Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Fear
    Fear
    Fear
    Audiobook2 hours

    Fear

    Written by L. Ron Hubbard

    Narrated by Roddy McDowall

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A novel of compelling suspense.
    Professor James Lowry didn't believe in spirits, or witches, or demons.
    Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn't remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing — slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember.
    Lowry is pursued by a dark, secret evil that is turning his whole world against him while it whispers a warning from the shadows: If you find your hat you'll find your four hours. If you find your four hours then you will die....

    A classic tale of creeping, surreal menace and horror... one of the really, really good ones. — Stephen King
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGalaxy Audio
    Release dateApr 29, 2024
    ISBN9781592124473
    Author

    L. Ron Hubbard

    With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most acclaimed and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard.

    More audiobooks from L. Ron Hubbard

    Related to Fear

    Related audiobooks

    Ghosts For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Tim Lane

      Dec 8, 2021

      We stopped at the Topaz Internment Camp, where my wife’s family was held during World War II, near the tiny town of Delta, Utah. We found the apocalyptic remnants of one of our country’s great shames. The post A Year in Reading: Tim Lane appeared fi

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Spellcheck

      Jan 1, 2019

      Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked des

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Oh, Corona

      Jan 1, 2024

      Books The Lights by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 128 pp., $26.00 (hardcover) According to the latest Times article on the qualitative merits of bot art, Ben Lerner has lent excerpts from his new poetry collection to a group of venture c

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Shelf Life

      Sep 2, 2021

      Shelf Life
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Night At The Freud Museum

      May 29, 2024

      A night at the Freud Museum! The idea appeals. The post Night at the Freud Museum appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      In a hotel in a small town in Norfolk I am listening to someonethrowing glass bottles into a metal bin: toss-shatter, toss-shatter.There are no other sounds; it’s a quiet afternoonbut the one tossing them has a sense of rhythm and I havea sense that

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      In Praise of Darkness

      Aug 15, 2018

      HEATHER LANIER is the author of the nonfiction book Teaching in the Terrordome as well as two poetry chapbooks. Her essays have appeared in Salon, the Sun, Fourth Genre, Brevity, and elsewhere, and her TED talk on the incomplete stories we tell ourse

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Angel In The Juniper

      Apr 10, 2021

      Old Clyde Adamson was plotting with the Jacobin faction. Holly, who had studied under him only the subjects he taught on the side—Neoplatonism in the early Church Fathers, and Classical Drama—had hired on a month ago as his secretary, and was now per

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Get It In Writing

      Mar 1, 2023

      Get It In Writing
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Paper Wasp

      Jun 3, 2019

      The Paper Wasp
      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Remastering The Mythos: Questions For Ruthanna Emrys

      May 4, 2017

      When Ruthanna Emrys first read H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," her sympathies were squarely with the monsters — and that sympathy was the seed of her new book, Winter Tide.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story

      Aug 18, 2021

      Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page. The post Who’s There?: Every Story Is a

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Sacred Trash: How to Dismantle a Library

      May 23, 2019

      We yield to our directive. We kill, destroy. We throw out the Jewish canon. The post Sacred Trash: How to Dismantle a Library appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ain’t That Pretty at All; Or, Going to the Tigers

      Oct 28, 2022

      Like most people, I would often prefer to be someone else. Ideally, the prose this other self would write would not be like mine at all. The post Ain’t That Pretty at All; Or, Going to the Tigers appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      REMAINING SILENT The facts

      Mar 1, 2020

      Sometime in 1985, I sit at a table in a college library among tall metal shelves, gray or green, that squeak if you lean against them or slide a heavy book across the horizontal rims, a rinse of dust always in the air. I’ve pulled out a large art boo

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      To Retreat, or Not to Retreat?

