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A review by awesomelybadbooks
Fear Me by Stephen Laws
3.0
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!