Glenn drove the Land Rover into a stone wall at just over 100mph. Alice stuck a meat fork through her hand and pinned it to the chopping board. Brenda took off all her clothes. She did whatever she was told. They were compelled by a fear too great to be remembered, enslaved by a power no man should ever wield.
In one of the most dazzling books of his celebrated career, Dean Koontz delivers a masterwork of page-turning suspense that surpasses even his own inimitable reputation as a chronicler of our worst fears—and best dreams. In The Taking he tells the story of a community cut off from a world under siege, and the terrifying battle for survival waged by a young couple and their neighbors as familiar streets become fog-shrouded death traps. Gripping, heartbreaking, and triumphant in the face of mankind’s darkest hour, here is a small-town slice-of-doomsday thriller that strikes to the core of each of us to ask: What would you do in the midst of The Taking.
Dylan O’Connor is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He is on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant,
Dylan is attacked by a mysterious "doctor," injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him...or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee--before the doctor's enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body. No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police.
Tommy Phan is a successful detective novelist living the American Dream in southern California. One evening he comes home to find a small rag doll on his doorstep. It’s a simple doll, covered entirely in white cloth, with crossed black stitches for the eyes and mouth, and another pair forming an X over the heart. Curious, he brings it inside.
That night Tommy hears an odd popping sound and looks up to see the stitches breaking over the doll’s heart. And in minutes the fabric of Tommy Phan’s reality will be torn apart. Something terrifying emerges from the pristine white cloth, something that will follow Tommy wherever he goes. Something that he can’t destroy. It wants Tommy’s life, and he doesn’t know why. He has only one ally, a beautiful, strangely intuitive waitress he meets by chance—or by a design far beyond his comprehension. He has too many questions, no answers, and very little time. Because the vicious and demonically clever doll has left this warning on Tommy’s computer screen:
The deadline is dawn.
Tick Tock
Time is running out.
Past midnight, Chyna Shepard, twenty-six, gazes out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend’s family. Instinct proves reliable. A murderous sociopath, Edgler Foreman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside. A self-proclaimed “homicidal adventurer,” Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to immerse himself in sensation, to live without fear, remorse or limits, to live with intensity. Chyna is trapped in his deadly orbit.
Chyna is a survivor, toughened by a lifelong struggle for safety and self-respect. Now she will be tested as never before. At first her sole aim is to get out alive—until, by chance, she learns the identity of Vess’s next intended victim, a faraway innocent only she can save. Driven by a newly discovered thirst for meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna musters every inner resource she has to save an endangered girl…as moment by moment; the terrifying threat of Edgler Foreman Vess intensifies.
Yesterday Snowfield, California, was a charming little town basking in the golden afternoon sun. Today it is a place of nightmare. An ancient, awesome force has spirited away almost the entire population of the town and left the bodies of those remaining bizarrely disfigured. What hope can there be for the few still left alive!?
A widespread drought is causing murderous famine. There is one possible solution: Arctic ice could be moved south to parched coastlines and melted for water. In an Arctic ice field, a special team of scientists has planted bombs that will detonate automatically at midnight to break away some of the ice. Before they withdraw to the safety of their base camp, a shattering tidal wave breaks loose the ice on which they are working.
Now they are marooned on an iceberg during the worst winter storm of the decade. The bombs in the ice beneath them are buried irretrievably deep...and ticking. Abruptly thrown into a desperate struggle for survival, the scientists are plagued by the discovery that one of them is a ruthless killer on a strange mission of his own...
Although accident victim Hatch Harrison dies en route to the hospital, a brilliant physician miraculously resuscitates him. Given this second chance, Hatch and his wife Lindsey approach each day with a new appreciation of the beauty of life -- until a series of mysterious and frightening events brings them face to face with the unknown.
Although Hatch was given no glimpse of an afterlife during the period when his heart had stopped, he has reason to fear that he has brought a terrible presence back with him! From the land of the dead. When people who have wronged the Harrisons begin to die violently, Hatch comes to doubt his own innocence -- and must confront the possibility that this life is just a prelude to another, darker place.
Tonight, Tina Evans dreamed that her son Danny was still alive. And when she awoke, she found a message scrawled on Danny's chalkboard: NOT DEAD. Tomorrow, Tina Evans will search for the truth about what really happened to her son. And learn that there are some things worse than death.
A mother’s greatest wish or worst nightmare comes true when she finds hints that her dead son may still be alive.
To stop a brutal killer, the NYPD enlists the help of clairvoyant Graham Harris. He sees the murders in his mind -- sometimes at the moment they are happening. Then he sees the most terrifying vision of all -- his own murder...
