millinocket's Full Review: Dean R. Koontz - The Taking
I don’t ask for much. Really, I don’t. Some Blood. A Knife. A touch of the paranormal if I’m feeling frisky. And that’s really it. I don’t even technically require the Knife in order to enjoy almost any crappy Bloody Knife* novel I pick up. The last time I took you on a journey into the Bloody Knife, the results were so bad as to be delightful – sort of “it hurts so good” type reading – courtesy of Dean Koontz and The Face. Well, the man has returned to haunt my nightstand, and this time it just hurts. The Taking hurts me, it hurts its characters, it hurts the good name of the Bloody Knife. All around painful, is what it is.
The Taking actually begins with some promise. Molly Sloan wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of pouring rain and some time to mull through a private inventory of her life. What this is, really, is just a way to tell us about Molly, but we’ll go with it. She’s a writer, though hasn’t published in far too long. Her mother was a writer as well, though died young. She’s married to the wonderful Neil, experienced some great trauma as a child and, wouldn’t you know it – just noticed a bunch of coyotes congregating on her front porch!
That’s right, coyotes, coming in out of the rain. Why, how odd. And it gets odder still as the rain starts to feel malevolent rather than just out of season. But that rain is only the beginning. Something is happening, and it’s happening everywhere. The world as Molly knows it seems to be coming to some sort of catastrophic end. Everywhere she and Neil turn is another horror. What will they do? How will they survive? What’s going on in this small California town? And more importantly, will Dean Koontz decide at any point during this book to put away his Magic Descripto-Pen and knock off the florid prose? Just for a minute?
So yeah, the world is ending. Or something, who knows. Those first scenes with the coyotes and the rain have a great feel – creepy and filled with atmosphere. Molly is engaging enough as a Bloody Knife heroine – she has something special about her – they always do. But that’s okay. It’s what I expect since only The Special can really make it through the Bloody Knife with style. But as the book goes on, something horrible happens. Again and again and again and again. Koontz seems to be insatiable in his desire to create and describe every single one of the most disgusting and virulent things he can shake out of his fevered imagination. I generally like that imagination, it’s what delivers all the best wicked beasties, but enough already. After the fifty-third creeping fungus or exploding head, everything starts to run together and the idea that anyone is still sane after witnessing this bizarre carnage stretches even the boundaries of a dedicated Bloody Knife fan such as myself. It’s just too much.
And then we have the prose. Oh dear, the descriptive nightmare. I’ll give you just a small sample (very small, I don’t want to hurt anyone):
”A profound awareness of the interconnectedness of all things in Creation seemed to arise not from her mind, not even from her heart, but from the smallest structures of her being, as if the microscopic tides of cytoplasm in her billions of cells responded to the coyotes, the unusual storm, and the forest in much the way that Earth’s oceans were influenced by the moon.” (pg. 20)
Yes, that is all one sentence. As the book progresses and Koontz begins to delve into matters significantly more unsavory than Molly’s communing cytoplasm we become profoundly aware of our billions of cells screaming for a simple declarative sentence.
My final gripe is the ending. I should have seen it coming, but hindsight is always 20-20. I won’t say a thing about the substance of said ending in case for some reason you decide to actually read this thing, but let’s just sum it up thusly: it sucks. It’s too corny, it’s too “philosophical”, it’s just absolutely no fun at all. And it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the book, though there are some clues along the way that Koontz is setting himself up for this big giant sell-out. I expect better from even the Bloody Knife books that have a bloody knife on the cover, and certainly expect more from Koontz, who can usually be counted on to serve up something reasonably good. Or perhaps mediocre - or at least bad enough to be rollicking good fun. The Taking isn’t good, it isn’t mediocre, it isn’t bad in a fun way, it just stinks. Despite those first few pages that felt so right, so creepy and so promising, this thing is a mess. A swing and a miss for Mr. Koontz, hopefully I’ll have better luck on my next Bloody Knife adventure…….
*The Bloody Knife novel is one that features murder, mayhem and perhaps something supernatural and paranormal. The term “Bloody Knife” is used to describe these books I love so much due to the alarming frequency with which this very item appears on the cover art. Surprisingly, many do not actually feature the knife pictured. The world of fiction is a mysterious and wonderful place…..
From the Publisher: In one of the most dazzling books of his celebrated career, Dean Koontz delivers a masterwork of page-turning suspense that surpas...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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