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
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.”
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 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.”
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.
(Reuters) – “Saint Odd,” the final book in Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series, shot straight to the top of the U.S. bestseller list on Thursday, pushing Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See” into third place.
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) –
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.
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.
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. Castle Rock, April 1989, Midnight & Night Visions 6 reviews Castle Rock, August 1989, The House of Thunder review Castle Rock, December 1988, Oddkins review Castle Rock, May 1988, Door to December review, Sudden Fear review, How to Write Tales of Horror… advertisement
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.
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.
As much as anyone hates to see a story come to an end, nothing lasts forever. We’ve all seen television, book, and movie series that somehow survived long past their expiration date, in the process becoming parodies of what once attracted us to them to begin with. It’s like Jud Crandal said in Stephen King’s Pet Semetary: “Sometimes, dead is better.”
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.
Well, not really… But one of his books was… In the background…
It always frustrated my father when I would watch a news interview and identify the books behind someone. This is the title in question. Here’s the book in question.
Koontz is one of the best selling authors of all time. He just released “Saint Odd,” the final book in one of this most popular series. Koontz speaks with Ben Tracy about his unusual life experiences.
Author Dean Koontz has sold more than 450 million books. He says of his best-selling success: “I’ve always been driven, probably for a lot of reasons, and one of those is, unquestionably: I’ve always loved the English language.”
Seven books later, the tale of Odd Thomas is now complete.
It was a sad day to finish the series because I loved the character so much. On the other hand, with the first book, I made a promise to the character, and it needed to be fulfilled, and it could only be fulfilled if the series came to an end.
Now that the series has concluded, some readers might determine that you’ve just finished your masterpiece. What do you think?
(Laughs) I think there have been so many books that it gets very difficult to make those kinds of assessments, at least for me. People ask me, “What is your favorite character or book, whatever?” To a degree, you have to almost say all of them because, even though I write pretty quickly, I’m still choosing to spend a lot of time with these characters, in these stories. I will say, though, that Odd Thomas was special to me. He wasn’t always well received, though. When I turned the first book in to my (previous) publisher, there were people there who so dislike the character and the conflict that they wouldn’t even talk to me about it. In me, that triggers a certain response.
What will you recognise her from?
Horror and supernatural fans will most likely recognise Gugu from the criminally underrated Odd Thomas, a movie based on the novel of the same name by Dean Koontz, which also starred Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin and the always-brilliant Willem Dafoe.
The movie wasn’t widely released in the UK, but was shown at London-based film festival FrightFest and can be found on Netflix for your streaming pleasure.
Outside of that, you may recognise her from period drama Belle, where she plays a mixed-race daughter of a Navy Admiral, raised by her aristocratic uncle in the 18th Century, and romantic drama Beyond the Lights where she portrayed a pop star called Noni who falls for young cop Kaz.
She will be featuring in The Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending later this year.
The title of this book tells you well what to expect of it: fear, suspense, red-hot emotions and unexpected twists and turns of the plot. Add to this the fact that the novel was written by Dean Koontz, a famous master of thrillers, and you won’t be disappointed from the very first page.
The story starts with a TV interview with Graham, the former mountain climber, who acquired supernatural mental capacity after an almost fatal fall off the slope of Everest. This psychic ability of the protagonist is the only deviation from a crime-detective story, in which nothing but the puzzle of reality exists. However, this assumption of Graham’s clairvoyant trait should not be categorized as a complete fantasy, as there are a few documented cases when psychics helped to solve crime mysteries. In any case, the story, told with convincing clarity of details is as believable as it could be in this genre.
Here’s a Polish edition cover for you. The title translates to “peripheral vision.” Leave a comment if you want to guess which book this is a translation of. (Source review.)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The title of this book tells you well what to expect of it: fear, suspense, red-hot emotions and unexpected twists and turns of the plot. Add to this the fact that the novel was written by Dean Koontz, a famous master of thrillers, and you won’t be disappointed from the very first page.
