Fear was a book that made the quarterfinals of my group of the Self Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC). This was however, not a slam dunk Quarterfinalist - one of our reviewers on our team of four enjoyed this quite a bit and the other one felt utterly perplexed and that he was missing something, so it didn't seem to work at all. So I went into the reading of Fear knowing this might be a polarizing, if short, work and wondered on what side I would fall.
Unfortunately, the answer is that I fell on the side of Fear not working - Fear is ostensibly the story of an independent film director in the future who has had some success but is not a household name, with the story following him as he tries to get made his passion project movie Phobos (aka Fear), a remake of an adapation of a famous horror novel on Mars. I believe this story is an attempt at absurd satire, as the filming goes completely awry due to editors, nutjob actors, and more....but the writing of this short novel never really hits home on that note - it's never a particularly humorous story, the plot beats don't seem to flow consistently, and there really aren't any characters of any depth. The result is a story that I can't recommend and one that will not be high on my rankings for the competition.
Quick Plot Summary: Fyodor Braava is an indy director/producer that has had some success, with one critically acclaimed film produced and one film finished that the production company is currently butchering into a form fit for commercial release. But he's desperate to have his next film be his passion project: an adaptation of Phobos, a classic horror novel set on Mars that has been adapted a while back but not in recent times.
When Fyodor finally gets a company on board, he starts the process of working on producing the film, and dealing with the realities of trying to get various movie stars on board and to adapt the Martian environments to what he needs in his sets. But as filming gets closer and finally begins, Fyodor finds that things start getting more and more out of control, until what remains may no longer be true to his vision......
Thoughts: A quick note - Fear is not a horror novel, this is not one of those books where filming a horror story results in actual horrors; instead this story is actually interested in showing a film production going awry due to normal (with a science fiction spin of being a few hundred years in the future) issues - so you have a production group who wants edits, you have one lead actor who has a ridiculously tight and inconvenient timetable that makes filming almost impossible, and you have another lead who shows up late, has someone piping in the lines into his ear from afar, and wants to constantly rewrite the script and scenes into something completely different and incohesive.
The issue is that none of this forms a coherent story. The ridiculousness of the film going awry never really becomes funny or humorous as I think is intended, and the book's events and characters are often one note and/or jumped away from and abandoned on short notice - so it often feels janky and disjointed at a story, with certain plot elements (an actress is discovered who possibly propositions Fyodor...which never goes anywhere! the secondary lead can only film for three weeks during which dust storms prevent him from filming...but he's still there at the end filming what should be well past that and having conflict with the other lead actor, etc.) seeming to go nowhere or be contradicted by later events. Even the book's prologue, which I guess is meant to show how our lead Fyodor is a bit incompetent, bizarrely is set 5 years in the past and then is never followed up on, like it was from a separate short story.
And well there are no characters who the author makes it so that we care about them here. Fyodor is the only one with any development essentially, and that development stops at Indy-director with a vision that is hijacked and who then gets depressed at what happens at the end...but he doesn't do anything interesting with that development and it's hard to really feel that bad for him; he also wavers between incompetent and just hijacked by others' incompetence depending upon what the author wants, which doesn't help.
Basically Fear feels like a first draft of an absurd satire novel that was built upon writing scenes from an outline that were then smushed together with little editing. It's possible editing and expansion of things could've made this amusing or coherent. But it's not in that state here and I thus cannot recommend it.
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