Customer Reviews

Liquid Fear

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This story follows a cast of characters that are part of an experiment gone horribly wrong (or right if you take this from the perspective of the master mind behind it). As the book progresses you begin to see how their fates are intertwined and the nature of the experiment in which they are immersed. It's easy to empathize with each of their plights as they are manipulated at every turn to finally end up at their intended destination, The Monkey House.

It's a brilliant thriller that I cannot recommend enough. And if you like shifting points of view, like I do, then you'll easily see the master of storytelling that Nicholson is.

There are writers out there that can pump out a good story, but few can do it was well as Nicholson while still delighting with his ability to craft sentences. This is a man who knows his art. And similar to Drummer Boy, the story doesn't seem to escape your head when you're not reading it. I definitely plan on picking up more of his work. He's on my A-list of authors.

Liquid Fear by Scott Nicholson is a page-turning story that dives head first into the bizarre and unknown. The reader will immediately become immersed in the world that Nicholson has created and have no option but to continue reading until the end.

Wendy, Roland, Alexis and Anita are all brought together again when they start remembering a dark past that happened while they were test subjects to a new product Dr. Briggs was working on. Originally thought to be a medicine to help one conquer their fears, they are left wondering if the impulses they are feeling are really their own dark desires or just a side-effect of the drug they yearn for. Either way they soon realize they are just test mice running through Dr. Briggs maze with no apparent way to escape.

A relatively quick read (it took me about 4 hours), Liquid Fear touches on topics like controlling your fears, human experimentation, political corruption, sexual desire, murder and pain. This book does contain adult language, sex, violence and gore and should only be read by mature adult audiences that are 18+.

I can't believe I wasted a few hours on this book. No depth to the main story line or the characters.
Messy politics and bureaucracy, I'll~thought plot e.t.c.
don't want to waste anymore of my time on this review :Liquid fear ;not recommended.

Scott Nicholson has been writing superior-quality disturbing fiction for a while now. I first came across his work in the moving and chilling collection Thank You For The Flowers, published more than ten years ago. These days he's publishing dark thrillers that are almost in a category of their own - paranoid, packed with suspense, unsettling, and above all gripping - and it's good to see him getting the success he deserves. Liquid Fear is a good example of his work: a real page-turner that will get under your skin, a dark thriller that just won't let go.

I could not finish this even though I tried 2 or 3 times. Not thrilling, no idea who the many characters are or what the point of it was. Too many different characters and strands of stories to keep it together. Struggled to half way through then gave up as it became boring!

Started reading this and it didn't seem to go anywhere - the plot is confusing and dare I say a bit boring - hard to keep concentrating to get to the end

When Roland wakes up in a motel with two identities (according to the contents of his wallet) and a dead woman in the bathroom, he wracks his brain to remember what has happened. The vial of pills labelled "Take one every 4 hours or else" clouds the picture further. Porn actress Anita has the same tablets and an encounter of her own that gets the heart racing. When they are reunited with the other survivors of an unauthorised drug trial the battle is on. They all want to take control of the pills that are helping keep them sane and stop them remembering what happened ten years earlier.

I have read other books by the author in the past and enjoyed them so was looking forward to getting into this. The premise sounded interesting, a botched drug trial that had left a group of people on the edge and despite this the interest of certain parties in developing the drug for military application. It sounded feasible enough to be scary, particularly in the hands of Mr Nicholson.

However I finished it feeling a bit apathetic about the whole thing. The point of view kept switching between a number of characters and I didn't feel like I knew much about any of them. The female characters felt slightly more fleshed out but only because there were chunks devoted to their sexual pasts.

I also had a lot of questions that could have easily been answered in the course of the book. For example the group are all described as sociopaths but it's never made clear whether that is a result of the drugs or if they were chosen for the trial for a personality trait common to sociopaths in the first place. As it is mentioned a few times it would have been nice to know.

With a lack of interest in the fate of the characters the tension that was being built fell flat, and I felt some threads were under-developed with scope for much more about the political forces supporting the mad scientist's research and its potential applications.

I was a bit disappointed in this book after having read Scott's other work, so it's just an "okay" from me.

Brilliant An Exceptionaly Clever Book.This Author Never Lets Me Down.Cant wait To Read The Sequel Chronic Fear. I cant Believe Someone Gave It One star

When Roland Doyle wakes up in an unfamiliar motel room with a strange man's wallet in his pocket and a woman's dead body in the bathroom, he fears the worst...and that's before he finds the vial of pills labeled "take one every 4 hrs or else." Or else what? Ten years ago, Dr. Sebastian Briggs's clinical drug trial for a cutting-edge fear-response drug went horribly wrong -- or did it? It's true that one trial participant died and five others were left with no memory of what happened to them. But now several interested parties, including a major pharmaceutical company and an ambitious U.S. senator, are willing to back Briggs's continued research. All he has to do is recall his five surviving "volunteers," whose addiction to a mysterious drug has left them largely at his disposal. They will do anything necessary to keep the pills coming and to stave off the creeping phobias, intense sexual impulses, and all-consuming madness that lurk on the edges of their minds. It's easy enough for the good doctor to lure the survivors back to the remote Monkey House, where the original trials took place. But when the pills finally run out...that's when the real show begins.

