Dean Koontz’s books are starting to remind me of old-style romance novels, and that’s not a good thing. Like those books, his are written to a certain formula, which involves perfect protagonists, intelligent dogs, a seething hatred of almost anything modern and the author’s own religion, Koontzianity. And like those books, his literary ejaculates are written in prose so purple that it’s in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum. The difference is that few romance novels have the gall to pretend that they are anything more than fluff, whereas in the latest Koontz novel I read, the narrative actually seemed to promise a return to the fun, science-based stories he used to write, such as Midnight or The Door to December. Except that was all a deception on the part of Koontz, who seems to have deliberately written a set-up that appeared scientific but was really a front for his brand of faith. Well, guess what? That annoyed me. And so I decided to write a review for
To eliminate any sexual tension, the novel begins with a blissfully happy married couple called Neil and Molly Sloan, though all is not quite perfect in Molly’s world. She wakes up thanks to a sudden rainstorm, and then lies in bed for nearly two pages while Koontz explains that she’s a writer (though not on his scale, alas). This lack of success bothers Molly, but not because she wants to earn Filthy Lucre; she sets herself very high goals. Her husband is the complete opposite, and the book will go to great lengths to demonstrate this, but for the time being, Molly spends the rest of the chapter getting out of her bedroom. At that rate, I was just glad Koontz didn’t try to show her doing any writing.
The rain flows almost as thickly as the authorial style, and after a few more pages where Molly looks out of the front window and sees a pack of coyotes on the porch, she decides to open the door.
Molly was inexplicably convinced that she could open the door and move among them without risk of attack.
Koontz goes on and on about how Molly had become accustomed to trusting her instincts, and I think this book would have been markedly shorter if Molly had had a cell phone. Then each time she had to “inexplicably” know something to further the plot, she could get a call from god or Koontz to prompt her. She goes out on to the porch, sticks her hand into the rain and finds that it has “the fecund scent of semen”. The author must’ve done a lot of research into what fecundity smells like; thankfully he shares none of it with us. I wondered if she would get pregnant from the contact, perhaps giving birth to some deformed mutant, but instead she goes upstairs to see her husband, who’s been having a bad dream. And then he wakes up to find that he’s in a Dean Koontz novel, making him even worse off than before.
Molly gets her gun, since good people in Koontz novels always have guns, and when they turn on the television they see that it’s raining everywhere. Koontz takes a few cracks at people who believe global warming exists and then retires to the background so that his heroes can finally do something. After deciding to leave their house, Molly takes another chapter to use the bathroom while Neil watches TV so that Koontz can whine about reality TV, pornography and “mean jokes”. Neil claims aloud that there’s more to humanity than, say, Survivor or Seinfeld. Wow, it’s like he’s shaking his fist in the face of all that’s wrong with the world, standing tall before the oncoming tank of degradation and media violence like that protestor in Tiananmen Square. Oh, but before we all forget, the story. Neil decides it’s time to go, so they leave the house. They took so much time to do this that I had a mental vision of him opening the front door and then being bowled over by the rush of water from the rain that was now covering their house. This would have had the added bonus of drowning the two protagonists and ending the novel at a mere 71 pages. Alas, it was not to be.
Molly and Neil, along with their guardian angel Dean Koontz, go to their friend Harry’s house, only to find that he has killed himself with his own shotgun (remember what I said about all the good characters in a Koontz novel packing heat?). As they are walking out of the house, someone starts quoting T. S. Eliot to them and they turn to find Harry’s animate body coming after them. At this point, I imagined the following dialogue.
Harry : Braaaaaains!
Molly + Neil + Dean : We don’t haaaaave aaaaaany!
After introducing their friend Harry to their friend Mr. Shotgun, our heroes burn rubber and decide that some kind of parasite was controlling Harry. I was fine with this, by the way, and was trying to figure the secret out as well (little did I know at this point what the mighty revelation would be). But they’ve soon got more company than just zombies, since they see Molly’s father out and about.
In keeping with Koontz’s usual habit of saddling the villains with monikers to indicate their depravity, this guy is called Render, though I must admit, it’s not as bad as other Koontz baddies like Punchinello Beezo or Vladimir Laputa. Render is a murderer, but he was sent to a mental institution. While Koontz is describing how psychiatrists write reports using “circumlocutions and obfuscatory jargon” (and coming off as the pot calling the kettle black), Render disappears into the rain. Too bad Koontz couldn’t hold off on the shrink-bashing long enough for Molly and Neil to run the perp down, but I guess this is so Render can make a dramatic entrance later. And god knows this book needs some action.
Finally they reach the town’s tavern, where a drunken professor approaches our heroes to say that what’s going on is “terraforming”. Unsurprisingly, Molly has never heard of the word. The professor’s theory is that the rain is part of an alien effort to change Earth into a world where the aliens can comfortably exist.