      Sep 22, 2017

      RACHEL MABE JUNE OF 2016 FOUND ME lying on a twin-sized daybed on the third floor of an unfinished house in Marquette, Nebraska—a village of 230 whose sole purpose seemed to be the two-step monoculture of corn and soy. Flies slipped through the shodd

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Winter Books Special

      Jul 1, 2024

      Winter Books Special
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Excerpt: 'The Last Thing You Surrender'

      Feb 10, 2019

      In this abridged excerpt from "The Last Thing You Surrender" by columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., elements of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion make a grisly discovery and Pvt. Luther Hayes, whose parents were murdered before his eyes by a white mob whe

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Fear

    3.5/5

    86 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      Lavishly praised by great horror authors (Robert Bloch, Stephen King) and critics (Groff Conklin) alike, Fear failed to excite me. As a total stranger to Hubbard's fiction (though I had read his famous self-help tome Dianetics with an open mind), I approached the book with no prejudices and was, in fact, looking forward to an enjoyable experience on the basis of all the glowing reviews. Boy, was I disappointed. The premise is workable, but it's essentially a short story premise; Hubbard padded the living shit out of Fear to stretch it to novel length. This was not an uncommon practice in the author's day, but here it hobbles the suspense he might have been able to maintain in a shorter format. The central character, a university professor who has just been fired, is unable to remember a four-hour period from the day his employment was terminated. This mystery could have been brought to a satisfactory resolution in the course of twenty-five or thirty pages, and in a story of that length, it would not have been necessary for Hubbard to venture too far afield from the initial premise. But the professor finds himself surrounded by whispering, mocking spirits, and when he is presented with a vast phantom staircase to descend in search of his hat (and the missing four hours), Fear suddenly ceases to be a half-hearted psychological horror novel and becomes a half-hearted fantasy quest novel. I abhor this kind of "anything goes" plotting; it's a momentum killer, and conveys the impression that the author's only goal was to fill up space on the page. (Which, in this case, was absolutely true.) When the denouement finally came, I was bored and no longer invested in the story. I wasted my time on Fear. Don't waste yours.
    • 3/5
      Stephen King considers this a classic but I just don't see it myself. Ray Bradbury called it "a true scare" but I didn't feel it. It was ok.
    • 4/5
      A quaint old horror story where a professor who recently wrote an article against demons and devils finds he missing 4 hours--and his hat. The search for these leads him to have a couple of bad trips followed by a lot of paranoid delusions all leading to a climax that's a little of a letdown. Anyway it's short and it was free on Amazon so it's kind of fun for getting into the mood for Halloween.

