Fear (Gone Novels) [Hardcover]

Every so often you come across a book which just makes your fingertips tingle with joy every time you turn a page. For me, the Gone series has offered five such books so far.

From the very first chapter in the series, these books have had me hooked. The key conflict of the series is situational, as is the case with most great books. Grant had a great "What if..?" which set the story on its way: What if a bunch of kids with emerging superpowers were trapped in a bubble with no adults and a monster out to destroy them?

The situation has changed and mutated (pun intended) as the books have progressed. What if the food started to run out? What if everyone started getting sick? What if kids got their hands on the booze and drugs lying around? And with every mutation, the books have become more and more brilliant!

The situation is awesome enough, but when you add Grant's ability to create flawed protagonists and truly villainous bad guys, the result is a series which is incredibly gripping. Fear has seen my favourite antagonist so far: the cruel and insane Penny. Penny's "power" is her ability to create illusions so vivid and sensory that they are impossible to distinguish from reality. This makes her useful to Caine, the self-proclaimed King of the Perdido Beach kids.

I loved hating Penny. My favourite illusion of the book saw her treating a boy to some imaginary Red Vines which were actually the veins of his arms. They tasted so good... he just kept digging into his flesh for more! So. Very. Dark.

She's part of the "fear" suggested by the book's title. The other is that the sphere which has encased the town is slowly turning black and will soon block out all light. Without the sun there will be no more food production. And in a town where a lot of scary sh...stuff is going on, the last thing anyone needs is to be trapped in darkness. Fear of the dark is just plain sensible in Perdido Beach.

Overall, I adored this book. It was nice to see Sam, the (arguably) main character finally come to grips with his role as reluctant leader. Astrid, who lost her faith at the end of the last book when she sacrificed her brother, is back and for the first time in the series I liked her. She kind of kicked butt actually! Quinn is no longer a whiny brat, either. All of the characters, in fact, have grown and become their own people. Which provides the "What if...?" for the next book: What if the barrier should fall and the kids should return to the world they left behind? How can you ever go back when you've seen and done things to survive which you'd be damned for in the "real" world? You can't.

If there was one thing that I thought let the book down (and it's a very minor thing) it's the language - or lack thereof. In a book where kids have eaten human flesh, where a girl has fallen pregnant, where kids smoke pot medicinally and where a kid has clawed out the veins of his arms thinking they were red vines, it's somewhat incongruous when nobody effs and blinds when they have every bloody reason to! But, like I said, it's a minor thing.

Oh wait! I just thought of a second thing! The final instalment, Light, is due to be released next year! Now I'm not counting down the days to the end of the world like some of the 2012 nutters are, but if the world DOES end then it occurs to me that there are a whole bunch of books coming out in 2013 which I'm dying to read! What if I never get the chance?! Noooooooooo!

***No spoilers for FEAR or the previous books***

Michael Grant knows how to write a story full of action, mystery, humour, disturbing/gory-stuff and occasional romance with a great variety of characters and plot twists added in to shake things up.

The idea behind this novel was promising and Michael exceeded my expectations once again by writing a really thrilling read. The plot twists were really well done. A lot of it I wasn't expecting, and like the previous four books, I just couldn't tear through this book enough. Even though the book is a big one, I felt that apart from the beginning it was really fast-paced and enjoyable.

It was great to meet up with my favourite characters once more. All of the GONE novels manage a balance between characters and action, but with each GONE novel different characters play different roles in the book. Personally, some of my favourite characters, Lana, Dekka and Diana have solid roles in this book which was nice. Lana is as determinedly strong as ever (and hey, she even smiles once or twice, which is great because she DESERVES some sort of happiness after the hell she's been through in the previous 5 books, no?) and Dekka, while she plays a smaller part in FEAR than I would have liked, tries to recover from the events of PLAGUE, in which she didn't leave fully unscathed. At all. Diana, on the other hand, was charming to me for the first half of the novel, and it looked like she would continue to be. But then the last fifty or so pages happened and I remembered that all of the main characters of the GONE novels have shades of grey, and are completely human in their unpredictability despite the strange situation (being trapped in this dome) they have found themselves in. I thought the boys were slightly lacking in character development apart from Caine, but all the characters (apart from the ones you're meant to dislike, that is) were fun to read about.

I liked how Michael gave his readers a sense of finality with FEAR--like some of the characters say in FEAR, the situation they face in this novel really is an `endgame'--and I can really see this series concluding in a way that doesn't feel contrived, whereas in the last four books I hadn't really felt that the overall series would end in a way that I'd find plausible.

I have only two gripes which kept this from being a five star read. The first is that the prose could have been improved. I've gotten used to and grown to like the simplistic, action-driven prose that Grant uses, however there were some minor grammatical inaccuracies. I also felt that some descriptions were a little vague and weren't detailed enough for me to get a good picture of what was happening while I read.

I think the pacing for FEAR was a little off, too. Like I said before, the beginning was a bit slow (as slow as a GONE novel could be, mind, which is not actually the writing being lengthily tedious but rather that not much events happen over a long span of pages) while the middle and ending were as furiously faced paced as the previous instalments. But ironically some very, very major things happened in FEAR, especially towards the end, and I would have liked some more detail into those moments--considering some of these events were permanently going to change some of the characters' lives for the foreseeable future.

This penultimate instalment of the GONE series was highly enjoyable, and my only improvements were very little things to be honest, because the story and characters Michael has created really enrapture you to the point where I only wrote about them to give an informed review that considers the entire book. This series continues to be one of my favourites and I cannot wait for LIGHT, the final book. Because of FEAR's ending, LIGHT looks to be a really hectic last novel and I can't wait to FINALLY know what happens to these characters.

If you STILL haven't read this series, I HIGHLY SUGGEST that you go do so. I hope you like them!

The children and young adults inside the dome are finding some kind of stability at last. And then, slowly, the dome begins to turn black. Without light, there's no food, no safety, no way of knowing what's waiting in the dark.
And what's waiting is even more unsettling for the 'good' guys than ever. Penny is a fabulously twisted creation - doing damage that even Lana can't fix. Drake/Brittany is as terrifying as s/he ever was, and, of course, there's the thing in the mine and this time it wants company.
This book feels like it's building to a great climax in Book 6. It refers to the characters as chess pieces at one point, and it does feel as if everyone is being moved into position for the Endgame. I, for one, can't wait to see how that game plays out in the final enstallment.