The picture version of Dean Koontz ’s Odd Thomas is done , Koontz enjoin io9 . He ’s really seen the finished film , and he told us what he thinks of it . Koontz also talked to us about the prospects for a TV show based on his Frankenstein series , and what ’s next for Odd Thomas . Plus Koontz has a new novel in the works based on an idea told to him by a long - drained author . Really .
Odd Thomas do photos byset designer Naython Vane , viaLivejournal
We were exceedingly golden to get to speak with Koontz by telephone the other daytime , and he deal a lot about his current and forthcoming projects . Here ’s what he told us about the Odd Thomas movie , which stars Anton Yelchin ( Star Trek ) as Odd :
I have pretty much given up on Hollywood and the whole idea of movies , because they never come what I did decent . And so I say my lawyer , “ When somebody send for and says , ‘ Are the right to that book available ? ’ , Do n’t say yes or no . Call me up and tell me who they are , and I ’ll think about it . ” And about a year after he did that , he called me up one day and said Stephen Sommers is interested in Odd Thomas . And I said , “ Hmm , I ’ll mouth to him . ” Because he has done cross writing style work in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns . And he might understand what has to be saved and what does n’t have to be saved in an adaptation .
And for sure enough , he ’s done a superb job . He wrote the just screenplay I ’ve ever read — not just of my stuff , but of anything . I ’ve seen the finished film . I never expected I would say blithely , “ I get it on the movie . ” I normally call up everybody I ’ve match all my life and apologize for my recounting with the film , but in this case , he ’s done a rattling task .
Steve said to me , the first day we suffer , before we ’d started shooting the flick , “ There ’s only one player under 30 I think I want , and I imagine is beyond just very convinced and in fact great : Anton Yelchin . ” I did n’t know who Anton Yelchin was , and when I found out who he was , I said , “ I ’m not sure . ” But I really had a great deal of reliance in Steve . And when I saw this movie , all you need is the first two minutes , and a panorama he has with a villain in a convertible . And when I insure that scene , I just relaxed and say , “ bang-up . He has found the pure Odd Thomas . ”
Koontz told us the Odd Thomas flick basically covers the event of the first book . And Addison Timlin plays Odd ’s girl Stormy , and is just as great as Yelchin is . “ She ’s just amazing . I could n’t be happier about the performance in this picture . They are really above the cut of this eccentric of movie generally talk . ” He also bring that Sommers does some thing stylistically that are innovative : “ He use transitions , or he does scene transitions , in a elbow room that I ’ve never ascertain before , that just move me . And they ’re very efficient at keeping the pace proceed . ”
Adds Koontz : “ I ’m just happy . You never know if anything ’s conk to be a success or not , but I can watch this again . And the rest of them I could n’t watch again . Some [ of my movies ] I could n’t see the first clock time . ” He allege Sommers is just buy at the completed film around , for a possible dismissal this wintertime : “ They ’re making the distribution pot as we speak . ”
Meanwhile , Koontz says he ’s in discussions about a telecasting serial ground on his Frankenstein novels , co - written with Kevin J. Anderson . They ’re “ down to the last small affair about the contract . I ca n’t peach about it until it ’s real . But it is Hollywood , you never know if it ’s real , even after you ’ve signed . But I think it is real , there are some very credible people involved . ” He does n’t consider he ’ll do any more Frankenstein novel , but there are great writers and producers attached to the serial publication , so he has some faith that it will actually be close to the source material .
Frankenstein actually pop out out as a TV lurch , which started as a one - 60 minutes pilot and then got expanded to two 60 minutes — and then Koontz understand his producing mate had a very dissimilar order of business than he did , so he take on his name off it . But in the end , he take in his estimation in book manakin .
