The Taking [Hardcover]

Dean Koontz (Author)

Book Description

Series: Koontz, Dean R. | Publication Date: May 25, 2004

In one of the most dazzling books of his celebrated career, Dean Koontz delivers a masterwork of page-turning suspense that surpasses even his own inimitable reputation as a chronicler of our worst fears—and best dreams. In The Taking he tells the story of a community cut off from a world under siege, and the terrifying battle for survival waged by a young couple and their neighbors as familiar streets become fog-shrouded death traps. Gripping, heartbreaking, and triumphant in the face of mankind’s darkest hour, here is a small-town slice-of-doomsday thriller that strikes to the core of each of us to ask: What would you do in the midst of The Taking.

On the morning that will mark the end of the world they have known, Molly and Niel Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain on their roof. It has haunted their sleep, invaded their dreams, and now they rise to find a luminous silvery downpour drenching their small California mountain town. A strange scent hangs faintly in the air, and the young couple cannot shake the sense of something wrong.

As hours pass and the rain continues to fall, Molly and Niel listen to disturbing news of extreme weather phenomena across the globe. Before evening, their little town loses television and radio reception. Then telephone and the Internet are gone. With the ceaseless rain now comes an obscuring fog that transforms the once-friendly village into a ghostly labyrinth. By nightfall the Sloans have gathered with some of their neighbors to deal with community damage...but also because they feel the need to band together against some unknown threat, some enemy they cannot identify or even imagine.

In the night, strange noises arise, and at a distance, in the rain and the mist, mysterious lights are seen drifting among the trees. The rain diminishes with the dawn, but a moody gray-purple twilight prevails. Soon Molly, Niel, and their small band of friends will be forced to draw on reserves of strength, courage, and humanity they never knew they had. For within the misty gloom they will encounter something that reveals in a terrifying instant what is happening to their world—something that is hunting them with ruthless efficiency. Epic in scope, searingly intimate and immediate in perspective, The Taking is an adventure story like no other, a relentless roller-coaster read that brings apocalypse to Main Street and showcases the talents of one of our most original and mesmerizing novelists at the pinnacle of his powers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1975, the now defunct Laser Books issued Invasion by Aaron Wolfe, aka Koontz (who later expanded that novel into Winter Moon, 1994), a breakneck tale of alien invasion centered on an isolated farm. Koontz's new novel also concerns alien invasion, and a comparison of the two books offers insight into the evolution of this megaselling author's work. Invasion was mostly speed and suspense—a brilliant if superficial exercise in terror. The new novel also features abundant suspense, as a couple in an isolated California home endure a phosphorescent rain and learn that, around the world, something is attacking humans and laying waste to communications. It's only when they drive to a nearby town that they learn of a global alien invasion; the tension ratchets as a weird fog descends and the aliens not only manifest physically but animate the dead. For years, however, Koontz has aimed at more than just thrills; today he is a novelist of metaphysics and moral reflection. His aliens are inherently evil as well as scary; standing against them are the human capacity for hope and the forces of goodness and innocence (here, as elsewhere, embodied in dogs), and near novel's end Koontz puts an overtly religious spin on his tale. Koontz's language has changed over the years, too, and not always for the better. While his care with words engenders admiration, his love of metaphor and alliteration can slow down the reading ("the luminous nature of the torrents that tinseled the forest and silvered the ground"). Also missing here is the wonderful humor that elevated his last novel, Odd Thomas, and some other recent work. Koontz remains one of the most fascinating of contemporary popular novelists, and this stands as an important effort, but not his best, though its sincerity and passion can't be denied.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A glowing rain begins falling at one a.m. in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, where productive but hardly best-selling novelist Molly Sloan and her ex-priest husband, Neil, live outside a small town. Besides being luminous, the downpour smells like rancid semen, Molly thinks, and it brings with it a feeling of oppression. Animals cower from it, as Molly grasps when she sees a pack of coyotes huddling on the porch. The little wolves seem to be appealing to her for help, and when she walks out to them, they seem to expect her to lead them. She goes to wake Neil, rescuing him from a nightmare, and to wash--no, scour--her hands where the rain hit them. The torrent continues, taking out the power, but then appliances come on spontaneously, and the hands of clocks run wildly in opposite directions. The Sloans conclude they must leave after an interior mirror reflects the house as invaded by ghastly vegetation--but doesn't reflect them at all. Opening sequences come no creepier than this one, and the rest of Koontz's version of the extraterrestrial attack scenario so well lives up to it that the revelation, painstakingly apprehended by Molly, of who the aliens really are comes as no surprise. Nor do Koontz's authorial insertions about modernity and social degeneracy seem anything but explanatory in the context of this gripping, blood-curdling, thought-provoking parable. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; 1ST edition (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055380250X
• ISBN-13: 978-0553802504
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (568 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #344,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born and raised in Pennsylvania where I graduated from Shippensburg State College (now Shippensburg University). When I was a senior in college, I won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition and have been writing ever since. My first job after graduation was with the Appalachian Poverty Program, where I was expected to counsel and tutor underprivileged children on a one-to-one basis. During my first day on the job, I discovered that the previous occupier of my position had been beaten up by the very kids he had been trying to help and had landed in the hospital for several weeks. The following year was filled with challenge but also tension, and I was more highly motivated than ever to build a career as a writer. I wrote nights and weekends, which I continued to do after leaving the poverty program and going to work as an English teacher in a suburban school district outside Harrisburg. After a year and a half in that position, my wife, Gerda, made me an offer I couldn't refuse: "I'll support you for five years," she said, "and if you can't make it as a writer in that time, you'll never make it." By the end of those five years, Gerda had quit her job to run the business end of my writing career. Gerda and I, along with our dog, Trixie, live in southern California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Prepare to lose sleep, May 25, 2004

