THE TAKING (2004) by Dean Koontz

[GRWelsh]

I'm about 70 pages into this, and it has really hooked me. The set up is that a heavy, luminescent rain starts to fall all over the world. The characters are not sure what is happening, and neither does the news media, the government or the scientific community. Some people think it is just freakish weather related to global warming or some other natural cause, but others begin to suspect this is the end of the world... Even the animals are acting strange, and trying to get away from the weird rain. TV channels become distorted. The power begins to go out. The protagonists wonder... is this an alien invasion, the Biblical Apocalypse, or what? I love a set up that makes me wonder what I would do in that situation. I haven't read a Dean Koontz book for a long time. In a supermarket around 1990 I picked up MIDNIGHT (1989) and became a fan right away. A character in MIDNIGHT loved Guinness and that was what prompted me to buy my first case of Guinness. To this day, it is my favorite beer-like beverage. I read quite of few of the Koontz novels from the 80's and my sister got into them even more than I did... WHISPERS (1980), PHANTOMS (1983), THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT (1984), STRANGERS (1986), WATCHERS (1987), TWILIGHT EYES (1987), and LIGHTNING (1988) are the ones I remember reading that my sister owned. I later found out that Koontz wrote the novel DEMON SEED (1973) that the movie DEMON SEED (1977) was based on... a movie that freaked me out when I first saw it as a kid but now seems rather silly.

[GRWelsh]

I finished this and it had an interesting angle at the end. I would say it is worth reading if you like horror and end of the world scenarios. SPOILERS... There was a twist at the end that reminded me of Koontz' novel LIGHTNING, which I thought was very clever. In LIGHTNING, there was a time traveler showing up in the present -- the 1980's when it was written -- and the unspoken assumption was that the time traveler was from the future. The neat twist was that the time traveler was from the past. The Nazis had invented a time machine and sent someone into the future to see if he could get something that would help the Nazis win the war. The time travel effect was accompanied by lightning, thus the title for the book. In this novel, to avoid the paradoxes of being able to kill your own grandfather or something like that, time travel only works if you go into the future and return to your own present. The Nazi, Stefan, is inspired by a quadriplegic woman named Laura in the 1980's who writes beautiful books of poetry. He takes it on himself to travel to different points in her life to change it and make it better, and ends up renouncing his mission for the Nazis. I recall that as one of my favorite Koontz novels and probably my favorite of his concepts, because of the twist. THE TAKING has a similar conceptual twist, in that the main characters and probably most readers assume the events occurring are due to an alien invasion. The third of Arthur C. Clarke's laws is referenced several times: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So, when seemingly supernatural events happen, Molly and her husband Neil and most of the other characters assume it must be because the alien invaders are so much more advanced than us in technology that what they can do seems magical or impossible. The twist at the end is that it really was a supernatural event, but modern people are so conditioned to think in terms of science fiction, movies, aliens and technology that they try to fit everything in that framework. This was summed up neatly near the end of the book:

A supernatural event of world-shaking proportions, occurring in a faithless time when only science is believed to have the power to work miracles, might appear to be the work of an extraterrestrial species hundreds or even thousands of years more advanced that we are.