Customer Reviews

Fear Pb

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

James Lowry, Atworthy's Professor of Ethnology, is paying dearly for having written a scathing article about witchcraft. First of all, he is dishonorably discharged from the college for writing such demagoguery. Then he loses four hours - with no recollections whatever. Worst of all, the entire realm of the supernatural is out to prove him wrong...

Fear is devastatingly boring. It introduces its hero, catch, and premise in the first twenty pages or so, then hems and haws for about a hundred with no plot development whatever while the unfortunate Prof. Lowry has episodic run-ins with the supernatural, finally gets a bit interesting in its final thirty pages by introducing some fairly original concepts, and then ends as abruptly as possible by putting everything on its head and cutting it down with a big rusty axe. Its Final Twist feels contrived, if crudely ironic.

"Fear" is terribly dated and its characters are cardboard-flat. Its protagonist is a perfectly upright fellow, logical, caring, with an academic background to boot: in other words - hard to identify with. "Fear" doesn't even have a defined antagonist. The story consists of a single catch which is revealed in its entirety on the very last page - for the remainder of the book Lowry jumps at shadows, shivers in the dark, sees strange things, and slowly goes mad (though, being so shallow in the first place, he doesn't have much of a personality to warp). Supposedly, he is out to find the four missing hours, but he has neither clues nor leads, nor any faint, sinister memories - he literally goes out at night and "looks" for his loss. The narrative lacks sophistication, and uses lots of exclamation marks and eye-grabbing sentences ("It was an inch deep in blood!").

Hardly worth the while to read.

This supposed horror book isn't a horror book. It's more like a description of an acid trip than anything else. A university professor, recovering from malaria, is fired for a controversial paper deriding idols and artifacts of certain gods. Apparently, this angers some spirits, and after seemingly losing a few hours of his life and his hat, he descends (literally) into a world of weird characters and doors and life forces involving his wife and best friend.

It's hard not to give away the plot, because the plot is only revealed in the end. It's basically a few huge extremely strange events in one book.

Even though the imagery is very good for this short, Hubbard's language is a little terse and antiquated to make it a quick read. Though overall pretty interesting, I would not recommend this, as I wouldn't know what to classify it as.

I decided to give L. Ron Hubbard's Fear a second chance. I'd rated it at two stars from what I remembered of my original read years ago, but was discussing the book in a forum (where it was getting generally positive reviews) and figured maybe I had judged it too harshly in the past.

Well, I finished it a second time, but the book didn't deserve a second read. It just isn't good. And that's too bad, because the plot idea is a good one. Archeologist Jim Lowry loses his hat and his memory of the last four hours. He discovers (or should I say he 'just knows') that if he finds his hat he will find his four hours, but if he finds his four hours he will die. Time to buy a new hat, I say...

Unfortunately for that kernel of a terrific plot, Fear reads like it is the result of a jumble of ideas Ron had that he didn't bother linking into a cohesive tale. Events that happen in one chapter don't seem to have any sort of effect on what occurs in the next chapter. The story seems to just sort of randomly flow with very little rhyme or reason to it, one surreal event after another. Situations rise from out of nowhere. In a way, the book felt like what I imagine an extended acid trip would be like. That might be an accomplishment, but I don't think that is what L. Ron was setting out for.

The writing is not good. L. Ron just didn't seem to have much feeling for the atmosphere required to tell a scary story. Rather than imply things to get under the reader's skin the way the best horror can, he would just use short sentences (the verbal equivalent to a jump cut in a bad horror movie) like "Two red eyes stared back!" (He has an over-reliance on exclamation points! in his narrative as well.) Also, anything Lowry discovers through the course of the story is something that 'he just knows for some reason' rather than anything that the character sifts out from the events unfolding around him.

The stilted unbelievable characters act like nobody except people in bad pulp fiction or '50's sitcoms ever really acted. Jim Lowry and his wife of several years are portrayed as being desperately in love, yet they sleep in separate rooms. The characters don't have any depth or believability to them. I never cared about Lowry, his wife Mary or his beautiful (and this is emphasized repeatedly) friend Tommy (who is aside from being beautiful is also a professor of psychology, though he councils Jim not to go ridiculing the idea of demons and devils. He is also a bachelor at forty who seems to have no interest in women. Maybe he should practice some self analysis? Now that might have been an interesting angle for the story to pursue). Since I never cared about the characters, I never had any apprehension as to what might happen to them.

The self serving foreword and fawning introduction from the 'editors' of the book don't help any. (Though I guess if I had a messiah and s/he wrote a book, I'd probably be apt to oversell it as well.) Also, L. Ron's foreword acts as a spoiler of sorts to the book. I understand he wanted to tell me what an original, creative genius he was, but the should have placed his little note of explanation after the story, not before.

I'd like to see some director take the basic setup of Fear and turn it into a movie. One of those movies where the title and general setup is the same but nothing else is. The core idea is a good one. The way it was executed in this book though, was bad.

At the risk of seeming dim-witted, I have to admit that I initially didn't really "get" this book. This is not to say that Fear isn't a good book. I enjoyed reading it, and the strange journey of Lowry was presented strikingly and richly, giving me a great sense of the growing mania afflicting the protagonist, inspiring my sympathy and inculcating my own dislike for Lowry's friend Tommy Williams. Lowry's surreal journey down a disappearing staircase outside his door was a little overblown for my tastes, but the more tangible effects of Lowry's situation, from the sublime to the overt, struck me as very well done. I wanted to know what happened to Lowry's missing four hours almost as much as he did. My problem was that I just could not reconcile the ending with the story as I had read it. I understood the ending, although perhaps not at every level the author intended, but I just didn't find it fully acceptable. It was like a splash of cold water hitting your face, awakening you to the realization that everything you just experienced was not quite real. Perhaps it is this sudden splash of "truth" that makes this book so wonderful to many readers (including the likes of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov), but I initially found it disappointing.

