L. Ron Hubbard - Fear

[dem bones]

L. Ron Hubbard - Fear (New Era Publications, 1991: originally Unknown, July 1940)

Blurb:
THE UNPREDICTABLE
Professor James Lowry didn't believe in spirits, or witches, or demons. Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn't remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing - slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember. Lowry is pursued by a dark, secret evil that is turning his whole world against him while it whispers a warning from the shadows: "If you find your that you'll find your four hours. If you find your four hours then you will die..."

"If you're not averse to a case of the cold chills — a rather bad one — and you've never read FEAR, I urge you to do so. Don't even wait fora dark and stormy night. This is one of the really, really good ones." - Stephen King

This special paperback edition includes L. Ron Hubbard-'s chilling horror short story BORROWED GLORY

"Ever watched a whole psychopathic ward go stark raving mad during the three nights that the moon is full?"

Have read plenty of favourable comment about Hubbard's novel without ever coming across a copy until this New Era edition showed up at the market yesterday morning. Two hundred pages of large type is exactly the kind of book-in-the-background I need just now, so let's get started.

Prof. James Lowry, 38, a globe-trotting ethnologist attached to Atworthy College, is recovering from a mild bout of malaria following an expedition to Yucatan. Lowry has recently published an article in The Weekly Newspaper ridiculing belief in the existence of devils and demons, and his physician, Dr. Chalmers, warns him that he could be in hot water with college President Jebson, who won't take kindly to Lowry name-dropping his position at Atworthy in the piece. Chalmers is proved right. Jebson, who is jealous of Lowry, reads him the riot act and hands him two months notice. James is distraught. How will he tell Mary, his beautiful young wife who has come to love life on the campus?

Lowry visits his colleague Prof. Tommy Williams, a life-long friend, and quite the most charismatic, popular and unorthodox lecturer at Atworthy, only for Tommy to surprise him with superstitious hokem! Man is inherently evil. Devils and Demons not only exist, they spend their every moment encouraging the human race to inflict further miseries upon one another, and to mock them is to attract their full attention. Lowry should pen a second essay, acknowledging this truth and thereby placate their vanity. 'What a load of tosh!' thinks the Prof., grabbing his hat to leave. He knows he has an appointment this afternoon, but where and who with, has temporarily escaped him ....

[cauldronbrewer]

Dec 17, 2012 9:10:21 GMT dem bones said:

Have read plenty of favourable comment about Hubbard's novel without ever coming across a copy until this New Era edition showed up at the market yesterday morning.

I'll be curious to hear your final take on Fear. I was torn between being disappointed relative to expectations (given its high reputation) and being impressed relative to expectations (given that Hubbard wrote it).

[dem bones]

Dec 17, 2012 15:33:43 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

I'll be curious to hear your final take on Fear. I was torn between being disappointed relative to expectations (given its high reputation) and being impressed relative to expectations (given that Hubbard wrote it).

Am up to p. 100 now and it's working for me so far. Particularly liked the waking nightmare wherein Prof. Jack Lowry meets 'mother', the cowled figure, and a very impressive Jack Ketch.

The professor has long since messed up his tweeds, lost his famous felt hat and four precious hours from his life. It's made him very paranoid, particularly about just how close his wife and his best friend really are. Tommy and Mary were an item before Lowry surprised himself by winning her heart. Now he's starting to fret that maybe she's not the Saint among women he takes her for. And what of Tommy? Why is such a grounded individual so insistent that demons are not only real, but Lowry has brought them down upon himself, and President Jebson is assuredly one such in human disguise. Worse, Tommy's mantra - "Look, Jim. You don't think that I fed you a drug or anything in that drink do you? ... You know I'm your friend, don't you, Jim" - is hardly reassuring.

Have read other Hubbard stories from Unknown in various anthologies edited by Zacherley, Vic Ghidalea and J. J. Strating, remember not one iota about any of 'em, so Fear is already ahead of the game.

[dem bones]

Ed Cartier (Unknown, July 1940)

Finished the final 150 pages in a single burst, and my only slight disappointment was (and this rarely happens), I guessed. That said, it's certainly a powerful, anxiety attack of a novel, and I particularly liked how Hubbard wrenches Prof. Lowry in and out of hallucination until the reader is almost as disorientated as he must be.

It's a happy coincidence reading this back-to-back with Chetwynd-Hayes' The Psychic Detective, because both are (mis)adventures in the beyond, but, whereas RCH, for the most part, plays for laughs, introducing his trademarked, self-consciously wacky monsters whenever he's at a loose end, Hubbard takes it entirely straight. He warns in his authors note, "There is one thing I wish the reader could keep in mind throughout, and that is: this story is wholly logical, for all that will appear to the contrary. It is not a very nice story ...", and he doesn't cheat. The editor's make the lofty claim that he was the first to dispense with werewolves, vampires, headless spectres and all the other traditional horror pin-ups - which, even were it true, isn't really applicable to Fear: His demons are familiar enough - Tommy and Mary are sporadically depicted as vampires sucking his soul dry, and the man who's shown his own grave was old when Dickens picked up on it (Fear reminds me of a black Christmas Carol, or an anti-It's A Wonderful Life), but he makes the best use of them. The cast includes the ambiguous Sebastian, whose tomb Lowry excavated on an expedition to Chezetol and whose golden belt is now displayed in the museum; a black mass with eyes which pries his fingertips loose from the cliff edge: Jack Ketch and his ever-present hanging rope: a little girl who informs him "Others are only props for you ...You are the entity. The only living thing in this world."; perhaps most disturbing of all, the unseen phantom trio who bully him to the church where Sebastian recites prayers to a hostile and seriously distracted congregation. The men are lecherous, fidgeting demons. The women, beautiful, pure, angelic; or so it seems.

"As the circle of women passed behind the altar, the men would suddenly reach out with clawed hand, and the women, with abruptly lascivious eyes, would glance over the shoulder at the men, and then, with re-formed innocence of expression, file past the front of the altar again.'

All these 'props' exist for a solitary purpose; to torment him until he finally recalls the events of those accursed four hours! If the 'surprise ending' doesn't come as all that much of a surprise today, it's hardly his fault. There have been so many derivatives.