Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas #6) by Dean Koontz

Koontz returns to writing about a character he clearly has deep affection for in his sixth Odd Thomas book.  You don't need to have read the previous five to enjoy Deeply Odd but it does work with them.

Odd wakes to the sound of a motionless bell ringing, a bell worn around his neck that summons him to fulfil whatever task awaits him.  He leaves his unconventional household, the mysterious Annamaria who has appeared heavily pregnant for many years, the deathless child Tim rescued in Odd's previous outing Odd Apocalypse, and two dogs, a golden retriever named Rapunzel and Boo, a ghost German shepherd.  Walking downtown to buy jeans and socks he is drawn to a large truck and a confrontation with its rhinestone clad owner.  Odd receives a terrible vision that this sinister man will shortly murder three young children by immolating them and knows he has to stop him.  Cue a pursuit across the deserts of America with Mrs Edie Fisher, a mysterious old lady in a limousine, the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock, monsters and 17 children in desperate peril.

Yet behind all this Odd senses a larger purpose looming, there are glimpses of an apocalyptic second reality lying alongside our own, a sense that the story arc of the Odd Thomas books is coming to a crisis, and there is, as ever in Koontz, horror and hope.

I enjoyed the humour, Odd is who he is because of his humility, his sense of humour and his faith in his beloved girlfriend Stormy, dead 18 months, and the world beyond our own that she has gone to ahead of him.

Powerful, not just for teenagers

Li Lan is a 17 year old girl living with her father in 1890s Malaya, her family was once prosperous but is now impoverished and they live quietly.  They are part of the stratified expatriate Chinese community living in Malacca, it is a society of gestures and manners, of honour and reputation. 

Li Lan's father tells her he has received an offer of marriage for her to Lim Tian Ching, son of the wealthy Lim family.  However, this is a ghost marriage, Lim

Tian Ching recently died and although unusual it is not unknown, the bride of such a union has a place in her bridegroom's household and that of the Lim's offers her a luxurious life and security that her father cannot.  Summoned by Lim Tian Ching's mother she is drawn to his cousin Tian Bai.  Trying to gain sleep and rest from dreams in which she is plagued by Lim Tian Ching's spirit she accidentally overdoses on powerful herbs and pitches herself into the hinterland between life and death.  Comotose in the living world her spirit embarks on a journey to the Chinese underworld where status is conferred by the funeral offerings familes make for their ancestors and she has to find a way to defeat the forces pitted against her. 

Li Lan's story is a mythic one and infused with a strongly communicated sense of what life would be like for a 17 year old girl in Malacca in the 1890s, intelligent, determined, loving, but bound by strict courtly rules.  The supernatural elements concerning the Chinese afterlife are convincing and seem well researched.  I really enjoyed it, a well written book.

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Cas Lowood is no ordinary teenage boy, with his mother he moves from town to town locating and dispatching the restless dead.  Usually ghosts cannot hurt people but these ghosts are an exception, more than touch they can kill.  Cas comes to Thunder Bay, Ontario to confront the most famous of these creatures, the spirit of a girl called Anna who has killed anyone who stepped into her home.  But as Cas begins yet another high school and encounters Anna after being trapped in her house by the local jocks she fails, for the first time, to kill.  Cas is drawn into the reasons why Anna is where and what she is, and the mystery of the creature that killed his own father and passed the role of ghost killer on to him.

A good fast read, about teenage concerns as well as supernatural ones, starting a new school, being an outsider.