I keep an open mind regarding all things supernatural.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI found his self-absorption endearing. Besides, if he were to have been curious about me, I would have had a more difficult time keeping all my secrets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe said, “My friend Adrian White was married to a fortune-teller who called herself Portentia.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI traded anecdotes with him: “This girl I used to know, Stormy Llewellyn—at the carnival, we got a card from a fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Portentia used a crystal ball and prattled a lot of mumbo jumbo, but she was the real thing. Adrian adored her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The card said Stormy and I would be together forever. But it didn’t turn out that way.”#1 New York Times bestseller","brand":"Bantam","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303424217317,"sku":"NP9780553591705","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553591705.jpg?v=1767734002","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/odd-hours-isbn-9780553591705","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}