I discovered Scott Nicholson, many years ago,a time when Leisure Publishing wasn't ripping off its writers. It was thanks to Brian Keene, and the good folks over at his message board, that I discovered Nicholson, Liamo, James A Moore, and Bryan Smith, ah those were the good ole days.

Since the fall of Leisure, some of the authors have struggled slightly in getting there books out there. Not so the case with Mr Nicholson, he has fully embraced the E-book revolution and become a one man army in the publishing world.

Unlike a lot of self published authors, Scott has payed his dues, he has served his time, and learned his craft. And this is why even though he is one of the now self published authors, he stands head and shoulders above the crowd.

This is a good book, it's not my favourite Nicholson book, that honour goes to either Drummer Boy or Burial to follow, Scott is a good writer but when he writes about things close to home, set in the Deep South he becomes a great writer.

So while this may not be a classic Nicholson, it is still a book worthy of your time. This is a fast paced page turner of s novel that mixes conspiracy and horror extremely well. Nicholson, manges to keep the multi-perspective narrative under control, this could have been a confusing read, with all the different narrations used here, thankfully you are not left scratching your head wondering what is going on.

A good read, that just falls short of a classic Nicholson read. If you do like this then I really suggest you get a copy of the two other books I mentioned above.

I downloaded the book without taking the sample chapter. This was a terrible mistake, and one I will not repeat. So, lesson learnt.

I confess, I didn't finish the book. I couldn't. The terrible writing style finished me off before the end of the fifth chapter. The story seemed so strong, such a good idea, sort of Memento-ish, crossed with the experiments of Stephen King's Firestarter, and in the hands of a decent writer (someone like Michael Marshall-Smith does this type of head-messing perfectly) I daresay the premise would have made an excellent book.
Specific issues with the first chapter are:
1) An obsession with the weather: rain does not need constantly referring to, unless it's changing in tempo/stopping. Rain falls like bullets, beats tiny tattoos,crawls in trickles and sweeps, all in the first 3 paragraphs. OK, it's raining, you established that in the first line, don't keep describing the rain, describe something actually happening! Pg3, more description of rain, this time, spattering and drumming. I have no clue what this guy looks like, but I sure know a lot about the rain. I tell a lie, I know he's got no hat on, but that he has a wristwatch.
2) Repetition and bad description. Cars don't hiss. Traffic doesn't hiss. It roars, grumbles, runbles, grinds. It doesn't hiss. Especially not twice in the same chapter.
I understand this first chapter is intended to be confused, because of the head-state of the protagonist, but it's so badly written, it comes across that the author himself is confused. The construction of the chapter is muddled, rather than the ideas within.

Minor things in the next couple of chapters irritate - again, no descriptions of what the Dr looks like, but extraneous details like the fact that he was scolded for poor handwriting as a child, serve to remind one of the much-mocked piece in the Da Vinci Code where the MIckey Mouse watch takes centre stage for no reason - beginning sentences with "and" and "that" - over-use of metaphor and simile to describe Roland's skull and tongue, the sky, slogans, coins, and the ring of a phone. This is one of the most common problems I had with the writer's style - shoe-horning in description of insignificant and extraneous matter, while overlooking the more important (to my mind) descriptions such as character appearance and surroundings.

Chapter 4 was the one that pretty much finished me off. The author repeatedly seemed to attempt to distract the reader from the conversation between the two women by offering different insignificant side-action. Allow me to sum up the scene:
Dead psychiatrist
Bad coffee
Cigarette smoke
Eggs/breakfast
Rest of the diner
Where they are sitting and why
grease on a plate/breakfast
Anita's sunglasses
Eyes
I teach art
Psychiatrist
Jukebox/Billy ray Cyrus
Cigarette smoke
Psychiatrist
Waffles/breakfast
lesbians
Catalogue model for a living
Billy Ray Cyrus
psychiatrist
Waffle
how much Anita weighs
psychiatrist
bad coffee
psychiatrist

Now, even to my untrained eye, this scene jumps around to a ridiculous degree, and to the detriment of the flow of it. It continues, jumping in and out of the current time line, back to how they met, mention of a drug trial, then back to the possiblility of Anita being recognised. I'm just saying that PERHAPS the author could have mentioned how Wendy had quit smoking and was sensitive to it when he wrote about the cigarette smoke at the beginning of the chapter, and PERHAPS he could have mentioned the consumers of her films probably not recognising Anita anyway due to her change in appearance at the beginning of the chapter when he explains why they took at booth at the back, or even when Anita's sunglasses are mentioned. Instead of that, he sidetracks in the middle of her explanation about her medication, and in doing so ruins any flow or natural rhythm to the scene.

The over-all impression is that not much thought or organisation has gone into the construction of his work, not much regard for flow, not much adherence to creating a logical sequential scene or dialogue. And it's a shame, because I think the premise was pretty strong, but the really awful writing style completely lets it down. This man is desperately in need of a good editor.