Literature / The Taking

The Taking is a 2004 Horror/suspense novel by Dean Koontz, detailing an invasion by hostile alien forces who bend all that is right with the world in their quick, ruthless takeover, and one couple caught in the middle of it all.

Set in the California mountain town of Black Lake, it begins with Molly Sloan getting out of bed to investigate a strange, sudden rain storm. Her husband Neil slumbers soundly, while she can't sleep.

She finds the rain is faintly luminous, and has a subtle, repulsive scent. Neil wakes screaming from a nightmare, or more of a terrifying awareness of something passing overhead—some massive force like “a mountain coming down.”

News broadcasts tell of strange weather phenomena across the globe, and connections to the outside world begin to be severed as the menacing visitors close in. Molly and Neil leave their isolated home and gather with other townsfolk at the tavern in hopes of finding answers and safety.

A purple fog enshrouds Black Lake. Some stay behind, others plan to fortify and find refuge at the bank, and others want to fight back at what is threatening their world.

Disturbing things happen to undermine the fragile morale of the townsfolk. Molly and Neil leave as disagreement and paranoia and something far worse takes hold of everyone. Braving the horrors outside, they must rely on each other and hidden reserves of strength and humanity they didn't know they had to survive and help those who need it the most; children.

Trying to find reason in the increasingly impossible happenings that seem intent on tearing them apart emotionally as well as physically, they soon find that whatever is taking the earth is changing it in ways profound and unnatural.

Like most of Koontz's stories it works on the premise of genuinely good people cast into horrific situations. The Taking is chock full of Nightmare Fuel, bizarre creatures, T. S. Eliot references, and, despite its Lovecraftian overtones, the notion that no matter what happens, good will prevail and darkness will die.

The Taking provides examples of:

