A page turned Thursday night, though probably not as big and heavy a one as the bookseller would have you believe.
“We’re on the computer!” Bill Maher told his L.A. studio audience and anyone else who was logged on to the homepage of Amazon.com.
The comedian touted Amazon as “the first major Internet site to launch an episodic series.” Fishbowl With Bill Maher, which began at 11 p.m. Thursday and is available at this very second at www.amazon.com/gp/movie-player-dashboard/permalink/39:31/104-3877406-928
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The City: Dean Koontz veers from type with this tender, character-driven story.
February 4, 2015
I call him the poor man’s Stephen King, which is ironic, because Koontz is probably one of the wealthiest authors alive.
So I picked up The City, convinced I was in for more of Koontz’s crafty if slightly formulaic storytelling.
I was very wrong.
In The City Koontz paints the unusual coming-of-age story of young Jonah Kirk, son of a talented lounge singer and grandson of a true piano man. Young Jonah learns about the mysteries and the beauty of his city through a very diverse crowd of friends… and enemies.
Read the full review @ Women24.
Sacramento Bee Interview
February 3, 2015
Best-selling author Dean Koontz talks about his success, latest hit character
by Allen Pierleoni
Q: Underlying the surface action, what is the Odd Thomas series about?
A: Perseverance in the face of the setbacks in life. Also, Odd represents the best that people are capable of being, but in this fallen world we rarely ever get there. That doesn’t mean he isn’t driven to do terrible things, but he does them to protect the innocent or save his own life.
Q: Where did Odd come from?
A: I was working on another book and suddenly into my mind came the line, “My name is Odd Thomas, and I lead an unusual life.” I spent the rest of the day writing what became the first chapter of the first book. The only thing I knew about him then was he was a character on a journey to absolute humility. Where all that came from is a mysterious process I did nothing to earn. The only thing I could do was bring my best craftsmanship to it.
Q: What’s so saintly about Odd?
A: I always knew the last book would be called “Saint Odd” because in his humility he would have come to a certain completeness. He lives for other people, and his philosophy is to live in a simple, old-fashioned, chivalrous way, but to never back down.
Read the full interview @ http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/books/article8952776.html
USA Today Chat Afterlinks
February 2, 2015
For the record, here’s just a few links re: the USA Today Chat that I didn’t get posted before the event:
- Five Things to Know for Thursday (USA Today)
- An Odd Opportunity: Q&A Tomorrow with Dean Koontz (Suvudu)
And, it looks like you can view the recording of the chat officially on the USA Today page where the chat originally occurred.
Take the USA Today Odd Thomas Quiz
February 2, 2015
I got 100% of course 😉
Story reflects author's new style
February 1, 2015
Though I feel like this review of The City is appearing a year late…
The book has the usual bits of mystery, scary moments mixed with moments of lighthearted normal life moments of the characters, and offers up a good dose of nostalgia of a time in our country — the late 1960s — when things were changing, and our television sets brought in those events to us every night. Events, such as race riots, bombings on college campus and demonstrations colored people’s memories and influenced a generation as never before.
Read the full review @ Journal-Advocate.com
Movies for guys to watch … for free
February 1, 2015
“Free” as in via Netflix streaming…
“Odd Thomas:” Typically, when I stream movies or TV shows, I’m pretty particular in the ones I pick. This was not one of those picks, and I was pleasantly surprised. I clicked on this one simply because I like the lead actor, Anton Yelchin (“Star Trek”), who plays the title character. Adapted from a Dean Koontz novel of the same name, “Odd Thomas” is a paranormal investigator who can see ghosts. Though somewhat predictable and at times plodding, it’s good sci-fi fare that benefits from Willem Defoe (“Spider-Man,” “Boondock Saints”) in a supporting role and some pretty solid CGI for a low-budget flick. It has heart, humor and decent action, and a touching ending that I didn’t really expect.
Read the full article @ The Dickinson Press.
Charnel House News re: The City & Saint Odd
February 1, 2015
THE CITY: The books have been in house for weeks, it is the slipcases we are waiting on. I can not co-ordinate the two for the same date as I use a finished book to size the slips. I have made blank dummys in the past to speed this process up with less than acceptable results. I am told another two weeks before they ship to me. The lettered edition has been shipped and is out of print.
SAINT ODD: Odd is going to the printer in February and publication is now scheduled for April. There are only six copies of lettered edition with this historic binding left for sale.
