In true Dean Koontz fashion, he spins the thriller genre on its head. Koontz adds a blend of paranormal mystery to the traditional thriller style.
Normally thrillers all have the same feel to them. They are written in an episodic fashion where you can pick up any book in the series and read it mostly understanding everything.  But Koontz does a lot differently.
Odd Thomas is a man who can see ghosts. In the town of Pico Mundo, Odd helps the chief of police solve murders. But when a man name Fungus Bob Robertson enters his life, Odd is convinced that the town is in danger of mass destruction.
Koontz writes the novel in a way of making the reader forget that they are reading fiction. It reads almost like a memoir. Characters are introduced where the reader feels like they intimately knows them and cares about them.
Like most thrillers, a person going in to this novel would not expect it to be a deep story. Thrillers are generally mindless fun. But this brought tears from the sadness that read like poetry.