Customer Reviews

You Don't Scare Me

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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

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.

I enjoyed this book, however I felt that there were so many unused elements. The heroine was a Math genius. I thought she would use this to fight Crow, but this didn't happen. Also the hero--the cop, knew a professor I think it was who had some insight into the undead, yet this was not used or fleshed out. Also I think the end should have occurred more toward the middle of the book. It would have been interesting to see this scenario played out further.

I love John Farris and have read all his books. He's a master of dialogue and that's apparent again in his latest. My only gripe is that he almost goes overboard in the level of brutality his heroine must endure in this one. For heaven's sake--the bad guy is just so unbelievably bad, I was waiting (and waiting) for him to get his comeuppance. I'm still waiting.

I agree that, while it kept my attention, it was very disjointed-is that the word? I would have enjoyed more back story and hated the ended. I lost track of what was going on half the time in the "neitherworld" or whatever.