“You don’t go to war with mosquitoes,” Neil said.
“Exactly. You just drain the swamp, deny them the environment in which they can thrive, and build your new home on land that no longer supports such annoying bugs. They’re engaged in reverse terraforming, making Earth’s environment more like that on their home world.”
Even hampered by Koontz’s chronic overwriting, this is a good scene, and it explained the mysterious rain. Molly denies this theory because “life was a gift given with meaning and purpose”, so obviously anything which kills so many people can’t possibly exist. Despite this Spock-worthy logic, the professor persists in his lunacy, going so far as to show them proof. Sheesh, he’s talking like some godforsaken sciency person. Proof, of all things. Why, it’s just a large, bizarre fungus that happens to have grown on the floor under a leak in the roof. Dean Koontz’s new favorite word is “fecund”, because he uses it again when referring to this magic mushroom. Our heroes finally admit that this really is an alien organism, and chances are such fungi are growing all over the world.
This is a good set-up, by the way. I was waiting to see how they would deal with the transformation of Earth and the sudden influx of alien life. Instead, Molly goes to the bathroom once more, where she finds her father.
It’s always insufficient for a Koontz antagonist to just have killed someone, so Render turns out to have shot five kids in Molly’s school. Then he realized that the author didn’t approve of that kind of thing, so he left his gun on a desk and turned his back to it. That gave Molly the chance to heroically shoot him in the back and end his reign of terror. The story of this courageous confrontation is told in paragraphs alternating with Render’s description of his escape, so you have to either skip paragraphs to read a coherent account or suffer mental whiplash. At least in the past, Molly was capable of shooting the nitwit; here, she has a gun in her hand but does absolutely nothing as he rambles on and on (much like the author). Finally he quotes T. S. Eliot, calls Molly a barren woman and leaves through the window. Molly screams for her husband, though I’m not sure what she wants him to do now that Elvis has left the building, and he never does anything in the novel anyway.
Molly and Neil spend a few pages discussing the incident, and all I’ll ever remember of those wasted minutes of my life is her revelation that not only is the barrenness remark spot on, it’s what hurts her the most. Like any traditional heroine, she wants a sweet sweet baby, and what a tragedy that she can’t have one. A few people go off to barricade themselves in the bank while Molly, Neil and the rest sit in the tavern. This is one of the most inert books I’ve ever had the misfortune to read, but Koontz seems to have realized this and is now grasping at any straw to prod his sluggish story into action. Therefore, a child’s doll talks about dying and pulls out its eye while the protagonists sit and stare. At this rate I was wondering if Koontz would have it do a striptease, which would undoubtedly result in another bovine gape, but instead the lights go off and when they come back on, the doll has vanished.
The significance of this, or how it’s done, is never explained, so I can only conclude that Koontz is meandering about, throwing up horror-movie setups and lines of T. S. Eliot poetry to disguise the fact that precisely nothing is happening. After pages more of talk that accomplishes nothing, Molly and Neil decide that they have to save the children. I’m not kidding. This is exactly how they put it.
“There are children tonight, in this chaos, who aren’t being given the shelter and protection they need, they deserve.” She was relieved to have a purpose, to be suddenly filled with the urgency of meaningful commitment.
“And if we can’t save them?” Neil wondered.
Then we die heroically alongside them, says Molly. Though not in so few words, of course. So she decides to play Pied Piper and go around town gathering up all the children whose parents aren’t taking what she considers to be adequate care of them. How exactly this makes sense when the world is supposed to be ending or the aliens are terraforming Earth is not clear, but then a dog brings her a rose, which is some supernatural sign to her that she’s right.
And the dog waited. And the dog watched. And the dog smiled.
And the author used repetition. And the author used anthropomorphology. And the author succeeded in shoehorning his threadbare and by now quite unoriginal plot device, the intelligent dog, into yet another book. Molly believes that Lassie will lead them to any children who need help. Since she has no idea how Lassie is supposed to know this – and Lassie’s owner has conveniently disappeared – Neil gives in like the mindless yes-man he is.
“Then it’s the dog,” he said. “After all, what do we have to lose?”
Not your sanity, that’s for sure. Outside, they see a decapitated body looking for something, possibly its head. This scene might have been suspenseful in any other novel. In this one, it’s not just melodramatic thanks to Koontz’s flowery overwriting, it’s shoved aside because the plot of this book is how Molly Saves The Children. Not how Molly defeats the aliens or anything silly like that. After finding two kids in an otherwise empty house, they all bumble along behind the dog, which leads them to a church where the graves are open since the cadavers have risen, perhaps to stage a re-enactment of Thriller. Heck, with Molly’s single-minded focus on kids, she must remind them of Michael Jackson. Again, this is just background, since the corpses never do anything. Why did they rise? No answer given. I have a feeling that if you put these questions to Mr. Koontz, he’d just give you a blank-eyed stare.
