Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

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

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Fear
    Fear
    Fear
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Fear

    Written by L. Ron Hubbard

    Narrated by Roddy McDowall

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Professor Lowry is a man of science who descends into a world of darkness beyond reason — and fear beyond belief.

    Drawn into a waking nightmare, where it appears even his wife and best friend have betrayed him, he is about to cross a threshold of temptation and evil from which he may never return — in a chilling novel of psychological suspense.

    A Galaxy Press audio production.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGalaxy Press
    Release dateOct 21, 2002
    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 enduring 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. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.

    More audiobooks from L. Ron Hubbard

    Related to Fear

    Related audiobooks

    Horror Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Literature Of The Underground

      Sep 2, 2022

      Robert Macfarlane W. W. Norton & Company IN UNDERLAND, Robert Macfarlane takes readers into the dark in order to see. In his early works, the author scaled mountains, then traversed old paths. Here, he spelunks and excavates. Not for riches and bount

      3 min read

    • Article

      Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle Sauvage’

      Nov 16, 2017

      Pullman is first and foremost an extremely skillful storyteller—the warmest, fuzziest kind that takes readers by the hand and guides them with sharp prose and a fast moving plot. The post Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle S

      9 min read

    • Article

      Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle Sauvage’

      Nov 16, 2017

      Pullman is first and foremost an extremely skillful storyteller—the warmest, fuzziest kind that takes readers by the hand and guides them with sharp prose and a fast moving plot. The post Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle S

      9 min read

    • Article

      Dangerous Illusions

      Oct 9, 2023

      by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché (Jonathan Cape, $37) Readers expecting something more in the vein of Helen Macdonald’s award-winning memoir H Is for Hawk or science writing are in for a shock. Prophet, co-written with US author Sin Blaché, a Black

      2 min read

    • Article

      In The Ravenous Dark

      May 19, 2021

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author AM Strickland Publisher Hodder & Stoughton This should be an anime, one whose aesthetics start in Ancient Greece, before veering off into overblown, overbuilt territory for its architecture, which e

      1 min read

    • Article

      'La Belle Sauvage' Will Be Like Coming Home For Philip Pullman Fans

      Dec 12, 2017

      Nearly 20 years after Philip Pullman published the final book in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, he’s launched a companion series, known as “The Book of Dust.” The hotly anticipated first volume, La Belle Sauvage, is finally out, and the master sto

      2 min read

    • Article

      Oliver Sacks

      Oct 31, 2018

      Oliver Sacks
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Cure For Life

      Sep 26, 2021

      The Cure For Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Month

      Jan 19, 2024

      By Alice McIlroy Iris wakes after an operation, her mind a blank. She’s told by the man who says he is her husband that normality will return, except for some traumatic memories that she’d wished to have permanently deleted. She can’t believe she agr

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reviews/books

      May 18, 2023

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Crowley’s ‘dear vile London’ was peopled with a bohemian demi-monde of artists, writers, courtesans, catamites, actresses, ragged ragtime girls, acolytes, wizards, s

      15 min read

    • Article

      Celestial Castaways

      Oct 29, 2019

      Celestial Castaways
      3 min read

    • Article

      Florida, Full of Dread

      Jun 14, 2018

      Florida, Full of Dread
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Month

      Feb 17, 2023

      Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries By Heather Fawcett Emily Wilde, an expert in the study and classification of faeries, is looking forward to solitary fieldwork in the far north, hoping to discover more about the secretive Hidden Ones. She aims

      2 min read

    • Article

      Amazing Space

      Oct 25, 2021

      People read fiction for all sorts of reasons, but one of the main reasons I love doing so is to get a glimpse of the wild and weird imagined worlds of the authors. This week we have two very different but equally inventive journeys into fictitious un

      2 min read

    • Article

      Closer to Truth: On Nicole Krauss’s ‘Forest Dark’

      Sep 18, 2017

      Forest Dark is perhaps not particularly believable, but it is elegant and shimmering, a slant of light shining long enough to make us wonder. The post Closer to Truth: On Nicole Krauss’s ‘Forest Dark’ appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Maybe-Messiah and His Grandmother’s Ghost: On Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Books of Jacob’

      Apr 25, 2022

      That Tokarczuk's Nobel nomination was rumored to be greatly based on the accomplishments of this book has only magnified the anticipation. And now, it is here. The post The Maybe-Messiah and His Grandmother’s Ghost: On Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Books of

      5 min read

    • Article

      Can Humans And Animals Be Friends? ‘Fox & I’ Raises The Question.

      Sep 1, 2021

      Catherine Raven couldn’t explain why a fox started visiting her cabin every day. But she ventures to wonder if they developed a friendship.

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Fear

    3.5/5

    98 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Roddy McDowall's voice warmed my heart; may he rest in peace. The story itself is tantalizing at first. The main character is James Lowry, a well-traveled and level-headed professor of ethnology in the quiet university town of Atworthy. Jim's troubles begin when he returns home infected with malaria he contracted during a research junket on the Yucatan Peninsula. However, his doctor, Chalmers, assures Jim that aside from a few chills, even a strain of Yucatan malaria won't down a tall, burly, healthy guy like Jim. Then things get strange. On a balmy spring evening walk, Jim's hat disappears. He suddenly can't recall where he was when he lost his hat. Moreover, he can't remember where he has been for the last four hours. Four hours! Each time Jim tries to remember what happened, a nameless evil manifests increasingly terrifying (to Jim) experiences, whispering a warning: "If you find your hat, you will find your four hours. If you find your four hours, you will die!" Jim's odyssey takes more hallucinatory turns. Many of his psychedelic visions confused me instead of imploring me to read on. But the book is short, and I wanted to get to the end. After the finale, I couldn't find any connective tissue tying many of Jim's visions to the book's revelatory ending. That annoyed me. The text of the printed edition of the book that I bought varied slightly from that of the audiobook edition. However, the variance didn't change the meat of the plot.
    • 5/5
      Una joya de uno de los grandes maestros de la literatura
    • 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.