Review: Odd Apocalypse

The stallion reared over me, silently slashing the air with the hooves of its forelegs, a creature of such immense power that I stumbled backward even though I knew that it was as immaterial as a dream…

The woman astride the ghostly mount reaches out desperately, the latest spirit to enlist the aid of Odd Thomas, the unassuming young fry cook whose gift—or curse—it is to see the shades of the restless dead, and to help them when he can. This mission of mercy will lead Odd through realms of darkness he has never before encountered, as he probes the long-held secrets of a sinister estate and those who inhabit it.

I never plan for the future, but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 8

…the dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider that it’s the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 9

Considering the unusual nature of my life, I need not worry that, when it comes to food for thought, I will ever experience famine. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 13

Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.
– Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 14

Stormy Llewellyn, whom I loved and lost, believed that this strife-torn world is boot camp, preparation for the great adventure that comes between our first life and our eternal life. She said that we go wrong only when we are deaf to duty. We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 17

They were an entertainingly eccentric crew; but eccentricity most often equates with virtue or at least with an absence of profoundly evil intention. The devil and all his demons are dull and predictable because of their single-minded rebellion against truth. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 22

Alarmed, I got to my feet, as I always do when a building begins to glow inexplicably. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 23

Occasionally, the deceased attempt to communicate not merely by nodding and gestures but through the art of mime, which can be frustrating. Like any mentally healthy citizen, I am overcome by the urge to strangle a mime when I happen upon one in full performance, but a mime who’s already dead is unmoved by that threat. –  Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 25

BETWEEN BIRTH AND BURIAL, WE FIND OURSELVES IN A comedy of mysteries. If you don’t think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren’t paying attention or you’ve anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don’t think life’s a comedy—well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 31

More than eighteen months before, in Pico Mundo, I would have given my life to save my girl, Stormy Llewellyn. Without hesitation I would have taken the bullets that she took, but Fate didn’t grant me the chance to make that sacrifice. Since then, I have often wished that I had died with her. I love life, love the beauty of the world, but without Stormy to share it, the world in all its wonder will for me be always incomplete. I will never commit suicide, however, or wittingly put myself in a position to be killed, because self-destruction would be the ultimate rejection of the gift of life, an unforgivable ingratitude. Because of the years that Stormy and I so enjoyed together, I cherish life. And it is my abiding hope that if I lead the rest of my days in such a way as to honor her, we eventually will be together again. – Odd Apocalypse, Pg. 39

Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations. And because your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will, if you entertain too much anxiety about too many things, if you place no trust in providence, what you fear will more often come to pass. We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.– Odd Apocalypse, PG. 59

Quick now, here, now, always, if we are in a condition of complete simplicity (as the poet said), hope and trust will more reliably keep a man afloat, while fear is more likely to sink him.– Odd Apocalypse, PG. 59

…trusted providence to prevent a sneeze, refused to worry, declined to dwell on negative possibilities, and I did not sneeze, did not sneeze, still did not sneeze, but then I farted.– Odd Apocalypse, PG. 60

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 64

True friendship, however, is a sacred relationship even if it doesn’t involve formal vows. The friends I’ve made in Pico Mundo and everywhere I’ve gone since leaving home have kept me from despair, have nurtured hope. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 73

…Sempiterno would have been a classic strong-and-silent type if he could have shut up for a minute. But he had a mad-on, and he wanted me to know he had a mad-on, and he evidently thought I was so slow-witted that I wouldn’t understand his position until he had used a thousand words to paint a picture of it.– Odd Apocalypse, PG. 81

I have in the past failed some people, including she whom I loved more than life itself. Every failure hollows out my heart a little further, and no success is able to refill any of that emptiness. I seem to be less likely to die at the hands of some villain than to fall dead when the walls of my heart collapse into the emptiness that they enclose. I couldn’t bear another failure; therefore, if time was running out, I would have to be faster than time. –  Odd Apocalypse, PG. 86

I wonder sometimes why those who theorize about the human mind can so easily believe in the existence of things they cannot see or measure, or in any meaningful way confirm as real—such as the id, the ego, the unconscious I—but nevertheless dismiss as superstitious those who believe the body has a soul. –  Odd Apocalypse, PG. 88

To keep the sorrow from overwhelming me, I remain focused on the beauty of this world, which is everywhere to be seen in rich variety, from the smallest wildflowers and the iridescent hummingbird that feeds on them to the night sky diamonded with fiery stars.
– Odd Apocalypse, PG. 132

There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way. I act in the defense of the innocent, but I sometimes must wonder if I will be innocent in my own heart, or even redeemable, at the end of my strange road. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 141

Of course, one must always remember that although The Sound of Music is the most feel-good movie musical of all time, it is crammed full of Nazis. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 143

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, who are beyond mercy. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 149

Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned. If anger is personal and selfish—and it usually is—it clouds your thinking and therefore puts you at risk. I had to remain clearheaded to deal with what would come next. I needed to keep Stormy Llewellyn out of this, to take this cruelty less personally, to trade anger for righteous indignation, which despises evil acts solely because they are evil. Anger is a red mist through which you see the world, but wrath is clarity. The angry man shoots too often from the hip and misses his target or hits the wrong one, while a wrathful man proceeds without malice but with a thirst for justice. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 155

Men and women who seek to become gods must first lose their humanity. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 199

His neck was nearly as thick as his head. Even his ears looked muscular, as if he did one-lobe push-ups every morning. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 206

The worst and best of humanity stand in the same cold shadow, and even a deserved death can send a shiver of sympathy through me from skin to marrow. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 267

In potentially deadly confrontations where I see no easy exit, I tend to think less than talk. I have found that if I say whatever comes into my mind, without calculation, all filters removed, I often talk my way to a solution that I don’t see coming until it arrives. It’s not that I’m opening a spillway to some huge dam of subconscious wisdom. Believe me, no such dam exists. Maybe it’s just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos. Or maybe I’m just a bullshit artist. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 284

…we had found our way to that crossroads of self-love and self-loathing that is the modern madness most in vogue. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 291

“What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?” – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 317

As we watched the shorebirds kiting in the sky, I told him about the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

Tim said he didn’t understand me any more than I understand Annamaria, but he felt better. That’s all that
matters, really: that we can make each other feel better. – Odd Apocalypse, PG. 324