ABOUT THE CREATORS

      DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Gerda, in Southern California.

      QUEENIE CHAN was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to Australia when she was six years old. She is the creator of the mystery-horror graphic novel series The Dreaming and illustrated two graphic novels based on Dean Koontz’s character Odd Thomas. She provided art for the Boy’s Book of Positive Quotations by Steve Deger and draws a number of online comic strips on her personal website: www.queeniechan.com

      FRED VAN LENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of Incredible Hercules (with Greg Pak) and three entries in the Marvel Zombies series, as well as the American Library Association award-winning Action Philosophers. His original graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens (co-written with Andrew Foley) is being adapted into motion picture form by Dreamworks and Universal. Visit his website at www.fredvanlente.com

      An Excerpt from Forever Odd

      Odd’s adventures continue in a series of full-length novels by Dean Koontz. The first novel is Odd Thomas, which was excerpted in the graphic novel In Odd We Trust. Here you can read a sample chapter of Forever Odd, second in the series. When a childhood friend disappears, Odd discovers something worse than a dead body…and embarks on a heart-stopping battle of will and wits with an enemy of exceptional cunning.

      ONE

      WAKING, I HEARD A WARM WIND STRUMMING the loose screen at the open window, and I thought Stormy, but it was not.

      The desert air smelled faintly of roses, which were not in bloom, and of dust, which in the Mojave flourishes twelve months of the year.

      Precipitation falls on the town of Pico Mundo only during our brief winter. This mild February night was not, however, sweetened by the scent of rain.

      I hoped to hear the fading rumble of thunder. If a peal had awakened me, it must have been thunder in a dream.

      Holding my breath, I lay listening to the silence, and felt the silence listening to me.

      The nightstand clock painted glowing numbers on the gloom—2:41 A.M.

      For a moment I considered remaining in bed. But these days I do not sleep as well as I did when I was young. I am twenty-one and much older than when I was twenty.

      Certain that I had company, expecting to find two Elvises watching over me, one with a cocky smile and one with sad concern, I sat up and switched on the lamp.

      A single Elvis stood in a corner: a life-size cardboard figure that had been part of a theater-lobby display for Blue Hawaii. In a Hawaiian shirt and a lei, he looked self-confident and happy.

      Back in 1961, he’d had much to be happy about. Blue Hawaii was a hit film, and the album went to number one. He had six gold records that year, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and he was falling in love with Priscilla Beaulieu.

      Less happily, at the insistence of his manager, Tom Parker, he had turned down the lead in West Side Story in favor of mediocre movie fare like Follow That Dream. Gladys Presley, his beloved mother, had been dead three years, and still he felt the loss of her, acutely. Only twenty-six, he’d begun to have weight problems.

      Cardboard Elvis smiles eternally, forever young, incapable of error or regret, untouched by grief, a stranger to despair.