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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Almost too suspenseful, September 4, 2007
The year is 1915 -- not the most popular year in which to set a crime novel, to be sure -- but the year is really unimportant, except to make the events that occur in Fright even more shocking than they would have been in 1950, when it was first published under the pseudonym George Hopley.
Preston Marshall is a lucky man. He has a job on Wall Street and a lovely fiancee, but a single drunken night leads to an event that, one week later -- the week after the sinking of the Lusitania, in fact, though the two occurrences are not otherwise connected -- begins his downward spiral into a life where every minute is filled with ... wait for it! ... Fright.
Author Cornell Woolrich is probably best known for writing the novella that Alfred Hitchcock turned into his classic film, Rear Window. (His work has been the basis for numerous radio, TV, and film adaptations, one of the most recent being the Angelina Jolie-Antonio Banderas potboiler Original Sin, loosely based on Waltz into Darkness with all the noir trappings intact.)
All these works share some similarities, despite their different approaches, namely protagonists who respond to the events around them far more dramatically than those events really deserve -- at least at first. Marshall's reactions in Fright get him into a deeper quagmire than his original actions ever would have.
Woolrich uses this intense nature of Marshall's to keep the suspense level high. So high, in fact, that a couple of scenes -- if the tension were just one notch higher -- would work just as well played as comedy. But no one is laughing as the events in Fright get darker and darker still (shocking even this jaded reader; I can only imagine how they affected the 1950 audience), culminating in a tragic ending that twists all that came before (but you have to pay attention to details to pick up on its real significance).
This is a terrifically suspenseful dark crime novel from an author whose name is synonymous with noir among those who know the subgenre. Used copies of the "George Hopley" original (and, until now, only) edition of Fright can run upwards of fifty dollars, and it is great to see this Cornell Woolrich classic revived by Hard Case Crime for a much less upsetting price.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another masterpiece unearthed by Hard Case Crime, September 25, 2007
Noir fans everywhere should celebrate Hard Case Crime for its reprinting of several lost masterpieces. This book by Cornell Woolrich is, in my opinion, the best one yet. We should all buy as many Hard Case Crime books as possible so that they will keep getting these books back into print for us.
Okay. Now that I've got that little speech out of the way - onto the book. It's fantastic from the first page. Like most of Woolrich's books, you can feel the agony and despair jumping right off the page, building to an almost intolerable crescendo by the end. This is an amazing, tragic psychologocial portrait of a man gone wrong for reasons you can somehow understand. Woolrich for me is a masterful writer, even better than Jim Thompson, in the way he gets you deep into the psychology of a person who should be completely unsympathetic, and takes you right along while that character does some terrible things. Woolrich never loses his humanity when he does this.
In addition to a great, suspenseful plot that finally boils over, all of the characterizations here are fantastic. Woolrich was ahead of his time in writing complex, believable, interesting female characters and this book is no exception. He captures the particular suffering of men and women of a certain era so well in this book. There are never any truly happy characters in Woolrich's books (are there? I can't think of any) but you won't want it any other way. If you love noir, get this book!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fear and Agony, September 1, 2007
"Fright," while not one of Cornell Woolrich's best-known novels, is definitely one worth reading. It provides an excellent demonstration of this noir writer's talent for creating an unbearable level of suspense. The hidden secrets and shameful agonies its characters endure make it almost painful to read at times. Woolrich was known as the "Hitchcock of the written word," and this book shows why.
While the novel was first published in 1950, it is set in 1915, a generation earlier, when Woolrich was only twelve years old. This setting during the Progressive Era is ideal. American society had entered a time of moral uplift, sandwiched between the excesses of the Gilded Era past and the Roaring Twenties yet to come. Victorian probity held sway. The whorehouses, no longer a genial rite of passage to be winked at, were being closed. Young men increasingly regarded their indulgences as a guilty secret--a shameful dalliance to be hidden from public knowledge.
Enter Press Marshall, a young man with ordinary desires who is engaged to be married to Marjorie Worth. Marjorie is a sweet young girl from a loving and wealthy Victorian family, naive and perhaps a bit spoiled, but devoted to Press. It is her devotion that will create the climate of agony throughout the novel, as the dark secrets from his past destroy her innocent hopes for wedded bliss.
For there is another woman. A woman of much less innocence and wealth, a coiled viper of a woman who encountered Press at a moment of weakness and has been blackmailing him ever since. When Press takes steps to end her blackmail for good, the horrifying results leave him trapped in a web of unendurable guilt and anxiety. His flailing attempts to escape only pull him in deeper and deeper and deeper still...creating a living hell for both Press and Marjorie. The end result is horrifying, as unsparing as any tragic ending in classic literature.
The book ends with an aftermath that unveils an even more shocking twist. The sophisticated reader may anticipate the suprise, but it still packs a punch. The best thing about this novel is Woolrich's unsentimental approach to the senselessness of it all. For such is the essence of noir.
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