There was this dark spacious intersection in Campbell, CA. It was nothing very remarkable. The asphalt was dull with dull yellow and white painted stripes It was a grimy area, near a creek. The large unsuccessful liquor store by it was faltering, its Ethiopian owner stooping to selling cigs to kids. It was quite a grimy area. The laundry mat was old and run-down. A tasty but crummy looking Chinese joint was there too. And the lights took forever too. Hamilton and San Thomas were not a pretty site.
People zoomed by this place in their fancy cars on their way to work at Ebay or Netflix. Since it was near highway 17 which connected to all the other highways in the area. Basically this area was spread out, so hardly anyone walked. There were a few bicyclists every once in a while. One day a young gay black disabled man named Robert set out in his Quickie power wheel chair to head to his medical appointment. Robert had muscular dystrophy or something like that, and it caused him to drool. That didn’t stop him from taking weight lifting classes at De Anza or from wanting to do martial arts. He was a really cheerful and uplifting guy to know. Anyhow the sun was starting to set, and there was quite a glare in the sky, especially with all the summer pollution up above. Robert pulled up into the crosswalk, wrongly assuming the monster SUV would stop for the right turn on red. Needless to say the SUV plowed through him at full-speed, fully accelerating through the impact – and never looking back. And they were blasting horrible sounding rap music with the bass turned up, while leaving a trail of lifeless bones and blood in the street behind their vehicle.
Robert had a fairly small tightly knit group of friends, all of which attended the funeral. Malcolm’s gay lover was in shock and jumped on the coffin as it lowered at the funeral. His mom passed out drunk in the limo. And the priest had gas and did a lousy sermon. But luckily Robert had one kinda chubby brown haired nerd friend named Chuck from back in the day who had gotten very much into voodoo. He had been interested in voodoo ever since he was very young and read the Harvard professors book called Serpent and the Rainbow. He went to Haiti himself while in college and had learned the black arts himself.
Chuck was irate and disturbed that the SUV driver fled and was not caught after mauling Malcolm. He had immediately gone to the crime scene (intersection) and took what he could find in terms of wheelchair and bone/blood frags. There were some chips of paint from where the car had hit, and he saved those too . He set them up at his black voodoo altar in his man-cave. And lit candles all around the room in a hexagon. He went into his herb jars and grabbed poppies, scorpion tails, beetles, and other strange ingredients and ground them into a potion. He had a new Quickie wheelchair that he ordered from Amazon Prime. So he sprinkled the potion on the wheelchair. Next, he did some Latin chants (basically about seeking revenge for his homie) and made a blood offering. Finally, he poured out a Mickey’s 40oz malt liquor over Malcolm’s old high school yearbook. Suddenly the windows flew open, and there was loud banging on all the walls. His blunt lit itself on fire, while shit started flying everywhere. The Ouija Board he had on the table in the corner started to spell something. It said:
I AM GOING TO KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER WHO RAN ME OVER!!!
Suddenly Robert’s Quickie 5000 wheelchair miraculously transmutated and reconstituted itself from small fragments into its original condition. But it didn’t stop there. It was shiny and mean looking now, and it had hydrolics and started bouncing. The arm rest and siding now had custom detailing saying “Made In Hell” with flames and skulls and dice emanating from it. Its wheels grew to epic proportions- more than eight feet high each! And the damned thing even had hubs with sharp Swiss-made blades sticking out more than 8 inches each. The cushion of the chair was also enormous, and it glowed angrily like a hot coal in a fire. Under the seat were a set of demon teeth, larger than those of any great white shark. And the battery was now the size of a large jet engine’s. The exhaust pipe have out a thick, putrid neon-green cloud of smoke, like that color from Maximum Overdrive. The wheelchair grew so large and tall that it burst through the roof, and squashed all the furniture. Then it loudly set out into the night to seek revenge.
“Saint Odd,” Dean Koontz’s final installment in his best-selling Odd Thomas series, is the perfect book for those of us who hate bloodthirsty Satanists. Odd Thomas, a fry cook with supernatural powers, is a refreshingly homespun protagonist who maintains an aw-shucks demeanor even as he blows away bad guys. Koontz used to be a Stephen King imitator, but in this series he has found a fresh voice and gives us a likeable albeit very bloody tale. I have not been keeping up with his recent books, but clearly I underestimated him and he is a better writer than I thought. I recommend this book to all horror fans. Also it was weird that the actor who played him in the film version of this recently died that bizarre accident where his own car pinned him to the wall. That’s weird since he is psychic in this series and has a somewhat bad fate in the book as well. -CoolAC