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Fear Me
Gideon loved women...to death. He seduced them, used them horribly, then discarded them, drained of their very lives. Until the day three women disobeyed him and dared to fight back, to seek revenge, leaving him in a pool of blood. Leaving them free at last from his depravity. — The women don't know that Gideon can't be killed that easily. They don't know what he really is. He has returned to seek vengeance of his own, and their mere deaths will no longer be enough to satisfy him. He will make them pay dearly for crossing him. But first he will destroy everyone they love.
435 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
2 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Laws
58 books137 followersStephen Laws is a full-time novelist, born in Newcastle upon Tyne. Married, with three children, he lives and works in his birthplace. The author of 11 novels, numerous short stories, (collected in THE MIDNIGHT MAN) columnist, reviewer, film-festival interviewer, pianist and recipient of a number of awards, Stephen Laws recently wrote and starred in the short horror movie THE SECRET.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 27, 2016
Vampire stories are a dime a dozen, so it's a given that for them to be even mildly interesting, they can't be cursed with the same endless repetition. Laws injects nifty enough twists, first in how the vampire strangely feeds, and second in how he keeps himself alive. In feeding he collects a woman and keeps stealing her away when he wishes to sate his hunger, until eventually she is dead from this, err...erotic style of nourishment. No blood for this bad boy!
I had written how different it was in how he kept his internal, eternal clock ticking, but then thought better and used the delete button. Maybe this is something best discovered by the reader and not spoiled here. I will just say the pattern of "seven" and "rage" was a clever tactic and small sub-mystery.
The villain, Gideon, is a nasty vampire - you fans of fanged fiends who hate the Anne Rice trend have reason to applaud. The protagonist is a decent enough guy but not overly interesting. The three women range from weepy to superhero. No one is over-stereotypical and the Law's paper people come alive well enough to manage, but there's just too many of them. It hurts the pacing a bit; I hate too much head hopping. I also wished we could have seen inside the vampire's head some, for he likely would be the more interesting of the lot.
Pacing is nimbly satisfying, beginning with an adumbration of the protagonist and what's to come, yet leaving much more to be unearthed later. Atmosphere is delightfully horror-filled, particularly the apartment scene. (Sadly, the library massacre which follows a short while later was a smidge cheesy). Some deaths are literally depressing; thankfully Laws does not shy away from exploring violence or blood.
The author's writing style is morbidly apt with the subject, not bloated with being overly descriptive or annoying 'poetic-like musings'. He keeps the words suited with the story, trying to keep the pace steady. I will say this book dares to lose some interest in the middle, it just drags on a little much, and the overabundance of characters doesn't help. At the end the fight thankfully was not a cop-out, being lengthy and complicated, while keeping its depressing ring.
Fear Me is a typical dark horror novel that doesn't shy away from pain, death, or red stuff. Characters aren't too grating and I can understand their motivations, and the ending is anything but wimpy. Still, Fear Me lacks some luster by not standing out enough, using a quick enough pace to stay interesting but not riveting. The villain isn't explored too deeply and just comes across as cruel - which, for this type of book, is good - but I couldn't care less about his fate either. Mild cheesiness during moments brought it down more points. A book worth reading but not seeking out.
I had written how different it was in how he kept his internal, eternal clock ticking, but then thought better and used the delete button. Maybe this is something best discovered by the reader and not spoiled here. I will just say the pattern of "seven" and "rage" was a clever tactic and small sub-mystery.
The villain, Gideon, is a nasty vampire - you fans of fanged fiends who hate the Anne Rice trend have reason to applaud. The protagonist is a decent enough guy but not overly interesting. The three women range from weepy to superhero. No one is over-stereotypical and the Law's paper people come alive well enough to manage, but there's just too many of them. It hurts the pacing a bit; I hate too much head hopping. I also wished we could have seen inside the vampire's head some, for he likely would be the more interesting of the lot.