Trapped inside the church are three children, so it looks as though the treasure hunt yielded rich pickings indeed. It reminds me of those fantasy novels where the hero has to go around collecting plot coupons such as magical artifacts before he can confront the villain and save the world. Also trapped inside the church are two pieces of very dead meat called “the tall man” and “the fat man” – since they were never named, I knew at once that they were going to bite it. Of course Koontz couldn’t kill off Molly, who’s basically himself with internal sex organs and less success, and even though one of the kids nearly falls into a hole through which some kind of giant insect spears the nameless redshirts, she’s saved.
From the darkness below the girl, the lost man’s tortured cries begged for death and pleaded mercy, for he was not at once broken and sucked dry, but suffered instead an attentuated death that didn’t bear contemplation.
Flaunting one’s vocabulary like this has the primary effect of alienating the readers from the action. When you’re reminded, with every sentence, that you are reading a novel written by an author in swooning love with his own overblown style, there’s no way you can be so immersed in what’s happening that you’re on the edge of your seat. But back to this wretched excuse for a novel. The good shepherd and her growing flock escape, and en route to the tavern – like counters on a Monopoly board, they’ve done a circuit and are now revisiting old locations – the children say that their parents floated away through the ceiling. Pages and pages are wasted on inane dialogue; it’s good to know that even though they’ve lost their parents and have just watched two men die, the children can still squabble, and the narrative tenderly charts each stupid name they call each other.
Molly goes into the tavern alone to look for a girl who was with her family there, and since you have to collect all the cards to win the game, she goes in to retrieve her one little last lost lamb. By the way, this book is 410 pages – which is about 409 pages too long – and at this point I was on page 324, which made me wonder how Dean Koontz would explain all this in the remaining pages. Especially considering that he’s got the highest noise-to-signal ratio of any author I’ve encountered. It takes Molly three more pages to actually enter the basement and find the helpless object of her affection, who is guarded by a few more hyperintelligent dogs. Why did the aliens spare the children and the dogs? No answer given, but I’ll bet it’s because the new and improved (and religious) Dean Koontz couldn’t bring himself to kill even hypothetical animals (though attacking scientists is no problemo for him).
Since they have nothing better to do in the remaining pages, Molly et al. amble along to a house where some nameless psychopath is holding a few kids hostage. The guy tries to shoot Molly, but his gun misfires. She tries to shoot him, and succeeds, making her believe that “some power was at work on her behalf”. Yes, it’s called authorial fiat, or Dean ex machina. Molly rescues the kids and they all traipse along to the bank to deliver some more children from evil, and I am so relieved this book is nearly over. They spot some people who have lost their faces, reminding me of the far superior scene in The Matrix where Neo loses his mouth. Since these people are merely present as window-dressing, and have no effect whatsoever on the plot, Molly leaves them and goes into the vault, where she finds Render (remember him?) with five kids. He talks for two pages, until Molly seems to be as bored with it as I am and shoots him in the chest. Unfortunately, that fails to kill him, but fortunately it ends the charade and he reveals his true colors.
Eyes as large as lemons, protuberant, crimson with elliptical black pupils.
This is supposed to be an alien? It has snakelike eyes, a mouth with sharp teeth, leathery wings and hands used in manipulation, all of which can be found right here on earth. Big frickin’ alien; the farce is strong in this one. Molly gets a spiritual text message from Dean Koontz at that moment and realizes that
As long as she had hope, they could not touch her.
That’s rendered (excuse the pun) in italics, just so we know how important it is. Molly also has the stunning spiritual revelation that the fungi, the psychopaths, the professor, the talking doll, etc. are “agent[s] of despair”, sent specifically to make her lose hope and thereby destroy her chances of saving all the children.
“You have no power over me or them. I am their tutelary,” Molly declared, surprised to hear the word escape her, for it was not one that she had ever used, though she knew it meant a special kind of guardian.
And that’s it, folks. That’s the grand finale. That’s the magnificent climax where she defeats the aliens and saves the world. The “ET” floats up through the ceiling, and outside, the mothership – which has “tens of thousands of faces, millions of faces” embedded in its outer casing like eyes for some unknown reason – just sails away and disappears. One day later, all the fungi and mosses are gone; perhaps Dean Koontz reached down from the sky and scoured the place as though he was wiping algae off an aquarium’s walls. And they find out who’s left behind in the town which had once contained nearly two thousand people.
Twenty-two adults, most of them parents. One hundred seventy-six children, more than half of whom were orphans now. Forty dogs, seven cats.
