Fear Itself

by Barret Schumacher

Devrie Haler has always believed that she can sense things that nobody else can. Whether it is the secret adventures of her third-grade students or warnings of a near-fatal car crash, Devrie gets signals from a place she cannot identify that tell her things that she has no way of knowing. Her bizarre powers are charming, even amusing to her adoring husband, Reed. Until one of her premonitions comes true.

The premonition about her own violent death.

Overcome by grief, Reed stumbles upon Devrie's journal, in which she wrote her visions down. Amazed by the accuracy of her predictions about her own death, Reed becomes obsessed with nine cryptic phrases that seem to hint at another death--this time of a little girl. Accompanied by an orphan dog present at the site of his wife's murder, Reed heads out on a roller-coaster ride that will rip apart his beliefs on good, evil, scientific progress, and the various forces that control our lives on Earth. He may have a shot at saving the next victim--if he can only come to understand what Devrie's writings are telling him.

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 2002

Reviews

[Miss_otis]

Definitely another in my "Would never have finished it if I'd had something else to read at work" category.

Reasons I loathed this book, in no particular order:

The characters were, across the board, flat and unengaging. The protaganist, Reed, was supposed to be in mourning, but you certainly couldn't tell, most of the time, that his pregnant wife had recently been brutally raped and murdered. I do admit that his erratic actions could easily be driven by mourning, and I think his journey was meant to be eerie, since he was taking cues from his somewhat-psychic wife's journal, but but honestly, most every move he made really just seemed pointless, if not downright stupid.

All the female characters were used only as set dressing and/or plot devices, the most obvious of which is the aforementioned brutal rape and murder of a pregnant woman. Reed's wife Devire is a 3rd grade teacher, and another female character is a pediatrician, because of course professional women have to work with kids. That's not even touching on how the pediatrician literally tells her six-year-old daughter that they have a big, strong, man to protect them. Well, thank God. Of course a big, strong man will keep the psychotic killer at bay.

Multiple POVs are used within the same paragraphs, and while nst multiple POVs can be quite effective, in this book it's clumsy and distracting.

And really, the entire plot was unbelievably flimsy. There was little tension and the "supernatural" elements were not very super or even all that interesting. When the killer was revealed, it made no sense at all - again, I think it was supposed to be "ooooooooooo, creepy!" but instead, it came across as, "Wow, that's so.....lame." I also suspect that the science was quite likely crap as well, but as I'm not a geneticist, I can't really say.