Pacing is nimbly satisfying, beginning with an adumbration of the protagonist and what's to come, yet leaving much more to be unearthed later. Atmosphere is delightfully horror-filled, particularly the apartment scene. (Sadly, the library massacre which follows a short while later was a smidge cheesy). Some deaths are literally depressing; thankfully Laws does not shy away from exploring violence or blood.
The author's writing style is morbidly apt with the subject, not bloated with being overly descriptive or annoying 'poetic-like musings'. He keeps the words suited with the story, trying to keep the pace steady. I will say this book dares to lose some interest in the middle, it just drags on a little much, and the overabundance of characters doesn't help. At the end the fight thankfully was not a cop-out, being lengthy and complicated, while keeping its depressing ring.
Fear Me is a typical dark horror novel that doesn't shy away from pain, death, or red stuff. Characters aren't too grating and I can understand their motivations, and the ending is anything but wimpy. Still, Fear Me lacks some luster by not standing out enough, using a quick enough pace to stay interesting but not riveting. The villain isn't explored too deeply and just comes across as cruel - which, for this type of book, is good - but I couldn't care less about his fate either. Mild cheesiness during moments brought it down more points. A book worth reading but not seeking out.
February 9, 2011
Very powerful and scary from the first sentence.
Prologue
Three women, Yvonne, Bernice, and Jacqueline meet in an underground parking garage with plans to kill a certain man who has literally made their lives a living hell. Yvonne seems the most fragile and frightend of them, but when the man they know as Gideon makes his hidious appearance they each, in turn, fire the gun that finally leaves him unmoving and dead. PERHAPS! I’m still uncertain about this, and may not know until I get to the end.
Part 1 Lust
Paul visits his mother in an asylum. The doctors had said she suffered from Alzheimer, but she had been in exactly the same state for 12 years. She was always verbally abusive to her son on his visits. Even so Paul felt a duty to see her as often as possible.Later, after Paul has left, his mother wakes up hearing the mesmerizing voices of the trees singing to her. This often happened, and she was the only one who could hear. Sometimes their song was a comfort other times not. The singing today seemed a mixture. Still she unhesitatingly followed their command to leave her bed and walk outside the hospital. When she arrived at a forested area a stranger appeared with a shotgun, aimed it at her and fired.
Soon after, while at the house, Paul and his father are confronted by a young man who storms into their house and tries to murder both of them. With great difficulty Paul overtakes the man. The father, badly injured, tells Paul that he must run and hide because it is Paul that they seek. Before he can explain what this means, he falls unconscious. Now Paul is left to his own devices which turn out to be more horrifying than he could ever imagine.
Laws knows how to build suspense and keep the spook factor high. This is not a book to read on a dark and stormy night although even as I say this I must admit that yesterday evening I was so engrossed in the story that I kept reading even with a terrifically loud thunder storm overhead. Fortunately the lights stayed on.
Prologue
Three women, Yvonne, Bernice, and Jacqueline meet in an underground parking garage with plans to kill a certain man who has literally made their lives a living hell. Yvonne seems the most fragile and frightend of them, but when the man they know as Gideon makes his hidious appearance they each, in turn, fire the gun that finally leaves him unmoving and dead. PERHAPS! I’m still uncertain about this, and may not know until I get to the end.
Part 1 Lust
Paul visits his mother in an asylum. The doctors had said she suffered from Alzheimer, but she had been in exactly the same state for 12 years. She was always verbally abusive to her son on his visits. Even so Paul felt a duty to see her as often as possible.Later, after Paul has left, his mother wakes up hearing the mesmerizing voices of the trees singing to her. This often happened, and she was the only one who could hear. Sometimes their song was a comfort other times not. The singing today seemed a mixture. Still she unhesitatingly followed their command to leave her bed and walk outside the hospital. When she arrived at a forested area a stranger appeared with a shotgun, aimed it at her and fired.
