You Don't Scare Me [Hardcover]

John Farris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2007

Jubilation County, Georgia, Ten Years Ago:

 Chase Emrick was fourteen when her mother married Crow Tillman. Maybe it was his creepy name, or his sinister good looks; maybe it was the glass eye with the bolt of lightning for a pupil that he kept covered with a black eye patch, or maybe it was the rattlesnake tattoo that curled around his left wrist onto his hand, but for some reason, Chase never trusted Crow. Then one terrifying night of horror proved what Chase had felt all along . . . Crow Tillman was pure evil.

New Haven, Connecticut, Present Day:

Crow Tillman is ten years dead, but he hasn't stopped haunting Chase Emrick. Everyone she's ever been close to suffers horrible fates, leaving Chase all alone in this world. Haunted by Crow, she has spent the last ten years of her life proving mathematically that a dimension lies unseen in our reality--one where the dead can inflict their will on the living: a netherworld of horror where Crow Tillman is in complete control.
            Adam Cameron is a campus cop, and he's utterly smitten by Chase's frailty, beauty, and genius. But getting close to Chase drags Adam into a world he didn't bargain for and head to head with the essence of evil and the reality of death. There is only one way to get Crow Tillman to leave Chase alone: To battle him, you must first die.
 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A young woman's tussle with a malignant predator from beyond the grave drives this bold new supernatural thriller from bestseller Farris (Phantom Nights). In the early chapters, which crackle with electrifying suspense, Chase Emrick recounts her terrifying childhood abduction by her creepy stepfather, Crow Tillman, who commits suicide and nearly takes her to the afterlife with him. Now a math student at Yale, Chase finds herself constantly fending off attacks from Crow as he distills his evil essence into a variety of menacing forms in order to reclaim her. Realizing her only hope is to beat him on his own turf, Chase debarks for the Netherworld of the dead for a final showdown. Once in the Netherworld, the narrative shifts into film-script form, an audacious but not entirely effective trick, and it nearly dissipates the story's hitherto relentless momentum. To Farris's credit, he redeems the tale with a killer ending that shows why he's still one of the most dependable writers of horror working today. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Mama has been widowed for three years when she marries twice-divorced druggie and domestic abuser Crow Tillman in a casino, literally sickening her 14-year-old daughter, Chase, and throwing younger son Jimmy into a tailspin retreat to his tree house. Ten years after Crow tragically goes "off the deep end," former New Haven Divinity School student-turned-campus-cop Adam Cameron crushes big time on math grad student Chase, whom he rescues from an oncoming bus. Chase has fits of blepharospasm--dangerous, post-traumatic episodes that leave her unable to open her eyes for two or three minutes. The long-dead Crow haunts her, and that has induced her to formulate mathematical theories of unseen dimensions that control reality. When the only way to loosen Crow's hold on Chase is to battle him in the netherworld, Adam takes up the gauntlet. Veteran horror master Farris puts new readers and established fans on the edge of their seats via compelling characterization and ratcheting up the tension at every turn of a well-crafted plot. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books; 1st edition (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312850646
• ISBN-13: 978-0312850647
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,413,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Should Have Been A Short Story, April 16, 2007

By 

MRose "smaurie" (Springfield, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Don't Scare Me (Hardcover)

I gave this book three stars basically because it kept me interested enough to finish it. The plot was very thin and I just could not connect with the characters. Plotlines dropped off so you never found out where they were going. Some things insinuated which should have just been said. Ending told in a kooky kinda screenplay fashion.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suberb horror thriller, April 5, 2007

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Don't Scare Me (Hardcover)

As she attends Yale University as a math major working to prove the existence of a dimension outside of the relative reality of ours, Chase Emrick knows how close she came to die as a teen. Her abusive disturbing stepfather Crow Tillman abducted her with the intention of a murder-suicide for some eerie motive. He failed as she escaped, but he killed himself.

However though a decade has passed, Chase knows somehow Crow's evil eye still seeks her from beyond. She is alone because of him as bad things accidentally happen to anyone who tries to get close to her as he still plans to possess her. Chase thinks she has found the coordinates to what she calls Netherworld where she believes Crow lives, that is if a dead person can live. Desperate to destroy the serpent, the frightened Chase journeys to Crow's turf to challenge him with her soul on the line.

The opening scenes on earth are some of the best horror description in years as everyone will feel the creepiness of Crow when he lived and the malevolence of this creature when he died as well as the astral-spatial geometry of Netherlands. Once Chase begins her trek into Netherworld, the story line retains its excitement, but loses some of its uniqueness. Still John Farris will have his audience hooked in a one sitting thriller in which the mouse insists to the cat (and herself) YOU DON'T SCARE ME when she knows she should be very scared.

Harriet Klausner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So so, July 15, 2007

By 

M. GREGORY "mgrego2" (MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: You Don't Scare Me (Hardcover)

I had high hopes for this book. There are so many good things said about Farris. However, it just didn't work out. Perhaps I'm a stick in the mud but I like to see dialog called out through the use of quotation marks. Add to this, the jarring transition to a movie script, close to the end, and you get a novel that seems more like an experiment than it does a full-fledged effort.

The escalating encounters with Crow, the subsequent escapes by the lead characters, the anti-climactic denouement of Crow, and the head-shaking finale, were just too much with too little payback. I feel like I wasted time on this book that could have been better spent on something else.