• Alien Invasion: The weather changes and odd fungi grow everywhere in ways reminiscent of terraforming while people are massacred left and right by strange and aggressive creatures. All the while a massive pulsing ship and numerous smaller glowing craft hover overhead. Turns out this is very much an Invoked Trope. The Legions of Hell are only masquerading as aliens because it's was people expect and it's the most effective way to make them despair. The giant ship is actually the devil himself and the smaller craft are guardian angels for the virtuous.
• Alien Kudzu: The luminescent lichen on the trees and the self-repairing fungus.
• And I Must Scream: Toward the end, Molly and the gang come across a group of people who have had their faces removed and are frozen in a standing position, twitching occasionally, their throats moving as if swallowing. Made even worse later when it's established that a stolen face equals a stolen soul and they are totally aware of what has happened to them and why.
• Animalistic Abomination: There are creatures that look like insects, monkeys and reptiles and an apparently feline horror kills a neglectful parent.
• Archnemesis Dad: Render is this to Molly. Or rather, he was before he died and was replaced by one of the creatures who still tried to invoke it to terrify her.
• Apocalyptic Logistics: Mentioned, but mostly handwaved: we learn that the survivors have enough people who know how things are done, and little by little the civilization gets reestablished.
• As the Good Book Says...: Neil's brother Paul quotes a few Bible verses, which are revisited at the end.
• Ate His Gun: Harry Corrigan, a neighbor of the Sloans, does this with a shotgun to escape whatever was in the house with him.
• Author Filibuster: The book regularly takes breaks to indict certain types of people as unilaterally evil, at one point even taking time for an aside to say that people who enjoy modern architecture literally want to see the world destroyed. Naturally, all these horrible people are the ones who are being cleared out to make way for a utopian world.
• Ax-Crazy: A man breaks into a house and tries to sacrifice an entire family so he'll be spared. He kills the parents, then tries to force Molly to kill the children after she attacks him. Molly kills him in self-defense. Molly's father was also a murderous psychopath. Until he died, anyway.
• Babies Ever After: Molly becomes pregnant after the survivors resettle.
• Badass Normal: The couple is thrust into a living nightmare and yet proves to be competent and brave enough to not only save themselves, but others.
  • It's implied that they were spared because they tried to save others and tried to protect children in particular.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Harry Corrigan thought so.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: A giant insectoid creature hides in the church basement.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Averted. Glowing lichen is seen on the trees and while it's not directly harmful, the Sloans are still creeped out by it.
• Black Speech: The voice from the space station after... whatever... comes in and kills the astronauts.
• The Blank: The people Molly and Neil's group find when they arrive at the bank have all had their faces removed. And they're still alive.
• Bloodless Carnage: When Molly shoots her father, the wounds don't bleed, telling Molly that it's not her father that she shot.
• Body Horror: Alien fungi. Inside you. Animating you even after you're dead. Fun, fun.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Many people don't handle the invasion well, to say the least.
  • The bartender in particular was described as being in "a trance of suspicion" and flies into a rage for no reason later on, implying that something was affecting him from the start.
• Caught Up in the Rapture: Some people were mentioned to have floated away, including some of those who went to the bank, but were happy when they did so. It's implied that they went to heaven.
• Children Are Innocent: Played universally straight. The invaders aren't even "allowed" to directly harm them, though they happily approve of humans taking care of that for them.
• Corrupt Politician: Seen in the hand of the creature in the bank.
• Creepy Doll: A doll Molly picked up in hopes of giving it back to the child who owned it stands up in front of everyone in the tavern and starts mutilating itself, pulling out its eyes and tongue, the innocuous phrases in its voice box turning into "all of your babies will die" as psychological warfare against those who are thinking about fighting back against the invaders. Holy shit.
  • It also looks a lot like Molly's dead classmate, which was probably deliberate.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: It would be easier to list the people who didn't meet a nasty end.
• Cue the Rain: Inverted. The glowing rain is just the beginning and the rain at the end is a sign of things getting better.
• Dark and Troubled Past: When she was a child, Molly was nearly abducted from her school by her estranged, gun-toting father, who opened fire on her classmates when his efforts to get to his daughter failed. One girl died in little Molly's arms.
• Dark World: A ruined, otherworldly version of the Sloans' bedroom with... something hiding in it is visible in their mirror while the Leviathan is passing overhead.
• Deadline News: Becomes increasingly prevalent as the unnatural storm goes on. Reporters are killed by the invaders as seemingly-indiscriminately as everyone else.
• Declaration of Protection: Molly does this multiple times, with the final time being in the bank when presented with a Sadistic Choice. It's why the creature she encounters there can't touch her.
• Demonic Possession: When the demons finally come to take the souls of the people in the tavern, they insert themselves into the faceless bodies left behind, as evidenced by the formerly blank faces taking on the features of the demons themselves before seeming to go back to their ordinary features.
  • It's also implied that Russel Tewkes was possessed around the same time the doll vanished and that Derek Sawtelle was possessed even before Molly and Neil arrived at the tavern and may well have at least been influenced beforehand.