I am sorry for the delays and shuffling of dates but I think you know by now–Saint Odd being the forty-first book for Charnel House and the twenty-ninth book with Dean–that this is the only way I can keep the quality that Charnel House is known for in producing these fine editions by hand, and I can not rush the process without damage. It is more important that these editions are done right than out on time and I appreciate your patience all these years. That’s a lot of patience.
Thank you–Joe Stefko, Publisher
Source: Charnel House
USA Today Chat Recording
January 29, 2015
Here’s my recording of today’s online chat. Should an official one become available I will replace my somewhat imperfect copy with the official one.
Re: Amazon Fishbowl
January 29, 2015
Just found this image on Getty Images from the Amazon Fishbowl episode…
…and this 6 June 2006 article from Philly.com:
7120, puts Maher in the talk-show host seat, interviewing folks whose stuff you can buy on Amazon. A new episode is scheduled every Thursday for the next few weeks.
Minor Internet sites have been running episodic series for quite a while. Of course, I’m a TV critic, and I don’t know a whole lot about them, but I do like one called Rocketboom.com, which features a pretty woman named Amanda Congdon doing a cockamamie “news” show, heavy on computer content.
She auctioned off the show’s first commercial time on eBay a while back (I think she got $40,000, which isn’t chicken feed, though it’s probably about 30 seconds of Amazon revenue), and you can watch her daily performance, which is called a “vlog,” on TV if you have TiVo.
I can’t, because I can’t figure out how to work it all. And that was part of the problem with Maher’s show Thursday night, too. It would just stop and start, and the little virtual gadget that was supposed to control it didn’t have any skip or rewind buttons, which I can work on my TiVo, so how new and revolutionary is that?
What is revolutionary, of course, are the commercial geegaws associated with Fishbowl, which appears on a little screen that’s made to look like a TV, maybe 5 by 6 inches, in the middle of your larger computer screen, leaving room for such Amazon messages as “The Husband (Hardcover) by Dean Koontz. Go to this product detail page.”
Full article @ Philly.com.
Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher
January 28, 2015
Some of you may know that Dean appeared on several episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. But today I discovered that there was a short-lived online show titled Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher and that the first episode from 1 June 2006 included Dean. You can still find the full original online @ http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/39:31/104-3877406-928 and I’ve embedded the interview with Dean here. (Please keep in mind that this is streaming video from 2006 so the quality pretty much sucks.)
Dean Koontz says goodbye to Odd Thomas (Interview)
January 28, 2015
Dean Koontz is one of the world’s most popular novelists, with 450 million books sold worldwide. In recent years, his series featuring Odd Thomas — a young fry cook with paranormal powers, including the ability to see the spirits of the “lingering dead” — has been particularly popular, with 20 million copies sold to date. Now the series is ending with its seventh installment, Saint Odd (currently No. 4 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list), in which the character returns to his hometown of Pico Mundo, Calif., to fulfill the destiny foretold in the series opener in 2003.
Koontz will be the featured guest on a special online video chat with fans from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET on Jan. 29, sponsored by USA TODAY and Intercast. In the meantime, we caught up with Koontz, 69, for a phone interview from his home in Newport Coast, Calif.
Q: Is the ending of the Odd Thomas series a sad occasion for you?
A: When I finished the first one, Odd Thomas, I thought, “This is liable to be more than one book,” but at most I thought it would be a trilogy. But the character just had dimension after dimension that I found fascinating. In book two, I thought, “He’s on a journey to absolute humility,” which I didn’t know how I was going to write about since I don’t have an experience of absolute humility myself. (Laughs.) In the first book, he lost the love of his life, and got a little card from a fortune-telling machine that said, “You are destined to be together forever.” And I knew that was a promise that had to be fulfilled. I thought, “I can’t keep him going forever, no matter how interesting he is.”
Read the full interview @ USA Today.
Live Chat with Dean on 21 January 2015
January 22, 2015
What have you always been dying to ask Dean Koontz? The best-selling author answers your fan questions during a live global online video chat on Jan. 29 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET, sponsored by USA TODAY and INTERCAST.
Full details @ http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2015/01/21/dean-koontz-saint-odd-chat-odd-thomas/21437675/
Or, you can watch it here.
