Odd Hours
Amazon Exclusive Essay: Destiny andOdd HoursOdd Thomas came to me as a gift, the entire first chapter of his first book having poured out of me as I was in the middle  of writingThe Face. I wrote it by hand, though I never work that way, and I never hesitated to think what should  come next. He was fully-realized in my mind from the moment I began to write in that lined legal tablet. With other stories  and characters, I can identify the source of the inspiration, but not with Oddie and his books. He just suddenly was. When I  write about him, his narrative voice is so clear to me that I almost hear him in my head.For those among you who long have thought that I should be institutionalized, just relax: I said I almost hear him.Many times over the years, I said I would never write an open-ended series. Then along came Oddie, and he proved me wrong.  Or so I thought. As I wrote the first chapter ofOdd Hours, the fourth featuring my fry-cook hero, I realized that  this was not an open-ended series, after all, but that it would conclude with six or seven novels. I now think seven.I suddenly saw the end point of his journey, the arc of it to the final book, and I was stunned. Beginning with this fourth  story, the stakes were being raised dramatically; Oddie was going to face far more physical and moral danger than  previously; and he was going to mature toward the fulfillment of a destiny that I had not seen coming until that moment.Initially, I tried to argue myself out of the direction thatOdd Hourswas taking. I didn't believe that the first  three books had put down a sufficient foundation to support the formidable architecture that I saw rising from it in the  next three or four novels.When I began to reread the first three books, however, I quickly discovered that I had unconsciously paved the road that the  series was now taking. I had thought I was writing a series with an overall theme about the power and beauty of humility.  Indeed I was, but it was also something more than that; and Oddie's ultimate destiny will not be merely purification to a  state of absolute humility, but will be that and something else I find quite wonderful.What lies ahead will be a challenge to write--or perhaps not. The character of Odd Thomas was a gift to me, and now I see  that the entire architecture of a seven-book series was another gift that came to me complete on the same day Oddie arrived,  although I needed time to recognize it.This world is a place of wonder, and life is a mysterious enterprise; but nothing in all my years has been more mysterious  than Odd Thomas's origins and my compulsion to write about him.-- Dean Koontz