I just finished reading the new Dean Koontz novel, The Taking, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
First of all, I should mention in advance that this review will spoil much of the book’s plot. But you won’t be missing very much. Although The Taking starts off promising, it quickly degenerates into one of the worst Dean Koontz books I’ve ever read. That’s brutal, I know, but the guy is capable of writing a good book and therefore must be graded thusly.
Part of my annoyance with The Taking comes from Koontz’s current habit of using characters who are just a little too goody-goody. Anyone who is familiar with the breadth of his work might have gotten the impression that Koontz found Jesus around 1995 or so. That’s when his books (which, admittedly, have always read like Danielle-Steel doing bad horror/sf) got really preachy. Despite their respective faiths and beliefs, the protagonists in books like From the Corner of His Eye and One Door Away From Heaven seem to operate on a rudimentary belief system that reeks of fundamental Christianity. There’s nothing wrong with Christians, but one should refrain from injecting every single one of his protagonists with the belief that as long as they keep love and faith in their heart, they’ll beat the bad guys in the end. And bad guys, a two-dimensional term if there ever was one, perfectly sums up the antagonists in Koontz’s books, The Taking included. Throw in some intelligent dogs and a couple of plucky (and often annoying) youngsters straight out of a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew adventure, and voila! you have a Dean Koontz novel.
The protagonists of The Taking are Molly and Neil Sloan, who wake up in the middle of the night to discover a strange silver rain drenching the small mountain town in which they live (the Great Flood bit, for those big on religious subtext, also known as "Noah’s Archetype"). The book focuses primarily on Molly (her husband, a shotgun-touting ex-priest-turned-cabinetmaker, speaks perhaps a dozen times in the entire book) and her mission to save the town’s children, who we learn are being threatened by aliens that are taking over the world via biological terrorism. And, as mentioned, there are several super-intelligent dogs. This time around they are the guardians of the children who are threatened by the aliens for reasons that, like much of the plot, is never really explained. The aliens can’t harm Molly and Neil directly – because they’re motives are pure or some stupid shit – so Koontz throws in a psychotic father for Molly, because as we know, most of Koontz’s female protagonists tend to have daddy issues. This one killed a bunch of Molly’s schoolmates when she was a kid, thus providing the armchair psychology needed to explain her determination to save the children from the aliens. Still with me?
As far as character development is concerned, Koontz has delivered another pair of pseudo-religious idiots with chips on their shoulders so big the aliens can probably seem them from space. Molly is a writer haunted by her own inner critic (she’ll never be the lit’ry writer that her mother was, oh the pain of it all!) while Neil is an ex-priest turned cabinet-maker who was raised by Jesuits. ‘Nuff said.
As mentioned, the book is packed full of religious metaphors and banal subtext — i.e. science has robbed us of our faith, repent or get anal-probed! Of course, I’m being sarcastic and perhaps a teensy bit caustic, but it’s not far from the truth. At one point, Molly and Neil discover several cars that have been abandoned in the middle of the road. The people are gone but their possessions have been left behind. Molly takes a child’s doll because although they haven’t found anyone who has been abducted by the aliens, she hopes that one day she’ll be able to return the doll to the little girl who owns it. Excuse me whil
e I grab my insulin.
Koontz is a good idea man, which is the only reason I even bother to finish his novels, but when it comes to writing his books follow typical patterns that propel the characters toward obvious conclusions. This isn’t a big surprise to those who know Koontz’s work, but The Taking is pretty stupid reading fare even by Koontz standards. Go read Phantoms instead.
Ian