      (I hope by reading this I don't get on a Scientology mailing list now.)
    • 4/5
      My reaction to reading this story in 1998. Spoilers follow.“Foreword”, The Editors -- Puff piece by anonymous editors claiming that several, (among them Ray Bradbury, David Hartwell, and Stephen King, people claim this story as transforming the horror genre. Fear, L. Ron Hubbard -- I don’t know enough about the history of the horror genre to evaluate the Foreword’s claim that this work transformed the genre and laid the foundations for “contemporary horror”. However, I did like this surreal and paranoid tale of a man who has lost four hours of his life and is told by a mysterious stranger that if he finds his hat he will find the missing four hours and if he finds the missing hours he will loose his life. I can’t really say I’ve read anything like this before. At story’s end, it is revealed that he murdered his wife and an old friend. I’ve read other stories of amnesia blotting a character’s misdeeds from their mind and seen surreal paranoia stories on tv and in movies but not in this combination. I wouldn’t say the novel kept me absolutely riveted and paranoid, but I was interested and the last two chapters were very engaging. I liked Hubbard being deliberately ambiguous about protagonist Lowry being mad or possessed – I especially liked it when his skepticism crumbled and decided demonic forces are at work in the mind.
    • 2/5
      I decided to give L. Ron Hubbard's Fear a second chance. I'd rated it at two stars from what I remembered of my original read years ago, but was discussing discussing the book in a forum (where it was getting generally positive reviews) and figured maybe I had jugded it to harshly in the past.Well, I finished it a second time, but the book didn't deserve a second read. It just isn't good. And that's too bad, because the plot idea is a good one. Archeologist Jim Lowry loses his hat and his memory of the last four hours. He discovers (or should I say he 'just knows') that if he finds his hat he will find his four hours, but if he finds his four hours he will die. Time to buy a new hat, I say...Unfortunately for that kernel of a terrific plot, Fear reads like it is the result of a jumble of ideas Ron had that he didn't bother linking into a cohesive tale. Events that happen in one chapter don't seem to have any sort of effect on what occurs in the next chapter. The story seems to just sort of randomly flow with very little rhyme or reason to it, one surreal event after another. Situations rise from out of nowhere. In a way, the book felt like what I imagine an extended acid trip would be like. That might be an accomplishment, but I don't think that is what L. Ron was setting out for.The writing is not good. L. Ron just didn't seem to have much feeling for the atmosphere required to tell a scary story. Rather than imply things to get under the reader's skin the way the best horror can, he would just use short sentences (the verbal equivalent to a jump cut in a bad horror movie) like Two red eyes stared back! (He has an over-reliance on exclamation points! in his narrative as well.) Also, anything Lowry discovers through the course of the story is something that 'he just knows for some reason' rather than anything that the character sifts out from the events unfolding around him.The stilted unbelievable characters act like nobody except people in bad pulp fiction or '50's sitcoms ever really acted. Jim Lowry and his wife of several years are portrayed as being desperately in love, yet they sleep in separate rooms. The characters don't have any depth or believability to them. I never cared about Lowry, his wife Mary or his beautiful (and this is emphasized repeatedly) friend Tommy (who is aside from being beautiful is also a professor of psychology, though he councils Jim not to go ridiculing the idea of demons and devils. He is also a bachelor at forty who seems to have no interest in women. Maybe he should practice some self analysis? Now that might have been an interesting angle for the story to persue). Since I never cared about the characters, I never had any apprehension as to what might happen to them.The self serving foreword and fawning introduction from the 'editors' of the book don't help any. (Though I guess if I had a messiah and s/he wrote a book, I'd probably be apt to oversell it as well.) Also, L. Ron's foreword acts as a spoiler of sorts to the book. I understand he wanted to tell me what an original, creative genius he was, but the should have placed his little note of explanation after the story, not before.I'd like to see some director take the basic setup of Fear and turn it into a movie. One of those movies where the title and general setup is the same but nothing else is. The core idea is a good one. The way it was executed in this book though, was bad.
    • 4/5
      Fear is one of those mind-twisting kinds of books I like so much. Here, L. Ron Hubbard tells us the story of a college professor's decent in to hell after writing an article decrying the belief in supernatural evil. It turns out that his article brought him to the attention of some evil beings who want to teach him differently. This is not, of course, a comfortable experience. Hubbard's not one of my favorite writers, but Fear is quite good. His characters are interesting, and I really like the imagery he uses when he's leading us through the more surreal experiences. And his ending really stops the reader short and makes the whole book suddenly twist into something larger.
    • 4/5
      I started reading this just to try it and see what it was about. It was on the list for a Halloween group reading in which I was participating, but I planned to quickly abandon the book if I didn't like it.I really didn't think that it would be my cup of tea. I didn't expect to like it, even though the dust jacket contained glowing recommendations from Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov -- all favorite writers of mine. The writing style seemed somehow odd to me, from the start. Other than the seemingly odd style (the nature of which I can't quite explain), the story seemed normal enough for the first chapter. Then it got really, really weird in a hurry. It was bizarre, it was unreal, it was madness . . .I couldn't put it down; read straight through to the end, way past midnight.I can't exactly say I enjoyed it, but I needed to see where the heck he was going with this crazy story. Then the ending really threw me for a loop, and I had to look back for a few minutes and try to re-think the story with the ending in mind.A quick, suspenseful read with a killer of a surprise ending.
    • 4/5
      En universitetsprofessor, Jim Lowry tror ikke på onde ånder og den slags. I starten af bogen vel at mærke. Pludselig bliver han udsat for fænomener, han ikke kan forklare og man forstår godt at det løber ham koldt ned ad ryggen. Det starter med at hans hat er væk og der er forsvundet fire timer for ham.Ganske velskreven gyser
    • 4/5
      Fear, such a subjective thing, and yet, Hubbard manages here to, at times, make fear a shared and culumative experience. To those experienced in unbased terror, panic attacks, and sudden fits of horror brought on by seemingly nothing in our own reality, "Fear" will be a trip down a familiar lane. The main character, Mr. Lowry turns from a man who refutes the existence of demons and devils, to one who is reduced by the seeming manifestations of evil to a superstitious quivering non-effectual entity. Slowly the fear is faced and conquered, but to what end? Sanity returns but a new reality has beset Mr. Lowry! "Fear" is an entertaining ride, most assuredly, as I, as many have, I'm sure, read it in one sitting, which as we know, only the decent books are able to provide such a mode for concentrated energies. In the end, I felt like I had read a mystery novel that concluded evil, or more precisely invisible evil, meaning devils, in the end, manifest evil by temporal and natural mean.