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The Protagonist
He can see dead people and creatures he calls "bodachs" which signify a dark event coming.
He is currently staying as a guest in the monastery so he can get away from his life in his hometown of Pico Mundo.
He is very witty. He finds himself drawn to the places where he is needed, which led him to the monastery. He hates guns ever since his abusive mother made him look down the barrel of one. While he is not incapable of lying, he is very bad at it. This makes it hard for him to investigate without arousing suspicion from the monks.
The picture is from the movie version of the first book.
"God has many reasons to love you, Oddie, but for certain He loves you because you are such an inexperienced and incompetent liar" (Koontz 36).

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The picture is of a jacket like the one he is said to wear.
Rodion is another guest at the monastery. Odd does not trust him because of how generally suspicious he looks, but still talks to him to try and figure out what he knows. After conversing with him during the book he decides that even if he doesn't trust Rodion, they need to work together. Near the end, Rodion is revealed to be an NSA agent who is investigating one of the brothers at the monastery: Brother John.
Odd describes him as "Bearish, glowering so hard that his bushy eyebrows knitted together, he spoke with a faint accent" (Koontz 113).

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While Odd was waiting for snowfall to start, he saw a Bodach (which signifies a bad event usually involving multiple deaths) roaming around. He decided to follow it to investigate and saw that it was lurking around the school looking at the children. This concerns him and so he goes around the school looking for anything bad that may be about to happen. While traversing the library, he trips over a dead monks body. He is then hit in the shoulder with a club, and quickly runs away. The next morning, Brother Timothy is announced missing. Odd believes Rodion Romanovich, the other guest at the abbey, is somehow involved. As Odd is investigating, he sees a creature in the snow, that he describes as a kaleidoscope of bones (I will be referring to it as "Uberskeleton"). Eventually he finds Timothy's body again underneath the school, and it turns into one of the Uberskeletons. There is a blizzard outside now that prevents travel between the school and abbey. Odd decides that he and Rodion must use some of the schools high-powered SUV's to bring some Brothers from the abbey to the school, to protect the children. As they are on their way back, An Uberskeleton attacks and tips over the first SUV. The Brother driving the second rams into the Uberskeleton and destroys it. As the Brothers set up defenses, Odd and Rodion figure out that somehow Brother John is behind it. They go to his lab and confront him. They learn that he has created a perfect environment to enable him to create life from his thoughts. The Uberskeletons were a subconscious creation that he made to attack his son Jacob, who lives at the school and is considered a failure to Brother John (this is what inspired the picture i chose). Rodion, who was an undercover NSA agent, shoots John. This destroys all the Uberskeletons, but not before one kills Brother Maxwell at the school. Odd ends the book on his way home to Pico Mundo, but takes a detour to whatever his next adventure is.

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An esteemed physicist. He had an enormous fortune. One day he quietly donated all of his money to the monastery and joined it as a brother. A decent amount of money was used to build him a lab underneath the monastery where he could continue working on his experiments.
"Newspapers referred to him as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" (Koontz 46).
He is described as tall and broad shouldered. I imagined him having blond hair. His eyes are violet. All of the Brothers wear black robes, like the picture above.
Near the end of the book, it is revealed that he has created his room to enhance his brain waves. He shows that he has learned how to create life through the power of thought. As his creations attack Odd and the school, he is killed by Rodion. When he dies, all of his creations disintegrate.
Even though he is the main antagonist, he is only in the book at the very beginning and the very end and very rarely mentioned throughout the middle.

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A possible theme for this book is that 'you cannot hide from your responsibilities forever.' Odd runs away to the monastery so that he won't have to worry about his powers. Even at the monastery, destiny comes, and he is forced to help investigate. "My months of peace and contemplation were at its end. The demands of my gift, the silent but insistent pleas of the lingering dead, the terrible losses that i had not been able to prevent: these things had driven me to the seclusion of [the abbey]," (Koontz 30).

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I loved this book. I think this is the best book in the series so far. 5/5.
I don't have a specific favorite part, but most of Odd's interactions with Rodion are very fun. The most fun of those is probably when Odd realizes that Brother John was the killer.
My least favorite part is the end of the book. I just think that the book was too big to be wrapped up in 5-10 pages. I think it would've been better with a longer wrap up.

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I think a theme could be 'You cannot be a completely new person.' Brother John tries to be a better man than he used to be, and calls himself a new man. But as we see from the hatred he harbors for Jacob, he cannot be a new man. "The man you were is still inside the man you are, and he had his own motivations," (Koontz 401).

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The setting is a monastery called St. Bartholomew's Abbey. It is placed on the California side of Sierra Nevada. As the book starts, snow is just starting to fall. A majority of the book is set during a blizzard, which makes it hard for the characters to travel outside. It is also surrounded by forest, "The primeval forests that clothed the rising slopes were themselves cloaked in darkness" (Koontz 2).
The monastery has two buildings. The new Abbey, which has the guesthouse where Odd is staying, and the old abbey, which has been refashioned into a school for the disabled.