I read this in two and a half days, which means I liked it. Koontz is a good storyteller. Some folks dislike his flowery prose, but in general, I actually like it except for the over the top moments, which, well, they happen. Fairly early in the story I think I pretty much had part of this figured out, but there is enough interesting stuff to keep you guessing, and some genuinely creepy moments to cause one to make sure the doors are locked.

It is an end of the world story. Mild horror. At it's heart a love story and a personal journey for the lead character Molly. It was a good read.

oh, and must love dogs ;) ( )

Half a star for the brilliant con-artistry that must have been required to get such a ridiculously bad novel published. The prose was horrible - and I say this as a fan of a lot of Koontz's work. I mean, it was really, really bad. Purple doesn't even begin to cover it. It was a rambling, lurid, barely coherent mess of a book. I struggled through to the end because I hate to leave a book unfinished, but it took me about three months to read it, where a decent book of similar length will take me a day or two, on average.

And it wasn't just the writing; the storycrafting was also terrible. Aside from being almost unbearably boring, it was also in places incredibly stupid, with poorly thought out events, random consequences, zero-dimensional characters and an ending that was a such a complete rip-off it made me actually resent the author for making me plow through the book to get to it. ( )

"The Taking" is Dean Koontz's version of the end of the world. It focuses on a young couple, Molly and Neil Sloan, who wake up early one morning to a strange rainfall. Turning on their television, they soon realize that the whole world is under attack and they head into town to find other survivors. Along the way they encounter zombies, unnaturally large bugs, other unknown creatures lurking in trees, dolls that self-mutilate, UFO's, and a fungus that threatens to overtake everything. Molly determines that she was left alive to protect the surviving children, so she and Neil, along with the help of a dog that seems almost human, set out to find the children and start a new world, if they survive.

"The Taking" is the written equivalent of a B movie - you know it's really bad, but you can't stop reading it. Koontz focuses on one character - Molly - and consequently the other characters, including Neil, are nonentities and readers don't care what happens to them. It's hard to feel sympathetic for characters that are killed because you know nothing about them. And Molly herself is a one-dimensional character.

The reason the characters are so one-dimensional is Koontz's writing. He spends too much time telling readers what is going on instead of showing them. A perfect example is what happened between Molly and her father when she was eight years old. Instead of bringing readers into the classroom with Molly and her father (which would have been a terrific way to open the book) Koontz tells readers what happened halfway through the book, in alternate paragraphs, as Molly encounters her father as an adult. The scene where Molly and Neil listen to the astronauts being attacked in space should have been especially frightening, the reader should have been able to imagine the horrors along with Molly and Neil but it just didn't work.

Finally, Koontz didn't seem to know how to end the book. The last few pages seem rushed. The aliens simply leave and he glosses over the setting up of a new civilization by having all the corpses mysteriously disappear and mentioning that there was enough canned food to last for years. Conveniently enough, all the survivors were in useful professions - doctors, dentists, nurses, engineers, architects, carpenters and mechanics - all chosen for their talent. No policemen or firefighters are mentioned - Koontz seems to have created a perfect world.

The description on the back of the book made the book sound really interesting, but the description was the best part of the book. ( )

This is just what i've given it so far, I have about fifty pages left and it's taking forever to finish, because I don't like it. ( )

Title: The Taking
Author: Dean Koontz
Genre: Suspense; Horror
# of pages:
Start date: 7/25/08
End date: 7/27/08
Borrowed/bought: borrowed from the library
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best]: A-
Description of the book: taken from wikipedia.org: " In the midst of a mysteriously sudden rainstorm, author Molly Sloan awakens in the middle of the night. Unable to return to sleep, she leaves her husband Neil slumbering in bed and goes downstairs to work on a manuscript in progress. Dark shapes huddle on her porch - coyotes from the nearby forest. She wonders what could have frightened such animals into leaving the sanctuary of the deep woods to brave the proximity of human beings. Disturbed, she steps outside, to stand among the wild beasts, and is frightened herself - not by the animals, but by the strange, silvery rain that has an odd scent. She and her husband flee their isolated home, gathering with the residents of the nearby small mountain town. . . Word reaches them that the eerie weather conditions they face have been encountered by everyone else around the planet as well. . . Then all communication is cut off."

Review: Great read! I really like Dean Koontz's work. I haven't read that much but he hooks me every time so I'm pretty sure I might become a serial fan. I was very surprised at the moral message of this book, actually. ( )