FAQ

Miscellaneous

I’m on record as saying I don’t believe in sequels. Yet here I am, finishing the third Odd Thomas novel, working on the third in the Frankenstein series, contemplating a fourth round with Odd, and promising a third Chris Snow. I can’t write sequels to everything. When I finished LIFE EXPECTANCY, I wanted to spend more time with the characters, but it seemed that to follow little Rowena on her five special days would require the book to be science fiction if the first of her days, like her father’s special days, came in her twentieth year. Then I realized all five special days could come in Rowena’s first couple of years, which lets the book take place in our time. So it has been a thought in the back of my mind. But the past few years have brought me more and better ideas than I’ve ever had before, and I think it’s less–not more–likely that I’ll do any sequels other than the third Chris Snow and, possibly, other Odd Thomas titles. Thanks for caring, Rafael. May you always have cake, and may you never be troubled by angry clowns.

Unless I just took a ghost dog out to pee, she’s fine. Several people wrote with condolences–misinterpreting, I think, the line of the dedication that says Trixie is “an angel on four feet.” She has been an angel since the day that she came to us, but always very much alive. I’ve made a couple of verb-tense changes in the dedication for the paperback edition, just to avoid confusion. Trixie is 10, turns 11 next October, and with the veterinary care and healthy diet available to dogs these days, she should be with us another five years or more, especially as she is on the small side for a golden, weighing in at 68 pounds, except in those weeks when she cages a few corn chips and extra peanut butter, but even then she has never ballooned to more than 236 pounds.

Of course, short stuff. Let’s go.

The answer to your question.

You may be crazy, Maxine. I don’t know you, so wouldn’t venture an opinion as to your sanity. Your neighbors and friends have got quite a web site going on the subject–maxinewhatanut.com–but I’m not prepared to make a judgment based on hearsay. I love the idea that I might be packing books full of literary allusions just by chance–like that infinite number of monkeys writing all the plays of Shakespeare, given an infinite length of time–or perhaps while in a trance. A writer of fiction has a deep bag of techniques with which to attempt to affect the reader on a subconscious level. This includes conforming metaphors and similes and imagery to a scheme that supports the underlying themes of a novel and also deepens character as revealed through point of view. It includes reaching for poetic meter now and then to make the prose surge along for a particular effect. And among dozens of other tools, there is literary allusion. None of these are things of which the reader needs to be aware. In fact, the more aware the reader is of them, the less effective they may be. The surface of a piece of fiction should be alluringly illuminated, but there are dimensions that fade down into ever deeper shadow, affecting us less consciously than by washing through the catacombs of the unconscious. After I’d been at this a long time, I realized that no matter how cunning the writer may be, even if he layers the story as exquisitely as a master pastry chef’s best phyllo, there will be a layer or two of which he himself is not consciously aware, or perhaps of which he is not aware at all. This is one of the reasons I say that fiction is a mysterious medium and that creating a fictional world puts you in touch with some higher creativity.

He would surely curse me for condemning him to a life without light, but he might thank me for making him such a romantic figure. He would mock me for writing novels in which even the troubled and the weak usually find great reservoirs of courage deep within themselves–while I myself am reluctant to board aircraft except in dire emergencies. Then he would notice the moon was full, the surf was up, and he’d suggest we grab boards and beer and speed for the beach. Orson would swoon over Trixie.

Very meaningful. In real life, Barbara Mandell’s husband paid a lot of money at a Canine Companions for Independence fund-raising auction to have his wife’s name used in one of my novels. And at another auction for another charity, Billy Wiles’s wife paid a handsome sum to have his name used in a novel. They both ended up in VELOCITY. The names of characters are not always symbolic, but they are always important and need to ring true, and they have to resonate in a particular way in each story, supporting mood if nothing else. That’s why when people have won charity auctions to have their names in a book, they sometimes have to wait a couple of years until I find a story in which they will fit. As for Phil Dick: I knew him a little bit and admired his work a lot; Phil would have gotten a kick out of seeing Valis in VELOCITY. In FRANKENSTEIN: PRODIGAL SON, I got to use an anecdote about Chinese cuisine that Phil once told me over lunch. I remember his smile when he got to the punch line. He had a killer smile, though you seldom see a photograph of him that isn’t somber.

