Be Not Idle

A Review of Danny Gospel and Odd Hours

Can you hear the Gospel ringin’, ringin’ softly through the pines? Death has taken our dear mother. We are walking in a line; we are walking in a line. – “Walking in a Line” by Grey Delisle, from her country album The Graceful Ghost

Danny Gospel is the first book by author David Athey.  Dean Koontz’s Odd Hours is the fourth novel in a planned series of seven.  So why am I reviewing them together?

It’s not just because both protagonists – Danny Gospel and Odd Thomas – have mighty strange monikers.

Strong parallels run between them. Both protagonists live with grief. Danny Gospel is haunted by the death of his family, the estrangement of his surviving brother, and the fear that his ex-fiancée Rachel died on 9/11. Odd Thomas still grieves for his true love. Both have supernatural visions. For Danny, it takes the form of a mysterious woman. For Odd, the spirits of the dead appeal for justice and, in this particular book, a recurring blood-drenched dream tells him what will happen if he fails. Both men are on what Marvin Olasky would call a “mad mission,” a calling to help others that is risky. 1

She was an average woman, perfectly lovely, dressed in white. She leaned down and kissed me lightly on the lips. Trembling, I wondered: is this normal and happy, or just a dream?

A month after the 9/11 attacks, Danny Gospel has a vision of a woman and knows he must find her. She is the driving force behind his travels – both mental and physical. 

Athey takes quite a risk by presenting Danny as mentally unstable postal worker during the anthrax scare.  As the narrator, Danny flits from one subject to another and takes the reader dancing around issues, such as stolen mail. However, the unreliable narration works. The reactions of Danny’s friends give the reader an inkling that he’s more eccentric than criminally insane. And Danny himself sees details that other’s miss: the beauty of a snow squall in Iowa, the goodness in a dirty-minded mechanic, the comaraderie between people who don’t fit in.

His journey is an allegory for anyone who’s heard God’s calling. Danny has been praying to be “normal and happy”, but the vision changes him. He begins to pray “Which direction, Lord?” and, strange as the signposts may be, he follows.  

The only moment when author Athey lost me was when the setting moves from Iowa. I could accept that Danny’s friend Grease was as eccentric as he. I could utterly suspend my disbelief in a mosquito being a heavenly guide. But he seemed to meet every oddball from Kentucky to Florida. It took me out of “the zone”, so to speak. It wasn’t until just before he left Florida that I got back into the story.

Odd Hours is a more mixed bag. I’m always happy to renew my aquaintance with Odd Thomas, frycook and wanderer.  He sees ghosts, but he also sees the small details of the world. In this lastest book, he is employed by eccentric octogenarian Hutch, a former actor reminiscent of Charton Heston or Robert Mitchum. His interactions with Hutch, a badly scarred woman, and the other oddball characters are part of Odd’s philosophy about loving:

I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love – the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street – and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and this life portend. I don’t love them to excess, (…) knowing that all this is as nothing compared to the wondrous sights that lie beyond the next threshold. (p 88)

However, the Odd Thomas of Odd Hours doesn’t seem to be himself in this book. Before he could see ghosts. Now he’s developed a new gift: the ability to see visions when he touches living people. He seems to have lost something. Previous books explained a childhood incident and the horrible murder that made Odd abhor guns. But in this volume, Odd doesn’t just pick up a gun; he uses it.

In between books in the Odd series, I’ve read more of the collected works of Dean Koontz. That’s why I was particularly startled to see a reference to a time-altering event from Seize the Night, the second of his Moonlight Bay trilogy. (For readers familiar with it, the reference occurs when Odd puts on a sweatshirt that says ”Mystery Train”.) 

It appeared to foreshadow Odd’s physically grueling adventures. At times I felt as if I were reading the continued adventures of Christopher Snow, the protagonist of the Moonlight Bay series. Unlike previous books, Odd’s supernatural hints showed no real pattern: stopped clocks, a presence on a porch swing, something in a mirror, and a seemingly prescient woman called Annamaria.

However, I think that it may be deliberate. Koontz appears to carry over the time-warp from the Moonlight Bay books to the Odd series. And Odd is at a crossroads, so to speak. Seventeen months ago, he survived a massacre and began wandering wherever he was led by circumstance. 

Since that day of death (…) my life had not been mine. I had been spared for a reason I could not understand. I had known the day would come when I would give my life in the right cause.

Will you die for me?

Yes.

Like Danny Gospel, Odd Hours ends with a woman. In this case, Odd finally recognizes the mysterious Annamaria. It’s a cliffhanger ending – an intriguing but unsatisfying one. 

Of the two novels, Danny Gospel is the better.  

1. Marvin Olasky’s column about his own “mad mission” is well worth reading.  http://townhall.com/Columnists/MarvinOlasky/2008/05/15/mad _missions

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