By 

Brian Reaves (Anniston, AL USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Taking (Hardcover)

I have been anxiously awaiting this book since first reading about it months ago. When I got it yesterday, I devoured it. The first 100 pages give you no let up at all. You can literally feel the end of the world approaching as an evil, foul-smelling rain descends on Molly and Neil's house. What awaits her on the porch and in the garage gives you more of a sense of dread than if actual razor-toothed gremlins were staring up at her. The peace and calm exhibited from everything in this scene of destruction makes it that much more powerful. For the first half of the book, you have several possible answers thrown at you. An emergency broadcast from the space station will give you literal chills.

The only thing I didn't enjoy was the ending. As the culprits of this destruction are unveiled, it loses some momentum. While the answer makes sense, you start to lose that sense of "something's out there waiting for me". Instead, you sort of keep watching from a sense of macabre interest--sort of like driving by a car wreck slowly. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of surprises and suspense thrown in, but I think the book would have been much more powerful if we'd been left in the dark just a little longer. The feeling of defeat and utter hopelessness doesn't let up, but the overall fear and dread die away as the revelations come in.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with this story though. Highly recommended.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Work by Koontz!, January 18, 2009

By 

Gregshock "Rowdyridleybear" (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Taking (Mass Market Paperback)

I think the almost perfect dichotomy in the ratings for this book is telling. As of January of 2009 there are 220-4&5 star ratings and 201-1&2 star ratings. An almost equal level of love and hate for this book. This seems very unusual.

As for myself, I loved this book. I'm a Koontz fan, so you might expect me to like another of his excellent novels, but there really is a great deal to like about this story. The story itself is an alein invasion story, but not your average, overdone nasty outerspace invaders type of tale. This one is done with a twist that I haven't seen done this way before, although I'll admit to not having read a great deal of Sci-Fi. Koontz admits in a podcast that I've listened to that his inspiration for the story came from Arthur C. Clarke, who suggested that alein technology from an advanced civilization might seem somehow supernatural to us. Koontz wondered about turning ACC's idea on it's head and suggesting that a supernatural invasion might seem like advanced technology to people in a society who don't believe in magic anymore. To people who only believe in science and the material world. I found this concept fascinating and Koontz's execution of it very well done.

I appreciate his use of metaphor and simile. His prose is vivid and often poetic and evokes such strong visual and auditory images in your mind as you read that you feel as if you are experiencing his created world first hand. His description of sights, sounds and smells become so real that one can feel the dark portent in the oppressive, driving rain, the bizarre behavior of the animals and the emotional response of his human characters. There is a scene early in the book where the main character, Molly, encounters a group of Coyotes in an uncharacteristic pack, frightened by the ominous falling rain onto her front porch. The description of this encounter is told so vividly and compellingly that it truly sets the tone for the otherworldiness of what is happening to the world around her. You can feel and appreciate her apprehension, her awe at being able to stand among these animals that, under ordinary circumstances, would turn on her in a heartbeat. It's a perfect scene to help set the mood of the story. And there are plenty more of them in the opening sequences of the book.

