Fear

Rating:
Summary: Review of Audio Book version
Review: 1) Roddey McDowall is such an enjoyable reader of books. His voice inflections appropriatley matching the fear, excitement, etc of the character is so well done. Not to mention his voice overs for different characters makes it easier to keep track of who is who.

2) Very interesting and gripping story. Something of a supernatural flavor with demons and spirits...or so it implies. The story leaves you guessing until the end what is actually going on. The story is definitely one of the spookiest stories I've read (heard) in a long time.

3) By chance my local library has 75% of their sci-fi/fantasy audio books all from this author. I've never been a L. Ron Hubbard fan but the more I hear his books the more I'm enjoying his fictional writings. This was more supernatural than sci-fi but in all the author's pieces so far the characters are interesting and engaging.

Rating:
Summary: Forget all you know: this book is scarier
Review: I bought this book because my favourite bookshop didn't receive the one I ordered and I didn't have anything to read. Started it at 11pm... Couldn't sleep for 2 days. The preamble tells that the story is logical... "OK", I thought... And started reading. The book is good and scary as hell. But then I remembered what the preamble said: Yes, the story is really logic and the fantasmagories inside it are absolutely possible. Then I felt really terrified.
I've never been scared of anything. Except this book... And I loved that...

Rating:
Summary: Quick Reading Horror Novel
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Great Horror By A Master of Sci-Fi
Review: This is the only Hubbard word I have ever read, and most likely the only one I'll ever read; but this is not because this book fell short of excellent! This is a wonderful forray out of his standard genre, sci-fi, and into horror. I read this after reading numerous recommendations of it as a classic by the likes of Stephen King and Robert Weinberg, and was not dissapointed I did. This is a classic that I found disturbing and un-put-downable for the first few chapters, and highlly satisfying by the end. Quite a premise: a man loses 3 hours of his life. There are hints that suggest he did something unthinkable during this time frame, so he must now search for what happened during this timeframe. His search takes him on a very memorable journey and what he finds is truly horrifying. This is not a particularly long book--it is said he wrote it on a train-ride from California to New York--but it is very much worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Trippy, but scary?
Review: 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.