The Future of Odd Thomas
Next week come across the releaseof Odd Interlude , a three - part novella being free in east - Bible form . ( We publish an exclusive excerpt , which you could readhere . ) At 65,000 parole , it ’s actually too long to be a novella — and it ’s about as long as a lot of factual novel . “ I adjudicate it has to be , in gist , a novel . ”
https://gizmodo.com/an-exclusive-first-look-at-dean-koontzs-new-odd-thomas-5915651
In Odd Interlude , Odd and Annamaria are on the road and they play a service post and series of cottages called Harmony Corner . As usual with Odd , he hump where he has to go , and so he start out investigating Harmony Corner and discovers that “ something very terrible is going on . ” remarkably for this series , it ’s not supernatural at all — it ’s “ a bit more science fictional . ” The e - book format , and the middling shorter duration , grant Koontz the ability to do things he would n’t normally do , something he launch previously when he wrote an e - volume - only novella called Bloom a while back .
And then the fifth book , Odd Apocalypse , comes out in July . Koontz says h
due east always saw this series as a six- or seven - book series , and now he ’s sure it ’ll be seven record book — and he get laid how the seventh ends . “ Each footmark of it raises the stake and it all starts accelerating , book by book . I once said I would never write a serial publication that this one came to me in such an amazing mode that once I ’d terminate the first book I knew I was going to . And it ’s only taken me several years to figure out how many volumes , but I think it ’s going to be seven . ” The sixth record is called Deeply Odd and the seventh is Saint Odd , “ but that might not mean what people mean it think . ”
The idea of Odd Thomas come to Koontz while he was work on a wholly different novel — all of a sudden , the opening stock of Odd Thomas pop out into his mind , out of nowhere . “ I realized that had nothing to do with this novel , and I wrote them down . I started pen by manus , which I ’ve never done before or since , and I wrote out the whole first chapter . ” bestow Koontz : “ When something come to you like that , you know , ‘ Okay , this is totally dissimilar , and some people wo n’t realise it . But a circumstances of people will , and they ’ll like that divergence . ’ And you just go with it . ”
Koontz says he commonly received about 10,000 letters a year about his Holy Writ — but when Odd Thomas came out , that numeral soared to 50,000 letter about that Good Book in a single year . Something about that character and his ability to verbalize with “ the lingering dead ” — and what he does about it — resonated with people .
And meanwhile Koontz says he ’s also working on a non - Odd Thomas record book , which came to him in a dream :
I ’m shape on a affair that I ca n’t tattle about the idea , because it ’s so unusual . People always enquire you in a Holy Scripture signing , “ I bet you get a lot of beneficial ideas from dreams . And over the years , I ’ve suppose “ No , I ’ve never ever gotten an estimation from a dreaming . ” And then here now about three weeks ago , I abruptly sat straight up in seam out of a dream . And in the dream , I will not say who , but I was having lunch with a renowned utter author , and he was talking about his unexampled Holy Scripture that was out , and how successful it was , and I was enjoin him how much I liked the Christian Bible . And we were talk about the book at lunch , and it was a very bright ambition and as we were babble about the book , I would see scenes of it in my head . And I waken up , sit straight up in bed , and said , “ I ’ve got a whole novel in my heading . ”
I ’ve sort of , as a secondary thing , started to write it on the side . And I really am liking it . I think I ’ll have to commit it to this writer . But since he ’s dead , he ca n’t action me for plagiarism . This is n’t anyone I ’ve ever known , and have n’t think about in 15 old age . So it was a very very strange experience . But I guess , “ Well , the mind is good . Wherever it come from , I ’m going to have to approach that . ”
He says he ’s not write it in the style of this famous beat author , but rather indite it in his own style — just using the theme that he got from the drained author in his dream .
Koontz on Writing
Koontz order he grew up reading nothing but science fiction — peculiarly Heinlein , Bradbury and Sturgeon . “ We were a very pathetic family , and my dada was a fierce soaker , and it was a house that you wanted to escape if you lived there . And the greatest escape was going completely elsewhere . Other humankind , or our man in the futurity . What Sturgeon did so bright was introduce a phone number of strange and creepy-crawly elements into dissimilar setting : Bianca ’s Hands . Most all of his famous stories — or a lot of them — take shoes now , but something very unusual enters the picture . So I ’m sure that he had a great deal of influence on me that way . ”
When he started writing professionally , he naturally veered towards writing science fiction — his first novel were purely SF . Then he started branching out into unlike genre , and “ after I did that for a little while , I found that I wanted to create hybrid — what ’s now predict mash - ups , essentially . ” He defines his canonical approach , since the recent seventies , is to create books that sense like mainstream novel but have “ elements of the fantastic ” — although not all of his books have those elements .