Another of the aspects of this novel that I enjoyed was DK's ability to express philosophy to the reader through the story and inner dialogue of characters. "During Molly's lifetime, architects had largely championed sterility, which is order bled of purpose, and celebrated power, which is meaning stripped of grace. By rejecting the fundamentals of the very civilization that made possible it's rise, modernism and it's philosophical stepchildren offered flash in place of genuine beauty, sensation in place of hope.... All of humanity's follies seemed worth embracing if that were the price to preserve everything beautiful in civilization. Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed."

There is one point to this novel that I didn't like much. In the early part and a bit more than halfway through the book, Koontz introduces some elements that are common to the average horror novel; grotesque beasts and walking-dead cadavers. I personally hate this kind of stuff, but I do understand what the author was trying to convey with these elements in his story. Satan always tries to mimic the perfection of God and wishes to create life where none exists, like God did, or raise the dead to walk again, as God will do in the future. But, all his efforts can only be abominations and grotesqueries, like the beasts and zombies in the book. So, even though I didn't personally like these elements, they certainly had a place in the story.

There is a very strong theme of Christian theology that runs through this novel and I think that is where the extreme dichotomy in ratings comes from. I personally believe that the many individuals who rated this book so poorly might consciously or unconsciously have a problem with the metaphysics of this story, not with the literary mechanics of the story itself. Not everyone, mind you, but it might explain the extreme spread in ratings. Those who agreed with the philosophical viewpoint, or those who just plain like Dean Koontz and his style would tend to rate it better. Even so, there is too much good writing that has to be ignored for the many one and two star ratings this book has received. And it just does not deserve so many low ratings.

In my opinion, this is an excellent novel. It is very well written, rich in metaphor and philosophical meaning, and at times very poetic. I found much of it a joy to read. At the very least, the plot and storyline always kept me interested and wanting to keep reading along. I found myself, as always in DK's novels, caring about the characters and their futures. And I love dogs as much as the author does, I'm sure, so any book with at least one dog in it merits high praise from me. This book had slews of them, so I was in literary heaven. Five Stars!!!

92 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Goes from good to bad, May 30, 2004

By 

Eileen Rieback (Coral Springs, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Taking (Hardcover)

When Molly Sloan awakens one night to the drumming of an oddly scented luminescent rain, she senses that something is off-kilter. The coyotes huddle frightened on her porch. She feels a disturbing presence moving past in the sky. When her husband Neil awakens with nightmares, the two of them watch news broadcasts about bizarre supernatural occurrences, shocking violence, and public panic that arise around the globe. It starts to look as if an alien invasion has begun. Then the power goes out. Molly and Neil join up with some of their neighbors, trying to identify what is happening and how to deal with the increasingly evil and omnipotent entity that appears to be taking over the planet. The townspeople splinter into factions, each with its own opinion on how to handle the crisis.

The story starts off with powerful mood-building imagery and with echoes of Koontz's "Strangers" and Stephen King's "The Stand" and "The Mist." Koontz then cranks up the suspense and horror as alien vegetation begins to invade the town, the residents are dispatched in gruesome and mysterious ways, and the dead come to life. Now the story segues into a Twilight Zone screenplay, as the supernatural and otherworldly occurrences increase. By the halfway point, Molly and Neil are now on a crusade to save the children at any cost, even though they wonder how anyone, adult or child, could survive this hellish new world order. When there are only 50 pages left to go in the story, I am wondering how Koontz could ever resolve the plot instead of leaving the reader hanging until a sequel. Then comes a disappointing ending that plays strongly on Koontz's increasing trend to use religion and hope in his books. Dogs feature prominently in this story, as they do in many of Koontz's books. However, the author's trademark sense of humor is conspicuously absent here.

To be fair, I give the first half of the book a five star rating for an excellent portrayal of a horrific and inexplicable entity gaining absolute control over the earth. I give the middle a three star rating as Molly assumes absurdly heroic proportions in the midst of Armageddon. The ending deserves one star as a cop-out and a disappointment. So how can I sum the book up? If you are a Koontz fan like me, you will want to read the book. The first half is a powerhouse of creepiness and it has a story line build-up that showcases the best of Koontz's storytelling abilities. But the second half will likely let you down, unless your favorite theme in Koontz's books is the transcendence of horror by uplifting spirituality.

Eileen Rieback