Soon after, while at the house, Paul and his father are confronted by a young man who storms into their house and tries to murder both of them. With great difficulty Paul overtakes the man. The father, badly injured, tells Paul that he must run and hide because it is Paul that they seek. Before he can explain what this means, he falls unconscious. Now Paul is left to his own devices which turn out to be more horrifying than he could ever imagine.
Laws knows how to build suspense and keep the spook factor high. This is not a book to read on a dark and stormy night although even as I say this I must admit that yesterday evening I was so engrossed in the story that I kept reading even with a terrifically loud thunder storm overhead. Fortunately the lights stayed on.
October 1, 2008
Lock and load, people! That’s right; my anger towards this book knows no bounds. How deep is that well? Think of the Black Hole of Calcutta and then multiply that by a thousand. Need a visual? After beating it to a bloody pulp against the wall while screaming obscenities at a god who would allow such a book to cross my path, I decided I would do as nature intended. I disassembled the book, page-by-page. Then, I drew little smiley faces in the center, tacked it to the fence, and began my target practice. Afterwards, I shredded it, bagged it, and placed it in the recycling bin. That’s right, I am earth-friendly.
Why yes, it is another vampire plot. Is there lewd sex scenes and overly ambiguous insinuations? How did you know? Well yes, Laws did try to break up the monotony and make his vampire evil. So we’ll give him the originality gold star, but only half. Sadly, that is where the creativity ended. The rest of the story is about as fresh as this simile. That’s right; put those seatbelts on people because it’s all down hill from here.
The pace is staged and patterned. Deciding to flow with convention, this would be the beginning of the end. Get those diagrams out and follow along with me now. The action arrangements are by the numbers, the story development methodical, and the suspense resurrects M.O.’s that were best left buried.
Laws’ style of writing is trite, uninspiring, and long-winded. Although, he does show flair of imagination, he rarely taps it. His characters are flat, and lifeless. They move aimlessly around with neither direction nor significance and the only time they show any emotion, it comes off as artificial, and over the top. The atmosphere is hazy, and well, that’s it. Focusing so much on creating an air of confusion, Laws misses out on an opportunity to truly create a world of mystery.
My rating? I give it a 1. Walk away, and let’s never mention it again.
-As reviewed for Horror-Web.com
Why yes, it is another vampire plot. Is there lewd sex scenes and overly ambiguous insinuations? How did you know? Well yes, Laws did try to break up the monotony and make his vampire evil. So we’ll give him the originality gold star, but only half. Sadly, that is where the creativity ended. The rest of the story is about as fresh as this simile. That’s right; put those seatbelts on people because it’s all down hill from here.
The pace is staged and patterned. Deciding to flow with convention, this would be the beginning of the end. Get those diagrams out and follow along with me now. The action arrangements are by the numbers, the story development methodical, and the suspense resurrects M.O.’s that were best left buried.
Laws’ style of writing is trite, uninspiring, and long-winded. Although, he does show flair of imagination, he rarely taps it. His characters are flat, and lifeless. They move aimlessly around with neither direction nor significance and the only time they show any emotion, it comes off as artificial, and over the top. The atmosphere is hazy, and well, that’s it. Focusing so much on creating an air of confusion, Laws misses out on an opportunity to truly create a world of mystery.
My rating? I give it a 1. Walk away, and let’s never mention it again.
-As reviewed for Horror-Web.com
February 19, 2015
Laws does something interesting and different with vampires in this book, and that's what truly makes this a fun read. It's almost like an action-horror story, especially when you take the ending into consideration, kind of like END OF DAYS, except good. The title's a bit silly, but the content will stay with you. My only problem is how the beginning of the book is structured. So much of it happens in flashback that it's hard for the plot to gain traction. It also doesn't flow very well. To be fair, I don't know how Laws could fix that. If the story was told in a linear fashion, so many things would seem to come out of left field, and it would baffle the reader. If you can get past this, you'll get a great deal of enjoyment out of this book.