You can see Koontz’s own hierarchy here: children first, then dogs, then people who actually have children or just want them so badly they’ll carry out a scavenger hunt for them while the world is coming to an end. Cats are at the bottom of his personal totem pole. Anyway, since the climax of the book is over, it’s time for the anti-climactic wrapping up. Molly, Neil, three dogs and eight children (none of whom are actually named – they’re children, what more do you need to know?) settle down in an abandoned oceanfront house. The former owner? Never referred to. Not important.
The only adults left are “the tutelaries”, and now I get the point of this whole ridiculous book. This is Koontz’s version of Atlas Shrugged, where only good people such as “doctors, dentists, nurses, engineers, architects, carpenters, skilled mechanics” – notice the lack of psychiatrists – and children (who are all sweet and innocent and loving in Koontzworld) and dogs (ditto) survive to repopulate the earth with sweetness and innocence and love. And how wonderful, none of the children have nightmares or lingering trauma, nor do they regret the loss of their parents.
…they seemed to be under a dispensation from grief.
Or maybe they’re just psychopaths in the making. And voila, here’s a miracle from Santa Koontz. Molly, after trying for seven years to have a child, finally gets her heart’s desire. Hey, maybe the “fecund” rain really did impregnate her. I’m going with that theory, since Koontz never gives a reason for why she should suddenly be preggers now when she never was before. And by the time he finally makes it explicit that he’s writing a modern-day version of Noah’s Ark (on page 403), I’ve already guessed. He also quotes Revelations to explain that the aliens were actually Satan. So let me get this straight. Satan decides to appear in a UFO and flood the world while quoting T. S. Eliot from time to time, but he can’t, for some reason, harm kids or dogs or Koontz avatars, so he leaves? No answer given. Finally Molly decides that she’s going to write a book about “hope”. Well, I’m hopeful too. I hope I will never again pick up a novel as pathetic as this.
Here endeth the sermon. Thanks be to Koontz.
It’s almost scary how detached and emotionless the supposedly good characters are. The children certainly don’t need their parents now they have Molly and Neil and doggies to play with. And for someone propagating a religion, Dean Koontz does a surprisingly poor job of actually showing us his god at work in the world: his devil looms much larger (albeit caricatured). His god is conspicuously absent while his devil capers merrily about, spreading semeny rain and raising the dead before being defeated by a wannabe-mommy and a dog. I’ve come across some ludicrous plots before, but this one sits at the top of the putrid pile.
And I think Dean Koontz knew exactly how spineless his novel was, which was why the religious elements were hidden as long as possible. I would rather read an honestly Christian book like Left Behind than this Rapture-in-disguise-as-alien-invasion. The Taking goes to lengths to create the much more interesting possibility of alien terraformation, and actually provides plenty of evidence for it. Then Koontz springs his flat little surprise : this is actually some confused combination of the End Times and the Wet Times. This is not just deceptive, it’s offensive, since the scientific theory is put forward by a drunken “agent of despair” and it’s the religious theory which is the correct one, the good one, the rewarded one. Moreover, this means Koontz doesn’t have to explain anything, as he would if he were writing a book with a scientific premise. What was the purpose of the fungi? Satan did it. What happened to the headless body? Satan did it. It’s a cheap, mindless, copout ending.
It’s not really surprising that no thought went into the plot, though, since Koontz seems to have poured all his palpitating, sweaty energy into the style. One of the girls has eyes that are described in an incredibly Mary Sue way that makes me think of teenage fanfic writers.
Containing three greens in striation – apple-green, jade-green, celadon – the girl’s eyes were beseeching.
This kid is hanging over a hole through which a huge insectile creature has speared the heroes’ nameless flesh shield (AKA “the fat man”). And Molly has enough time to note the difference between jade-green and celadon in her eyes? I don’t think I’ve ever even read the word “celadon” before. C’est la crap, if you ask me. There’s pompous pontification (“The mystery of evil is too deep to be illuminated by the light of reason”) and there’s even one point where the narrative even addresses the reader directly. Most noticeable is Koontz’s antipathy towards science.
They say God made the universe. The astrophysicists don’t understand it, but perhaps wiser men do.
Science is hardly alone in this regard, though, since Koontz hates modernistic architecture as well. He seems to really loathe progress (except in firearms manufacture), or the passage of time. According to him, modern architecture offers “sensation in place of hope”. Who would have thought that architects were duty-bound to make people hopeful? Instead, they offer sensation, so I guess modern architects are the prostitutes of Koontzworld. I expected him to whine about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as well, but he probably doesn’t read anything published after 1900, such is his phobia of the present. In summary, the alien terraformation could have made a great story in the hands of the Dean Koontz who wrote Phantoms, but The Taking is little more than a flaccid sham in which Father Koontz presides over the wedding of his bible to his thesaurus. And I will never pick up another of his recent novels again; modernistic Koontz turns out to be far worse than modernistic architecture in that regard.