Koontz firmly believe that no genre is superior to any other — whether you ’re talk about SF or the genre known as literary fiction — and the best writing in any musical genre is adequate to the honorable composition any other . tote up fantastical component to otherwise realistic writing “ does give it a heightened sense of hyper - realism that , if you work it justly , is very affecting and interesting . ”
And Koontz has resist having the “ repugnance ” label stick on his Book , because he hate labels generally and experience as though not all of his work contains horror elements at all . He ’s constantly march heads with publisher — not his current publisher , he ’s well-chosen to describe — who require him to fit more closely into a genre box :
I ’ve had publishers tell me , “ You ca n’t do that . You ca n’t mix in humor in a suspense piece . You ca n’t introduce science fiction into a suspense objet d’art . You ca n’t introduce science fabrication and humor into a suspense piece . ” There ’s all these rules of publishing that I do n’t cerebrate anybody ’s ever think through . And I just started , many year ago , saying , “ I do n’t manage . I have to toy with me first , and I have a low ennui threshold . ” I spell what I desire to write , and I go for the public go along with it , because I can not do anything else . I could n’t do plumbing , for instance , because I am totally incapable at anything requiring cock . You do what you ’re really enthusiastic about doing . And reader react to it , if they lie with your ticker ’s in it .
Since Koontz mentioned having a low boredom threshold , we want to need him how that affects his writing style . And he react : “ It for certain makes me really witting of pace . There ’s no rationality at all why a book ca n’t be as serious as anything else , but also fast paced . I ’m well aware of that . Although I do n’t particularly write tight . I pen one page over and over again , sometimes 20 prison term , sometimes more , before I move on to the next . And so I inch my way through the outgrowth , like an [ inaudible ] built by a lick of dead creatures . So for me , I ’m with a story very intently , page by Sir Frederick Handley Page . ”
He seldom gets blase with what he ’s writing — although if he gets bored with something in the first chapter , or the part are n’t coming together on the page , then he ’ll throw it away . “ unspoiled to do it earlier than later on . ” This usually means that the nonrational part of his author brain is telling him “ this wo n’t work . ” Fortunately , he say he does n’t have too many of those sort of discard .
We asked Koontz the vainglorious mistake people make in trying to break into supernatural fable or other speculative fable , and he responded : “ The big one is probably calculate around and scoping the market . Do n’t think about what ’s selling . ” People see lamia book selling like hotcakes and call back the way to become successful is to compose yet another vampire volume . “ Vampires have always been spicy . But that does n’t think you have to write vampire . I would always take it to trust that if I started publish about lamia , that ’s exactly when they would go cold . ”
repulsion fable , in general , has never come back from its summit , because publishers put out so many horror books in such a short time . “ When something becomes very popular , you get just a immense amount of it . And any time you get a huge amount of anything , a Brobdingnagian amount of the Brobdingnagian amount is n’t great . ” And that turns multitude off , sometimes forever and a day .
Instead , Koontz advise writers : “ Think about what you may do that ’s different , and yet is within those genre . That takes a little more movement … try out to come up with ideas that nobody ’s done before . Or if they ’ve done them , they have n’t done them in the same way . ” You ’ll know you ’ve bring home the bacon when you get the form of varsity letter Koontz find in the mail , saying thing like , “ ‘ You must have a freaky weird interior mind . ’ I ’m about as cuddly and normal as you could get . But yeah , just let the idea go , sometimes you’re able to be sandbag at what comes into it . ”
Odd Interlude Part 1comes out next hebdomad . And Odd Apocalypseis out in July .
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