A few weeks ago I started reading The Taking by Dean Koontz.  Things have been hectic because of the move.  I looked forward to relaxing with a good book.

The book is about a couple who live in a house surrounded by pine trees.

Their house stood high in the San Bernardino Mountains, embraced by sugar pines, knobcone pines, and towering ponderosas with dramatic fissured bark.

“How fun,” I thought.  “Our new house is surrounded by pine trees as well.”

In the novel there’s a horrendous rainstorm.

The voices of the tempest were legion, like an angry crowd chanting in a lost language.  Torrents pounded and pried at the cedar siding, at the shingles, as if seeking entrance.

I looked outside uneasily.  It did seem to be raining quite a bit. Was there local flooding?   Was the storm going to get worse?  There was no way to find out.  There are no nearby radio stations.  The newspaper is a weekly and their website doesn’t carry breaking news.   Plus our house is set back from the road.   We can only see two other houses from our house.  There was no way to check in with the outside world.

As the book progressed, the rain became more and more ominous.  Finding a place without windows became an important task for the characters in the book.  Why?

“The courthouse has fewer and smaller windows,” Paulie explained.  “It’s more easily fortified and defended.”

Did you notice that our new house has a lot of windows?

In the novel, the rain lead to some alarming developments.

She realized that a colony of mushroomlike fungi lay before her, fat and round and clustered in such a way that they resembled the coils of a gathered serpent.

It was too much!  At that point I decided that the book was getting a little too intense for me.  I decided to go for a drive.  I walked outside and saw this in front of my garage door.

Alien fungus!!!!

I’m happy to report that the world looked better after a nice peppermint mocha.  I also decided that I needed to put the book aside for a sunny day.