Book Review: Fear

About a month ago I was talking about great books with a few friends, and one of them suggested I check out the book Fear by L Ron Hubbard. Here is what I knew about the author until that point.

1) Creator of Scientology (I knew this because I almost joined at one point in my twenties, for cash - also I saw a pretty awesome orientation video showing god petting a monkey, which is still one of my favourite images to this day)

2) He wrote the book that became the movie Battlefield Earth, which single-handedly ruined my interest in checking out new Science Fiction films for about a year.

3) He wrote that book with the volcano on the cover.

So bearing that in mind I checked out his 1940 novel Fear, considered a classic of horror by the likes of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. Now I've read a lot of horror in my time so when I hear a lot of folks saying "classic" I get a little nervous. But you know, what?

The book was pretty cool. It followed a university teacher named James Lowry as his world begins to dissolve around him one day. There are no monsters, haunted houses or aliens, and it does get pretty freaky in some parts. My only problem was that as the idea was pretty clever, I've seen it redone more than a few times in other horror stories.

In the end, a fun book that I recommend to fans of horror, it's not quite a keeper for me (having a copy availabe at my local library is enough) but I had a pretty good time reading it.