• Despair Gambit: Everything the creatures do from the apparent terraforming to the Creepy Doll are intended to make people despair so that they'll see protecting others as pointless and thus have their souls taken.
• Dirty Coward: The two men in the church were hoping to exploit Improbable Infant Survival by keeping a group of children near them. They get killed by the bug in the basement for their trouble.
  • The people planning to fortify the bank were taken because they were looking out for themselves rather than for others.
• Dragged Off to Hell: Happens to a pretty large portion of humanity.
• Driven to Suicide: The Sloans think Harry Corrigan shot himself because he was unable to cope with the loss of his wife, who had been murdered some months before the events of the story. Further investigation reveals that he killed himself for an entirely different reason.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Leviathan.
  • Eldritch Starship: It's repeatedly compared to one, with the pulsing sensation it creates suggested to be from its engines. Turns out not to be the case.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: The creatures reanimate some of the corpses from the graveyard near the church. There's also the Sloans' neighbor Harry Korrigan whose corpse reanimates in his house to mock Molly.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Virgil, who knows a lot more than even a normal dog should know. In fact, all the dogs seem to be this way, being able to reliably locate children who need rescue amidst the chaos and tell when something bad is nearby.
  • One of the other groups encountered near the end have cats and in one instance a parrot aiding them.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: When one of the creatures tries to take Molly's face, its hand is described as feeling cold and greasy.
• Evil Is Visceral: Many of the creatures are described as fungal, insectile, and generally disgustingly organic.
• The Eyes Have It: That damn Creepy Doll, previously normal but animated by the Leviathan, suddenly has mobile eyes which look around and seem to see.
• Facepalm Of Doom: The creatures in the tavern do this. Also counts as Your Soul Is Mine!.
• Face Stealer: "The thing with faces in its hands." The protagonists come across a group of people who have had their faces removed, leaving only a smooth, blank surface behind. Also counts as Your Soul Is Mine!. The invading creatures can then use their identities but the face-stealing is not required for this.
• Facial Horror: Everyone's reflections in the mirror at the Tavern except for Molly, Neil and a few others. They're the ones who survive.
• Festering Fungus: All over the damn place. Masses of fungus are found all over the town, some of which move around on insect-like legs while others are glowing. Molly instinctively sees them as malignant and they eat souls. The self-repairing mushroom in the tavern is a less dangerous example.
• Fog of Doom: The town gets filled with purple fog, which eventually forms a layer further up.
• Frame-Up: After the victim of a murder committed by Molly's father was discovered in the asylum where he was being held, he framed another of the inmates and got away with it.
• Galactic Conqueror: The invaders. Or so they want you to think.
• Genius Loci: "Something weird's happening to the house. It's changing. It's like...almost alive."
• Global Warming: Apparently doesn't exist if the interviews on the news are anything to go by.
• Good Shepherd: Neil left the priesthood the day Molly met him, though he always had the personality of one. He takes up the profession again After the End. His brother Paul is trying to be this to a large group in Hawaii when the Sloans call him.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: The humanoid... thing that took the shape of Molly's father and confronts her in the bank has leathery, bat-like wings.
• Guardian Angel: At the end, Molly realizes that the smaller glowing craft were benevolent and considering the nature of the invaders, they were most likely angels.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Happens to a cameraman reporting on the storm in Berlin.
• Happily Married: There's never any friction between Molly and Neil.
• Harmful to Minors: The kids may be safe from the invaders, but that doesn't exactly spare them from seeing and hearing all kinds of horrible things and occasional Ax-Crazy people all around them.
  • Also the incident from Molly's childhood, with her father gunning down her classmates.
• Haunted Technology: Whenever the Leviathan passes overhead, anything technological starts freaking out. Digital clocks rapidly cycle through random numbers, phones and radios emit strange electronic noises and some television stations only disply swirling colors. When Molly and Neil arrive at the tavern, they hear stories of everything from CD players and computers to kitchen appliances acting strangely. Even non-electronic devices such as Molly's watch and music boxes are affected, and that's all before the doll animates and starts pulling itself apart.
• Hostile Terraforming: Derek Sawtelle theorizes that this is what the aliens are doing. The rain's purpose is to plant seeds which grow into these strange new life forms, which release compounds that will slowly make the air less breathable for earth's inhabitants, and food inedible. It's much worse than that.
• Hostile Weather: The rain at the beginning is stated to have caused mudslides and flooding in some places. There are also impossibly dense and wide waterspouts that form in the ocean.
  • The lower parts of the town have also been flooded by the unnatural rain, which just formed a layer on top of the actual lake.
• Humanoid Abomination: The things with faces in their hands and the figure that appeared in the Sloans' mirror.
• Human Sacrifice: One person resorts to this to try to save himself, though he was already Ax-Crazy to begin with.
• If I Can't Have You…: Molly's father killed her classmates to get at her so he could raise her himself.
• I Know What You Fear: One of the things with faces in their hands took the form of Molly's father because that was what she feared most.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In the church, a gigantic bug-like abomination bursts from the basement and impales a guy on its stinger.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Children are the only group universally spared. Two people tried to exploit this, but get killed by a giant bug anyway.
• Infernal Retaliation: What's worse than zombies? Flaming zombies. With tentacled parasites nesting in their innards, reaching out for a nice hug.
• Insane Equals Violent: Most of the guards at the asylum where Molly's father was incarcerated wanted to let the inmates go, but two of the guards decided to kill them instead based on this logic.
  • The book portrays them as morally right in doing so, with the merciful guards being part of the pre-apocalyptic world's general softness on crime. See Broken Aesop.
• Insecurity Camera: Happens on a global scale. Cameras and any other observation devices including weather satellites fail when they try to look at the creatures or the bizarre weather.
• Intangible Man: The creatures can move through walls and aren't hit by bullets.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The book starts as the glowing rain begins falling.
• It Won't Turn Off: Happens with the TV set in Molly's house after it starts showing scenes of human depravity due to the Leviathan's effects.
• The Legions of Hell: What the "aliens" actually were.
• Light Is Not Good: Smaller glowing craft fly through the clouds and seem to have an absolute knowledge of people they pass over. Subverted. At the end, Molly suspects that they are guardian angels due to events such as another person being physically unable to shoot her while one is overhead.
• Living Ship: The Leviathan. Emphasis on living.
• Losing Your Head: Poor Ken Halleck... though Neil doesn't seem to think it was actually Halleck.
• Lovecraft Lite: The Taking starts out as an alien invasion story with all the trappings of Cosmic Horror (it's even speculated that the aliens are terraforming Earth and humans to them are akin to the pesky mosquitos you annihilate by draining their swamp), complete with a reference to Cthulhu. Turns out, the "invasion" was actually the Apocalypse and the "aliens" were demons unleashed to punish humankind for its wickedness. They depart as suddenly as they arrived, and all children and sufficiently virtuous adults have been spared. The new world is actually pretty pleasant with all the Bad People gone
• Mama Bear/ Papa Wolf: Molly and Neil have no children of their own but make it their mission to save any they can find.
• Meaningful Name: The name of the dog that guided Molly and Neil through this gallery of horrors is Virgil. Given the true nature of the invaders, the symbolism is pretty blatant.
• Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: The asylum that Molly's father eventually got himself confined to. He even got away with another murder during his time there.
• Mind Rape: Happens to the people in the tavern.
• Mirror Scare: Molly and Neil briefly glimpse a different world in their bedroom mirror—one composed of the charred ruins of their home and strange plants and containing a shadowy winged figure.
  • Later at the tavern, everyone sees themselves in the mirror— not exactly in their glory though.
    • Some people didn't appear in the tavern mirror at all. They survived.
  • Subverted when Molly catches a glimpse of her mother in a mirror while searching a house for survivors.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The bug in the church has features of both insects and arachnids, notably having both mandibles and palps.
• Monstrous Humanoid: The things with faces in their hands. The girl Molly rescues in the tavern just describes them as being tall and hideous. It's not until the confrontation in the bank vault that one is fully described.
• More Dakka: Guns may not work on many of the otherworldly monsters, but they definitely work on human ones.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Molly has written several novels but still hasn't managed to make a career out of it. This troubles her greatly, as she fears leaving the world without leaving any lasting mark on it.
• No Such Thing as Space Jesus: Thoroughly mocked. Everyone automatically assumes that the invaders are aliens. Molly only realizes that it was a supernatural event and the invaders were actually The Legions of Hell at the end.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Classic version. The tense scenes where nothing seems to appear always build up to something nasty assailing the protagonists and revealing itself fairly spectacularly as it does so. A bug bursting through the floor is the most obvious.
• Older Is Better: The author certainly seems to think so. All of the movies watch by Molly and Neil before they leave to look for other people are old movies. Modern media is represented by reality shows, gory violence, porn and cruel jokes. There's also Molly's internal monologue about how modern architecture sucks.
• Ominous Fog: Black Lake is shrouded with purple fog and full of dangerous creatures, effectively making it Fog of Doom.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: The woman that "looked like Obi-Wan Kenobi" as described by a trio of siblings rescued by Molly and Neil. She's heavily implied to be the ghost of Molly's mother Thalia.
  • Molly also sees her mother in a mirror, suggesting that she is watching over Molly.
• Our Monsters Are Different: Walking armored fungi that make screaming and weeping sounds and hold human faces under their gooey membrane of flesh. Yeah, I'd say plenty different.
  • Our Demons Are Different: The creatures are hinted to be demons by Paul during the beginning, though it's only confirmed at the end.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The corpses in the church are animated by masses of tentacles nested in their ribcages.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: Molly's collection of antique music boxes and other items start doing things on their own accord when the Leviathan passes by. Played with in that the music boxes themselves don't play anything unusual. It's all of them playing at the same time that's unsettling.
• Pedophile Priest: Neil left the priesthood because one of these went unpunished.
• Personal Horror: One of the main themes of the novel is how the protagonist's—especially Molly's—insecurities are played against them, and how they resist succumbing to this and focus on what needs to be done.
• Posthumous Character: Molly's mother Thalia.
• The Power of Love: What keeps Molly and Neil going through the events of the story.
• The Power of Trust: Molly's Declaration of Protection in the church evokes this.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The creatures can do this with corpses, which are animated by spiky tentacles.
• The Radio Dies First: Phones are one of the first things to go, closely followed by the Internet. Somewhat justified as dial-up Internet connections were still in widespread use when this book was published.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: When the Sloans' TV starts showing footage of graphic violence and gratuitous sex, Neil's reaction suggests that it's meant by the invaders to be a commentary on the depravity of the human race.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: When Molly finally confronts one of the invaders, it's revealed to have these.
• Religious Horror: Several of The Undead in the church perform a mock church service before revealing themselves and attacking the protagonists and at the end of the book, Molly realizes that the giant "ship" was actually the Devil and the creatures were demons, making the story this retroactively.
• A Round of Drinks for the House: Russell, the tavern owner, is giving out free drinks since the world's ending. He gets pushier about it after being possessed.
• Sadistic Choice: Oh boy is there one.
  "I'll let you keep your face and walk out of here with four of the lambs. But only four. You choose the one to leave behind."
  • Subverted as by that point Molly knows that the creatures can't harm children.
  • The Final Temptation: The creature tries to get Molly to abandon one of the children to its mercy to save herself, an act that she has thus far refused to commit. It also happens just before the creatures leave.
• Satan: The Leviathan's true identity.
• Sdrawkcab Name: The voice on the space station was introducing itself after it killed the astronauts, but was saying the individual words backward.
  "My name is Legion, is Lucifer, is Abbadon, is Satan, eater of souls."
• Sex Is Violence: Molly's father is aroused by murder as he or the thing masquerading as him repeatedly states.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Molly's father was actually killed in his cell by a guard as the catastrophe was starting up. The man that Molly talked to was actually one of the demons who had stolen her father's soul, revealing itself during the confrontation in the bank vault.
• Show, Don't Tell: Among other things, the news reports and Molly's conversations with the children she and Neil rescue are mostly described in paragraphs rather than dialogue.
• Snow Means Cold: The colder parts of the world get glittery blue snow instead of glowing rain.
• Strawman News Media: Television media in general is depicted this way. The anchors on the night shift on one of the stations are blatant careerists and a more experienced news anchor is a narcissist.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: What the main characters and the people in the tavern think the invaders are. The story actually concludes with an inversion: Molly realizes that if a sufficiently advanced race would look like magic or gods, a supernatural event of any scale would look like the arrival of sufficiently advanced aliens to a world that had abandoned all faith and belief in anything beyond what they could scientifically prove.
• Survival Horror: Seems to be this at first. The setting is creepy and oppressive with monstrous creatures and walking corpses seeming to lurk in every shadow and people holing up to defend themselves, but the horror takes a much more personal turn as the story goes on.
• Take My Hand!: Kid, this is a bad time to freeze like a deer in the headlights when you're dangling like bait over a pit full of monstrosities.
• Take That!: The story contains several toward various aspects of modern society including the news media, modern entertainment, modern architecture and science fiction and none of them are particularly subtle.
  • The character of Derek Sawtelle, the literature professor, is one toward science fiction in particular.
• Tears of Fear
• Title Drop: "One phase of the taking of the earth had ended."
• The Tragic Rose: Rebecca Rose, Molly's classmate who died in her arms during her father's attack. Her death in particular has haunted Molly for years.
• Unseen Evil: The Leviathan, though it is eventually revealed at the end.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Molly's internal monologue about the nature of the invaders includes armchair invocations of astrophysics, multiverse theory and black holes.
• When It Rains, It Pours: The oddly-scented rain at the beginning and the purifying rain near the end are both downpours.
• Winged Humanoid: The creature that Molly encounters in the bank is a Monstrous Humanoid with wings.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: When Molly and Neil head out to rescue others, they hear what sounds like a woman crying. The source of the sound is a walking fungus and the exact same cries are heard in different voices from other walking fungi, suggesting that the sounds are a lure.
• Voice of the Legion: The voices in the walls of a couple of houses subvert this by actually being numerous voices. Inverted with the thing impersonating Render. When it speaks, its voice doesn't echo despite being inside a bank vault where just about anything would echo and there's no indication of its voice changing when it reveals its true nature.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Molly believes that the survivors were chosen to survive and protect others because they had skills useful in a post-apocalyptic environment and were virtuous on top of it. This is supported by people with only the unvirtuous, skilled or not, getting Dragged Off to Hell and the virtuous unskilled being raptured.
• Your Head A-Splode: One of the tentacled parasites in the church emerges from the corpse of a priest who died just a few months before by bursting out of its head.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: The first type, where only the soul is drained, is what the creatures actually do when they don't kill directly. The third type, drained after death, is also heavily implied to happen to some people.

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