“On the morning that will mark the end of the word they have known, Molly and Neil Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain on their roof., “At first is seems like just a heavy rain but it smells different and the effects are frightening. Soon it is evident that an alien race is intent on wiping out the survivors of the rain and the world is under attack.
The rain stops but fog replaces it and those left face attack dead bodies come back to life and fungi that inhabit and live on everything it touches.
Molly and Neil and a golden retriever named Virgil are the children in their small towns only hope it seems. At first, they fear that the aliens have allowed them to rescue the children to harvest them for some more terrible end, but they come to hope that maybe they have been spared for a special reason.
Comparing Koontz to Stephen King seems natural with the subject of this novel being horror. King writing seems more at home in the genre, but Koontz offers a little more hope eventually in his plot. Well worth reading if you’re a fan of Dean Koontz especially.
Quotes
“Reality isn't what it used to be.”
“Maybe there's nothing impossible tonight. We're down the hole to Wonderland, and no White Rabbit to guide us."
If I remember correctly, the White Rabbit was an unreliable guide, anyway.”
“Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.”
“...like a scene from the swamps of Louisiana or the mind of Poe on opium.”
“Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.”
“The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relentless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.”
“We don't call them inmates,' Molly said, quoting one of the psychiatrists.'We call them patients”
