There’s no nice way to say it:  I can’t recall when I’ve enjoyed manga less than this effort from Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan.  Admittedly, I don’t come to this stand-alone single volume as a reader who’s already familiar with Koontz’s series character Odd Thomas… but should that really make a difference?  True, I might have mentally fleshed out some of the threadbare characterization with prior knowledge, but this book strikes me as sub-par on so many levels that I doubt that would have made a difference.  Positioned as an occult-crime thriller by a horror writer, In Odd We Trust neither thrills nor horrifies.  Not even for short stretches.

While the premise of having a character see dead people is hardly original, it still seems that a lot could be done with the idea.  Yet instead of interesting riffs on the protagonist’s superhuman abilities we get an uninspired combination of Scooby Doo and The Sixth Sense—no, make that The Ghost Whisperer.  And that’s just in terms of the paranormal elements.  As a work of detective fiction, Koontz and co-writer Chan pretty much roll out every cliché you could imagine.  Sadly, there’s a total absence of tension in the narrative, and please just forget about being surprised.

  In fact, halfway through the story (spoiler alert), our fry cook hero simply guesses that the killer is “nearby… watching our reactions,” adding, “He’s toying with his victims—” So what does Tommy do?  He just kind of glances around, spots a suspicious van, and proceeds to open the (unlocked) back doors—and then presto:  there’s the killer!

I kept reading in the hopes that there was some huge twist coming, but all the creators did was subject me to more sub-Whedonesque “cute” banter.  I guess I also kept reading because of Dean Koontz’s name—it certainly wasn’t because of Queenie Chan’s art.  The character’s faces, especially the men’s with their strangely cylindrical shape, often seem like they’re hewn from wood blocks by a dull knife.  And that wouldn’t matter so much except that In Odd We Trust often feels like a non-stop parade of talking heads.  Go ahead and do a flip-test:  see for yourself how much of the book consists of the characters simply standing around and chewing the fat.  There’s so little dynamism to the figures and to the storytelling itself that the experience is like watching a bunch of wax museum statues revolving slowly on a Lazy Susan.

Again, if the dialogue sparkled we probably wouldn’t mind such a gabfest or the overall lack of action and atmosphere on hand here.  Want a sample?  Here’s some text quoted verbatim:

“Ready to break and enter?”
“Got my magnum—and I don’t mean of champagne.”
“…I don’t think you need a gun for this.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have a tactical nuclear device.”
“Hey, wait, that guy in the van last night—are you going to his house?
“We’re interested in interior design.”
“…and evidence to link him to Joey’s murder.”
“This isn’t good.  In fact, it’s stupid.”

On that note…