Punching Up Forever Odd

As I work to learn the various techniques used by authors to create suspense, I find myself reading a lot more horror these days than I have ever done before. This reading gives me useful ideas about how authors make their stories scary.

Most of the time, I just find myself taking mental notes of techniques used. Occasionally, however, I find myself wishing that an author had done certain things to make the story scarier.

Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series offers a fine range of such techniques. However, his second book, Forever Odd, left me with the feeling that much more could have been done to raise the stakes and get the blood pulsing faster.

At the risk of being incredibly presumptuous, I am going to discuss some of the things I would have liked to have seen in this particular book that I believe would have enhanced the suspense.

SPOILER ALERT: The following discussion reveals essential plot elements of Forever Odd and may significantly reduce the impact of the novel to those who have not yet read it. If you plan to read Forever Odd, I encourage you to read the novel in its entirety before reading the rest of this post.

Punch-up Suggestion #1: Don't make it so easy to figure out who will live and who will die.

By the time Odd Thomas enters the storm tunnels in pursuit of the villains who are holding his friend captive, the reader already has a pretty clear idea as to who will survive and who will not.

1) Odd Thomas won't die. Well, he might die in the traditional sense, but we know that he will remain a sentient storyteller--which is as good as being alive for our purposes--because the story is told in the first person with Odd as the narrator.

2) Danny won't die. He can't for two basic reasons: (1) He is the story's "object of altruism," the "damsel in distress," as it were, and the whole point of Odd's pursuit is to rescue him from the captors. (2) Danny's character has not been imbued with enough moral ambiguity to give the reader the sense that his death might have a literary justification.

3) The villains will die. Or if they don't die, at least they will be stopped.

Two possible solutions to this problem occur to me. The first solution is to have Odd go into the tunnel with another sympathetic character rather than alone (i.e., someone whom the reader will believe might die). The other solution is to find some way to add some gray area to Danny's character, make him less a pure paragon of friendship and more a complex human being earlier in the tale.

The bottom line is that the reader needs to believe that someone other than the villains are in real peril, and I do not believe that this is adequately established when Odd enters the storm drain.

Punch-up Suggestion #2: Raise the friendship stakes.

We know that Danny is a childhood friend of Odd. We know that he has a disability which makes his kidnapping a physically excruciating experience. We know that Odd and Danny traded some fantasy cards when they were kids. Beyond that, we don't know nearly enough about Danny's personality to bond with him until Odd actually reaches the destination.

Achieving this character coloration would not have been difficult to do. As he follows the trail, Odd might recall incidents and conversations from their lives that would give the reader a stronger sense about why Danny is a character we should care about.

Punch-up Suggestion #3: Raise the villain stakes.

Aside from two anonymous phone calls, we don't have much insight into the prime villain until Odd Thomas reaches the destination. Since the villain's primary motivation is to lure Odd Thomas into her trap, why not let her toy with him in the tunnel as he makes his way to the destination? This could have been achieved quite easily with a few spray-painted messages on the tunnel walls and the meaningful placement of some occult-related items along the way.

Punch-up Suggestion #4: Show us the cat.

We know that there is some animal lurking around, because we've seen the paw prints in the tunnel and in the destination. And at a critical moment in the story, the cat appears at a fortuitous time and saves the day.

But before that happens, it would have been nice if the cat could have posed a more direct peril to Odd Thomas, and it would have been even nicer if Odd Thomas, presented with an opportunity to kill the cat, had chosen not to do so.

Then, when the cat finally saves the day, the event itself would carry some poetic justice and moral weight.

And finally...

Not a "Punch Up Suggestion," but just a "gimme"

One of the henchmen has a taser, and we find his body in the tunnel. It would have been nice if something creative could have been done with the taser and the plastic explosive that appears later in the story. It just seems a shame to let a perfectly good supply of plastic explosive go to waste, especially when you can use a taser to set it off.

Tasers combined with plastic explosives--that's almost as good as having sharks with freakin' lasers on their heads!