John Farris, You Don't Scare Me

You Don't Scare Me

John Farris

Forge, Apr 2007, $24.95

ISBN 0312850646

As she attends Yale University as a math major working to prove the existence of a dimension outside of the relative reality of ours, Chase Emrick knows how close she came to dying as a teen. Her abusive, disturbing stepfather Crow Tillman abducted her with the intention of a murder-suicide for some eerie motive. He failed as she escaped, but he killed himself.

However, though a decade has passed, Chase knows somehow Crow's evil eye still seeks her from beyond. She is alone because of him as bad things accidentally happen to anyone who tries to get close to her as he still plans to possess her. Chase thinks she has found the coordinates to what she calls Netherworld where she believes Crow lives, that is if a dead person can live. Desperate to destroy the serpent, the frightened Chase journeys to Crow's turf to challenge him with her soul on the line.

The opening scenes on earth are some of the best horror description in years as everyone will feel the creepiness of Crow when he lived and the malevolence of this creature when he died as well as the astral-spatial geometry of Netherworld. Once Chase begins her trek into Netherworld, the storyline retains its excitement, but loses some of its uniqueness. Still, John Farris will have his audience hooked in a one-sitting thriller in which the mouse insists to the cat (and herself) YOU DON'T SCARE ME when she knows she should be very scared.

Harriet Klausner