In the wake of the success of The Silence of the Lambs, there was a spate of novels specifically looking at serial killers, and seemingly the more twisted and freakish the better. Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself, from 2003, fits squarely into this category.
The best short summary I could give here would be to imagine Quentin Tarantino writing Hannibal Lecter. In prospect, this should give a high-octane, wittily self-aware plot with some moments of over-the-top gore. Sadly, Nasaw isn't Tarantino, so it falls a little bit flat.
The novel focuses on soon-to-be-retired FBI agent EL Pender and his replacement-to-be Linda Abruzzi. On Pender's last day before retirement, he receives a letter from Dorie Bell, a woman with a crippling phobia of masks. Bell had attended a conference for people with "Specific Phobias", and since that time several of the attendees have died in ways which seem unusual given their phobias (an acrophobe throwing himself from the top of a tall building, for example), and she is concerned that something more sinister is afoot. Oddly, the blurb on the back of the copy I've read misstates some of these details, although it's insignificant in plot terms.
So much the preamble. The plot then sees Pender handling the investigation in California, where Bell lives and where he's gone on a golfing trip to celebrate his retirement, while Abruzzi conducts other parts of the investigation from her desk outside Washington. We're also treated - surprisingly early, by the normal standards for this sort of novel - to the identity of the killer himself, and his attempts to avoid capture and deal with his deteriorating mental state.
There are several good ideas afoot here. The idea of a killer who thrives on fear for the sake of fear is unusual, and in theory could produce a very interesting novel. The plot device of having the investigation conducted on opposite coasts of the USA also works well, although it's rather more hackneyed than Nasaw seems to think.
The difficulty is that Nasaw is a novelist who is very much enamoured of the cliche. Pender isn't just a soon-to-be-retired agent, he's a giant of a man with a high profile in the FBI and a history of rubbing his colleagues the wrong way, so we know almost immediately that he'll have a series of strokes of good luck, as well as a heart of gold. Abruzzi's superiors are petty bureaucrats (Nasaw even renders the term "bureau-crats", to make the point clearer), so the only purpose they serve is to get in the way. Abruzzi herself suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, and Serious Narrative Tension is provided by having her fall over at the wrong time on a few occasions.
But it's the dialogue which really brings Fear Itself down. Pender's comic foil through the early part of the novel is his retired-profiler friend Sid Dolitz (who, incidentally, is clearly being played by Woody Allen in the film Nasaw so clearly wishes he'd written), who keeps delivering witticisms. At one point, Pender asks if Dolitz thinks he (Pender) has drunk too much, with the response being "For a small Irish county, no. For a human being, yes." Clunky dialogue like this continues throughout, with police in the middle of tense moments being able to deliver a snappy line or two, and even a nearly-victim of the killer finding time to correct Pender's references to films. Again, Tarantino can get away with this sort of thing, but it's a very tight line to walk.
There's also a strange lack of place and time in Fear Itself. It was published, as mentioned earlier, in 2003, so while investigations are done online we're certainly not in the realms of smartphones and social media. More unusually, though, the FBI characters seem to divide American history into "pre-Oklahoma City" and "post-Oklahoma City" eras, and everyone is worried about Y2K (we're in late 1999, plot-wise). While 2003 was perhaps relatively soon after the World Trade Centre atrocities to include a reference to that, it feels very quaint to read a novel in which the characters haven't experienced this epochal event, particularly where they "could have done".
Nasaw is an American author, which makes his lack of engagement with any of the geography in the novel even stranger. Events take place in San Francisco, rural Wisconsin and the outskirts of Washington DC, but there's no sense of place anywhere. San Francisco is simply an area in which people live, and despite the buildup to the final events in Washington, there's only one glancing reference to the fact that it's a large city (Abruzzi isn't sure how quickly she can get to her office at one point). The novel could really have occurred anywhere.
All up, this reads as a good idea executed by someone simply not up to it. A lot of American serial-killer thrillers suffer from being written in a way which screams "please option this as a script", and Fear Itself is no exception. It's entirely possible that this could make a semi-decent film, but as a novel it just doesn't cut it.
Two stars.
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