A day later, I have found my thoughts returning to this little tale, and a new sense of appreciation has begun to take root in my mind. Bits and pieces, particularly the oft-repeated frantic calls of Lowry's wife interspersed throughout the action, have begun to coalesce and make more sense to me. I must say that the ending is no longer so unsatisfying as it was at first. My visceral reactions have given way to more philosophical musings, so I must credit the author with producing a work that stays with you and makes you think. Having said that, though, I still find that, whichever way I look at the novel, I have questions that are not answered and can point to incidents that still don't make perfect sense to me. As such, I cannot go so far as to declare this book a classic.

This book can quite easily be read in the course of a single sitting; in fact, it probably should be read from cover to cover nonstop in order to achieve the fullest effect possible on the senses and thoughts of the reader. The most compelling aspect of the tale is the way it draws the reader into Lowry's mind and taps the reader's emotions; to fully experience the journey, one really should read the book without pause. As for the scare factor, I did not find this book scary or unnerving at all, nor can I really understand why some readers obviously do find it frightening. The tale is gripping, it does draw the reader into the story, and the ending, while not necessarily surprising, is refreshing in its nonconformity with most readers' expectations, so I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in the suspense and horror genres. I would also urge future reviewers to wait a day before writing a review complaining about the ending; many of my impressions of the book changed dramatically after a day's thought.

If you only have a first grade reading ability, and can be excited about a jar of pickles, then this is the book for you. Limitted to small words, random acts of illogic, and a poor excuse for dialogue text, I found it hard to pick the book back up after laying it down. Needless to say, I finally got the book read, and realized that I had wasted my time. I experienced no personal fear, and could have walked down a dark alley at midnight, while reading this book, and experience no qualms.

Usually, I take books I don't care for, to the thrift shop. This one, I tore into little pieces, dumped in the trash, and then sat there upset with myself that I actually WASTED my time on the book. I would suggest that the reader seek entertainment in other more enlightening forms, like plucking their nose hairs, trying to stare down their cats, and clipping their toenails.

"Fear" has been praised by people like Stephen King and Robert Bloch. It's been called a great, chilling horror novel. Personally, I didn't find it scary, but it did make me curious to know what had happened during the four missing hours. Unfortunately, once the mystery starts, the plot goes nowhere for the next half of the book until the ending. There are some rather good sequences towards the end, but the ending itself is more confusing than satisfying.

2,5 for Fear. 3 stars for the Bridge Publications edition, which includes a pretty good short story called "Borrowed Glory".

Just to let you know, I am not a Scientologist, EX-Scientologist, or an Anti-Scientologist "Hubbard-Hater." I have read Dianetics twice (and loved it both times). I have read various Scientology books, and found most of them excellent!

I was immediately attracted to FEAR by the author's non-fiction works, and also by a rumor that L. Ron wrote the book in a single weekend. However, I found FEAR to be the biggest piece of garbage I have ever read.

The book is about a man who lost four hours of his life, and embarks on a journey to discover what happened during that time. How ironic! I wish that I had MY four hours back, too. What a waste of time....

To put it mildly, I'm mystified by the praise that Robert Bloch and Stephen King and Ray Bradbury lavish upon "Fear". Even on their worst days, those guys could (and did) write circles around a second stringer like L. Ron Hubbard. "Fear" would have worked reasonably well as a short story, but Hubbard pads his very thin concept with 100+ pages of silly, irrelevant booga-booga imagery pulled from thin air--and, by the time the denouement is revealed, the reader no longer cares.
If you simply can't get enough Hubbard (I must confess that I've never met anyone who fits this description, but I'm sure rabid fans exist), you'll find "Fear" mildly interesting if only because it represents a departure from the author's usual space opera output. But if it's an engrossing tale of psychological horror you're after, avoid this book.

If you're in the mood for a easy/fast reading and scary novel, then "Fear" is the book for you. "Fear" is by far the scariest book I have ever read and probably the best too. Once I started to read it, I couldn't put it down and read every time I had the chance, and in a day or two, I finished it. The novel is about a college professor named Jim Lowry who strongly disbelieves in demons and devils. He believes that they were created by witch doctors in order to control people by telling them that they exist in order to sacre them so the people would obey them. Lowry finds himself in a world of madness after he writes an article about his beliefs, loses his teaching job, and then abruptly loses four hours of his life. What happened to him during these four hours is what he searches for and slowly drives himself mad doing so. Lowry suffers an ironic fate during his quest to find his "missing" hours, and a twisted end waits at the end for the reader of this book. I urge anyone, other than the weak minded, to read this book if they are looking for a very short, yet thrilling novel.

I like this classic L. Ron Hubbard book a lot! This book really demonstrates his imagination as a writer, immortilizing him as one of the greatest writers of all time! Fear is a classic milestone in literature. It's the tale from everyone's hometown, and the creapy cobwebs of your darkest nightmares. Fear captures you, spins you around, rolls you like a tidal wave and erupts into the most incredible ending ever put on paper! 'Gripping' and 'chilling' are understatements. If you want an real good read on a dark and stormy night, read this one... but be sure to keep a flashlight handy, and a table to hide under. This is one hell of a book! It easily goes as one of my top favorites!