Odd Man Out

A decision made by a man’s local church sends him deep into a dark memory he had been desperate to bury. It had been a summer from his youth, a reunion with an old friend in a setting that should have been idyllic. But fell far short because of a secret revealed and a night of violence that ruined every life it touched.

Author James Newman was previously known to me from the novella “Ride or Die”. Which I found to be a great read, in spite of a few niggles I felt about the story, and this novella – Odd Man Out – bears many similarities in its approach to that previous work.

James Newman is an author who obviously strives to create a tale that transcends the superficiality of horror literature, attempting to imbibe his characters with depth that is not as common as it should be in the genre. Both Ride or Die and Odd Man Out both manage to create memorable characters in situations that feel well rounded and real. The characters are often driven by their own flaws – both of character and judgement – and the stories revolve around the chaos those flaws produce.

Any interested reader could read my previous review for Ride or Die and a great deal of what I said concerning that story would also fit for Odd Man Out. Much of what I could say would be positive as Newman is a good writer and easily holds the reader's interest, even when dealing with stories that tread quite familiar ground, which Odd Man Out does.

There are a few things that have been included that did leave me a little confused, however. We are told several times that the kids are there to evaluate the summer camp, presumably to drive future business. This seemed a strange thing to include in light of the events of the story.

It would seem to me that – as this is a kind of promotional event – the children would be excessively supervised, so as to get the best feedback possible, rather than leave them to degrade into a Lord of the Flies situation. The addition of this idea weakened my belief in the story while it seemed to add nothing of value. The “why’s” of the summer camp seemed superfluous, we never needed to know why the kids of Friday the 13th went to summer camp to appreciate what happened to them when they arrived, and the case seemed the same here.

This odd little addition notwithstanding the story follows a logical series of events that culminates in a final night that is truly gruesome and unpleasant. The story is a good one, it leaves the reader to predict enough of what is coming to create a sense of dread.

As with Ride or Die, I did feel that Odd Man Out overstayed its welcome a little, and in the epilogue the author goes on to explain the moral of the story far more than I would have. This adds what I can only think of as a wedge of activism into the literature that I didn’t think was needed. I am moved far greater by stories that allow me to come to my own conclusions regarding the morality of the tale than I am by an author explaining them to me. I don’t think it serves an author or the tale they present as it telegraphs that the author is either not confident in their ability to effectively shape their moral arc, or they are not confident in their readers ability to understand it, and neither are attractive prospects.

A good author – a category which I think includes James Newman – really doesn’t need to do this, as their story is more than capable of guiding the reader on its own.

In spite of my grumblings, I think that Odd Man Out presents a 2 for 2 alongside Ride or Die, and I hope that the third one I read from the same author follows the trend. If you haven’t read anything by this author, and anything I have written here intrigues you about this (or Ride or Die) then you should give one of his stories a go.

One final word before I let you get on with something more interesting. The narrator Curtis Michael Holland does an admirable job with the audiobook version of the tale. Though most of the story is told first person, with any voices presented as being “in memory” of the event, he does a respectable job with the emotional core of the story. This might sound like “damning with faint praise” but – on the contrary – Odd Man Out is the kind of story that would benefit from a low-key approach, and Curtis Michael Holland seemed to understand this. It would have been easy for a less clued-in narrator to turn such a tale into something exploitative, which never happens, and this keeps true to a story that contains real gravity.

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