:USATodayKoontzChat:
BookReporter review of Saint Odd
January 22, 2015
In 2003, Dean Koontz published ODD THOMAS, which followed a 20-year-old fry cook from Pico Mundo, California, through the loss of his true love, Stormy Llewellyn, in a brutal mass murder. In the years since, Koontz has published six more Odd Thomas novels, concluding the series now with SAINT ODD.
In the two years since Stormy was killed at the Green Moon Mall, Odd has been traveling the country, drawn to various dark scenes and enigmatic figures. Throughout the series, he thwarts several major crimes or disasters using his psychic ability to see and communicate with the dead, though the body count is always still high. The bad guys are often nefarious cultists, and those assisting Odd are frequently mysterious or possibly magical. In SAINT ODD, the series ends with Odd finally returning to Pico Mundo and facing an evil greater than even the one that took Stormy from him.
Read the full review @ BookReporter.com
Saint Odd' debuts at No. 1 on U.S. bestsellers list
January 22, 2015
Data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors across the United States is used to compile the list.
Hardcover Fiction Last Week
1. “Saint Odd” by Dean Koontz
(Bantam, $28.00) –
The Real Town of Silent Hill
January 19, 2015
It’s called Centralia, Pennsylvania, and while not what inspired the games it is the place that inspired the setting for the films and they share quite a few similarities.
Centralia is a near-ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 10 as of 2010, as a result of the Centralia mine fire burning beneath the town since 1962. All properties in the town were claimed under eminent domain by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1992 (and all buildings condemned), and Centralia’s ZIP code revoked by the Postal Service. State and local officials reached an agreement with the remaining residents allowing them to live out their lives there, after which the rights of their properties will be taken…
Centralia has been used as a model for many different ghost towns and physical manifestations of Hell. Examples include Dean Koontz’s Strange Highways and David Wellington’s Vampire Zero, and, as stated, the film adaptation of Silent Hill.
Read the full article @ MoviePilot.com
HP Lovecraft: Horrible man, great writer, now collected in annotated edition
January 19, 2015
The-New-Annotated-H.-P.-LovecraftHe wrote like nobody before him, and no one since. Stephen King called him “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” He was HP Lovecraft, whose works are now collected and curated by scholar Leslie Klinger in “The New Annotated HP Lovecraft,” with an introduction by Alan Moore.
“He was very much a stylist, a craftsman, and I think writers like Neil Gaiman, Robert Bloch, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz — they all absorbed that and realized that’s how you write scary stuff,” says Klinger. “You don’t start with something that has blood and gore. You write an atmosphere. You build it up.”
While he was alive, Lovecraft was unknown and made very little money from his writing. He had a few stories published before he died at the age of 46, but not much else. “He had only a single book published in his lifetime,” says Klinger. “He was clearly a commercial failure and sort of the quintessential starving artist.”
Now, Lovecraft is regarded as one of the most important horror writers of the twentieth century. Authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Dean Koontz name him as an influence. But there’s a side to Lovecraft that’s hard for fans to ignore: he was a horrible bigot.
Read the full article @ SCPR.org
Dean reviewed in Castle Rock
January 19, 2015
By my count, Dean has had books of his reviewed in a total of six issues of Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter. Recently I picked up four of those issues which has me missing just one at this point.
Ask Anna 50% Off
January 18, 2015
Both of my local Barnes & Noble stores have copies of Ask Anna for 50% off on their post-holidays clearance table. If you’ve not picked up a copy yet, now is a great time to do so. For those of you without a local Barnes & Noble, it looks like Amazon is also currently offering is at the same half-off price.
New Wilderness audio on the way
January 17, 2015
Amazon is currently listing Wilderness: A Short Work Tie-In to Innocence on Audio CD available for pre-order with no release date listed. Of course, I’ll update here is information becomes available.
So Long Odd Thomas: Saint Odd
January 17, 2015
Perhaps more common are those series that are struck down in their prime: Firefly is my favorite example, but there are so many others – Dead Like Me, Freaks and Geeks,Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – each with its own tragicomic backstory of studio meddling, executive cluelessness, and ignominious death on the frontlines of popular entertainment.
Sometimes, though, the audience gets lucky and a story ends just where it should. Loose ends are tied up or left with just enough slack to leave us with something to think about. Story arcs are resolved. Heroes and villains arrive at their destiny. We stand and give a round of applause, maybe wipe a tear away, and put the book or blu-ray or ticket stub away on the high shelf of our imagination.
Read the full review @ Suvudu