** spoiler alert ** 
 Molly Sloan, a successful writer with a dark event in her childhood, and her husband wake to a strange rain in the home in a small Californian mountain town, the precursor of what appears to be a strange alien invasion. The invaders themselves remain unseen, seeming instead to attack with fungal spores contained in the rain and psychological warfare - for example, the survivors gathered in a tavern are assailed with images of their grisly deaths in the mirror behind the bar. 
 The Sloans, led by a strangely intelligent German Shepard, begin to scour the town looking for children to rescue, and it becomes steadily apparent that the children are being spared whatever weird fate is befalling the adults. 
 I'll be honest upfront; I didn't like this book, but I'll to be fair in my review and give Koontz his due. The events are certainly horrific, and often made my skin crawl so, I guess I ought to say that it succeeds as a horror novel. But, but, but... 
 I disliked the writing. Koontz jumps straight into the action, which is often a good idea, but he attempts to keep a level of terror and weirdness that is simply not sustainable for 400 pages, even if it is well written. He has an annoying tendency to leap for the thesaurus to express description ("it was slimy, glutinous, muculent") which just sounds like he can't decide which word to use. 
 The characters and narration constantly reference science fiction movies, only to dismiss the images 'fed' to us as misleading; "forget that, it's how they want us to think." Likewise any problem with the lack of internal logic is banished by quoting "some science fiction author": "any sufficently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic". I'm sure it could be argued that the speaker themselves didn't know who said this, but not referencing Arthur C. Clarke suggests a disrespect for the genre Koontz appears to be writing in - although it soon becomes apparent that this is not an SF novel in any way. Molly constantly realises what is going in in what are not so much deductions as revelations, and the plot is frequently advanced by instances of deus ex machina (I use both terms advisedly). 
 The characters are two dimensional at best, even the lead players, and offer no room for development; Molly is strong, intelligent, focused, organised - her husband Neil is strong, calm, thoughtful, manly. By the end I realised that this was largely because neither the characters or any other aspect of the book has room for moral ambiguity - not just right and wrong but Good and Evil. And this leads to one of the biggest problems I had with this book, but also the reason I'm cautious about outright condemning it, because my dislike is based partly on a conflict of beliefs. 
 From very early on I realised that the author was coming from a morally absolute standpoint, and that this was his standpoint as much as the protagonists' (largely because the character and authorial voices are interchangable) and this turns the novel into a tract. The end was not a disappointment, largely because it was in no way a surprise and because I didn't care about the actors. Molly realises, in he last of a series of revelations, the reason why the invasion ended as suddenly as it began, why some people were taken and some where not (why also those seen lifted bodily away reacted with joy while others that seemed to sink through the floor reacted with terror) and why the children were exempt from this 'sifting'. Have you guessed yet? It is all because it is the rapture, disguised in a way that would be believed in a godless age. Forget the question of why belief would be necessary as it was actually happening, or that the theory that this was an alien invasion was simply one they came up with in the bar. 
 Dean Koontz obviously has imagination of a gruesome sort but, if The Taking is anything to go by, lacks any literary instincts or, more importantly, compassion. I'm tempted to read something else of his to see if his style works better on a smaller, less apocalyptic stage (as I occasionally thought it might while reading this book), but feel that that, as on eating a strange fruit and finding it unpleasant, don't really want to be left with the same bad taste in my mouth.