During my childhood, we lived across the highway from the county fairgrounds. The county fair was the biggest event of the year. Even bigger than the summer-long thrill of watching corn grow. I knew all the places where you could sneak under the fence and get in for free. Consequently, I spent a huge part of fair week on the fairgrounds, but not in the livestock and home crafts exhibitions! I might run up to the barns to see the biggest hog of the year, because everyone gets a kick out of huge hogs, but otherwise I was on the midway. I was fascinated with the exotic, gaudy world of the carnival, with the life on the road that it offered. Because of our poverty and my father’s alcoholism, I might have run away with the carnival if they would have accepted me. My fascination with carnies has endured, though current carnivals are a pale imitation of what they once were.

I do so much research for a novel that I try to spare myself additional research regarding the locale. Consequently, I prefer to set my books in territory with which I’m deeply familiar—largely here in California, but also in Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. When I set BROTHER ODD in the Sierra Nevada, in California, I thought I had spared myself locale research—then too late realized a great deal of the novel would take place not in the mountains themselves but inside the monastery. I didn’t know a lot about monastic life. I sure do now.

Currently, a number of my books are in development for films or television projects. Focus Features has optioned THE HUSBAND, and recently named Ole Bornedal to direct. Once the script is complete, the film will go into production. There are also a variety of plans for ODD THOMAS (a television miniseries, as well as a potential video game.).

I’ll keep you posted on the website and in the newsletter as more projects come to fruition.

FRANKENSTEIN 3 will be in stores July 28, 2009. Simultaneously with the publication of FRANKENSTEIN #3: DEAD AND ALIVE, Bantam Books is offering new editions of the first two volumes – Book One: PRODIGAL SON and Book Two: CITY OF NIGHT.

Fans have said I’ve written many books that cry out for sequels, such as BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON, and DARK RIVERS OF THE HEART. And though they like Odd Thomas, they wonder why that one already has already had three sequels. They also want to know when the next Chris Snow is coming out, and if I’ll write a sequel to BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON. I have a lot of requests for sequels to BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON and I didn’t think I was setting it up for one I do see though why many people feel that it might be an obvious series. I won’t say I won’t return to it, I don’t intend to, but, I also never intended to return to certain other things and I did. As for ODD THOMAS, I loved that character from the moment the first book was written, I wanted to go on to book two but I didn’t want to do it until I found out whether readers might actually like him as much as I did. When readers responded to him so strongly that allowed me to start writing a sequel to that and in fact a whole series. I did not know that it was going to be a seven book series until I was working on number four. And I now know there are seven books to complete Odd’s entire journey. I know where he’ll end up in the seventh book and it’s pretty astounding, it gives me a real chance to fall flat on my face, which I always enjoy, because if you aren’t challenged the book is never going to be any good. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Odd from the time he leaves Magic Beach at the end of book four until his journey ends at the end of book seven. I never know what’s going to happen in a book as I’m going. So the journey is as much of an exciting one for me as I hope it will be for you. Uh, as for Chris Snow, there will be the third Chris Snow book; you can count on it, if I live long enough.

Book 1: ODD THOMAS — Odd is a short-order cook in a small desert town, Pico Mundo, California. He leads an unusual life — the spirits of the lingering dead come to him for justice. He thinks of himself as an ordinary guy until a mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world’s worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like shades following him wherever he goes.

Book 2: FOREVER ODD — When a childhood friend of Odd’s disappears, the worst is feared. But as Odd applies his unique talents to the task of finding the missing person, he discovers something worse than a dead body, encounters an enemy of exceptional cunning, and spirals into a vortex of terror.

Book 3: BROTHER ODD — Odd has retreated to a monastery, but trouble has a way of finding him. It slinks back onto his path in the form of the sinister bodachs he has met previously, the black shades who herald death and disaster, and who come late one December night to hover above the abbey’s most precious charges. For Odd is about to face an enemy who eclipses any he has yet encountered, as he embarks on a journey of mystery, wonder, and sheer suspense that surpasses all that has come before.

Book 4: ODD HOURS — In the latest Odd novel, Odd is haunted by dreams of an all-encompassing red tide, and is pulled inexorably to the sea, to a small California coastal town where nothing is as it seems. Now the forces arrayed against him have both official sanction and an infinitely more sinister authority…and in this dark night of the soul, dawn will come only after the most shattering revelations of all.

Also, you may be interested to know that a Manga novel based on Odd Thomas, IN ODD WE TRUST, published by Del Rey in May, 2008, is now available.

Don’t usurp my authority, Rebecca. I’ll be the one who decides which questions are stupid. This is not a stupid question. In fact, lots of people have written to me with the same request. And when I finished Chapter 43 of VELOCITY, I felt it was likely that Ivy was going to get the leading role in a future novel. She’s a very mysterious, even haunting, character, and I would like to have a look at the world from inside her head. I haven’t come up with a story for her, but I can feel it brewing.