April 5, 2021
Last year I read The Wyrm by Stephen Law and was very unimpressed. So unimpressed that I actually forgot I read anything by this author until I was scrolling through my past reads on GoodReads and recognized the name. I hadn't yet started Fear Me at that point and was given pause, wondering if I wanted to even give this author a second chance. Since I do believe in second chances, I decided to go ahead and start the book. I am happy to say that I liked it better than my previous experience, but not by that much. Fear Me is about a vampire that steps away from the mythos about vampires we have all come to know and love, combining it with the mythos of the incubus. Gideon, our vampire, doesn't sustain his immortal existence on blood, but with feeding on the women he hypnotizes into sleeping with him. Trigger warning, none of the women seem very keen on actually being with him so there are elements of assault in there without getting too graphic (i.e. no detailed sex scenes in here, just implied badness). That is all I will say in regard to that as I don't want to spoil what happens to them from there in case you want to read the book!
Here's the thing, I liked the concept. I think his ideas of vampirism are very creative and a nice step away from the usual. However, the main problem I had with this book is that it took on the points of view of way too many characters! Bernice, Jacqueline, Yvonne, Paul, Van Buren, Leonard, Shapiro, Gideon. Instead of picking 1-3 characters to stick with, Laws chose to go with multiple which, for me, made the story suffer. It was far too many characters to see the points of view from! So, while the story was there, the connection with the characters definitely was not. I had a hard time connecting with any of the characters and, perhaps, that could have been fixed by focusing it down more and trying to show the fear, the panic, the confusion, etc. Also, the antagonist, himself, is not that scary. He's a creep, for sure, but not scary in the least. I think what the character was written to do was more disgusting than scary, but that's just my opinion. He had no charisma to make him stand out. He was just a creep.
However, this was definitely better than my last Stephen Laws read! I'm not completely angry at it, just wish there had been more there for me to connect with, to feel something!
Here's the thing, I liked the concept. I think his ideas of vampirism are very creative and a nice step away from the usual. However, the main problem I had with this book is that it took on the points of view of way too many characters! Bernice, Jacqueline, Yvonne, Paul, Van Buren, Leonard, Shapiro, Gideon. Instead of picking 1-3 characters to stick with, Laws chose to go with multiple which, for me, made the story suffer. It was far too many characters to see the points of view from! So, while the story was there, the connection with the characters definitely was not. I had a hard time connecting with any of the characters and, perhaps, that could have been fixed by focusing it down more and trying to show the fear, the panic, the confusion, etc. Also, the antagonist, himself, is not that scary. He's a creep, for sure, but not scary in the least. I think what the character was written to do was more disgusting than scary, but that's just my opinion. He had no charisma to make him stand out. He was just a creep.
However, this was definitely better than my last Stephen Laws read! I'm not completely angry at it, just wish there had been more there for me to connect with, to feel something!
November 21, 2017
pretty fun stuff! great characters. It sas a little slow at points, but generally a fun read!
November 6, 2017
I had this book on my wishlist for years before getting hold of a copy only to find that I'd read it about 20 years ago (when it came out in 1993) under the title of "Gideon". Grrrr!!!! I HATE it when that happens & it's happening more & more but I digress...
Well as it was so long ago since I read it I couldn't really recall anything other than a vague gist of the story & it wasn't bad at all. Not as gripping as I recall his later books ("Chasm", "Darkfall" etc) being but then it's a long time since I read those as well. An entertaining read :o)
Well as it was so long ago since I read it I couldn't really recall anything other than a vague gist of the story & it wasn't bad at all. Not as gripping as I recall his later books ("Chasm", "Darkfall" etc) being but then it's a long time since I read those as well. An entertaining read :o)
September 17, 2012
A very interesting novel which adds a new twist to the vampire mythology. A young woman has a one night stand with terrifying results. I'd like to read more from Stephen Laws.
November 20, 2016
Excellent Book! Will keep you on your toes!!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews