Right on the heels of my telling you I don't often write reviews of other writers' work, here's a review, and a negative one at that.

Let me start by saying I'm a big fan of Dean Koontz. In fact, he's the guy who led me to discover Authors' Hair Service, so I like him, really I do. But his newest book, The Taking is a mess.

It starts off with one of my pet peeves, a protagonist who is a writer. This always makes me think the author was too lazy to research, or even just imagine, what it's like to have a profession other than his own. Koontz has lots of writer protagonists in his novels, if my memory serves, but I can usually overlook it if the rest of the book holds my interest.

The Taking seemed to start off OK, but devolved into a series of nightmares strung together in place of a legitimate plot. In something like 350 pages, Koontz managed to throw in scenes that evoked The Day Of The Triffids, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Thing, The Matrix, Independence Day, Hannibal Lechter, "I have No Mouth And I must Scream," "To Serve Man," terraforming on a grand scale, On The Beach, The Stand, Alien, War Of The Worlds, "The Mist," and more. But the sum of all these parts was somehow less than any single one of them alone. It seemed like he was just riffing through his file of ideas and throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. It read like a bad sci-fi movie, with one spectacular special effect after another, while paying little attention to basic storytelling.

The plot didn't hold together for me. The characters never came to life. Worst of all, the ending seemed to just happen for no good reason at all. Perhaps in my haste to be done with this mess I missed something, but it made me want to throw the thing across the room and curse the author for wasting my time. It wasn't even copyedited very well (someone apparently didn't know the difference between spoor and spore, for one typo that jumped out at me).

Of course, it'll sell millions, so what do I know? Koontz has written a lot of books that I enjoyed; this just wasn't one of them.