(2004) Pretty good almost SF of a mysterious force that comes to earth as if an alien attack that starts to change the environment and eventually kills all but children and selected adults. Turns out it may have been the devil making the world a better place to live.

Many years ago I read and enjoyed several of this author's books although I can't recall much about them now. So it was with a pleasant anticipation that I picked up this book and at first I found it interesting and creepy.

Molly wakes in the middle of the night due to very heavy rain that has not managed to wake her husband, and she goes downstairs. She sees that the rain is luminous and it has driven a lot of coyotes onto her porch. The animals look terrified of something out in the rain which she can sense as a forbidding presence, and she has a mystical experience with them, feeling a sense of union. Then they run off and she goes upstairs where her husband is having a nightmare about something huge descending from the skies. After he wakes up, they both see a reflection in the bedroom mirror showing the room as if the house has been abandoned for years and has odd vegetation growing in it - and a suggestion of something moving around. And after that, TV and telephone communication is gradually cut off, but not before they have seen evidence that the rainfall is world wide and that monsters are taking over.

So far, so creepy. And yet I found a problem almost from the start because there was loads of infodumping, even in the opening pages. Molly has a history - something awful happened to her when she was eight years old and a few years later her beloved mother died of cancer. Her mother was a writer, whose work is already out of print, and she, an author herself, is concerned that the same will happen to hers. And her husband is the best thing that has ever happened in her life - they have a totally empathic relationship. Unfortunately, none of that is dripfed into the scenes between the characters, or conveyed with their dialogue etc. There is throughout the book a tendency to headhop between characters and to have paragraphs of information giving their back story, but it is especially noticeable at the beginning and gets in the way of the menace the writer is trying to create.

There were resonances in this book with others I've read: the strange 'vegetation' which begins to appear is an obvious harkening back to 'The War of the Worlds' and its red weed, and that book/film is name checked more than once. The beginning also reminded me of Stephen King's 'The Mist'. Some images are genuinely creepy, such as the animated doll and the sense of something vast moving above and resonating rather than being heard, in people's bones and blood. Yet there do seem to be rather a lot of hobbyhorses being ridden, including liberal treatment of prisoners, bad parenting, whether climate change is real (the book was published in 2004) and others.

Most adult characters in the book, apart from Molly and her husband, are nasty, and if they are not, have a very short life expectancy (apart from people we don't actually 'meet' although they are performing the same child-rescue role that Molly and Neil take on). Molly's child/teacher-killing father turns up. Some supposed friends or neighbours are literally possessed by the alien force and turn out to be enemies. Multiple types of creature - insectoid, reptillian, simian, fungoid - are spawning everywhere and threatening humanity. Dead bodies are bizarrely reanimated. The whole tone of the book is extremely downbeat and with the huge power of the invading force and its permutation into the whole ecosystem, did seem to be an 'extinction of all life on earth' story for much of the book.

Against that are the preternaturally understanding dogs who help the couple rescue children, and the twist that something which seemed hostile apparently wasn't the lights that kept coming over Molly in the fog and making her feel awful because of the way they saw into her character. And Molly's ability to hold onto hope as a result of her childhood experiences.

The problem, or one of the main ones I found, was that Molly as a character is incredibly bland. Her husband is also Mr Perfect. So to hang the whole book on them is problematic. And the changed premise revealed at the end made the whole thing come crashing down like a house of cards, although I had found it increasingly less like an alien invasion and more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. If the whole incident was meant to be the Rapture where the bad and good are taken up either to hell or heaven, where was Jesus Christ? The rain apparently heralded the time that Satan was given to ravage the Earth just before the Second Coming - that is the clue given by Paulie, Neil's brother when they speak to him on the phone before communication is cut off. So it seems that was why it was being made over into a form of Hell, and why everything goes instantly back to normal when Satan suddenly has to leave. .

I didn't find it realistic that the children were all good either. Having all the surviving adults at the end being useful and skilled such as doctors, carpenters, engineers and so on was rather convenient as was the sudden departure of Satan and his minions, but if that was because Molly refused to sacrifice one child to save the others, I don't see her as a Christ substitute. For me the book jumped ship from one genre to something so completely "out there" it ceased to have all credibility. For that reason I can only award a 1-star rating. ( )

Riveting. Originally read in June 2009 ( )

First DK book I've read. A few boring bits but starts strong. Extraterrestrial invasion/apocalypse vibes. ( )

First DK book I've read. A few boring bits but starts strong. Extraterrestrial invasion/apocalypse vibes. ( )