Review: Fearworld
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 22, 2011
Everyone knows the bad things come out at night, and that's when nightmares come alive. In this short story, set in England, we have a man named Roth who makes a tear in the fabric between what is real and what is deadly nightmare, creating a portal between our world and a parallel one.Through this dark portal come these beings that look like black, swirling ghosts. With hideously torn features and demonic faces, they terrorize and destroy, and, being metamorphic, they can shift in shape, appearing as an ordinary man or your very worst thought or nightmare, beautiful or grotesque. They only want to lure you away from the light and into the darkness.The story opens one year after the Event, when a man called Roth let these entities into this world, and everything then went to hell in a hand basket. Most of the story is told in flashbacks, taking us to the night that it all happened. The rest of the story takes place present-day and is told in first person by our narrator, one of a group of survivors who have banded together and have since figured out that these beings are photophobic.Whether these beings are from hell or from another dimension doesn't really matter to our protagonist. He is tired of only surviving, tired of watching others suffer and die; he has a plan to destroy these creatures. Although the reader is with the narrator for only one night, I still had a sense of his determination and his will, and I guess that's all I really needed to know, that he had a plan and was going to see it through, whatever it took.From the screeching demons to this post-apocalyptic world of eternal darkness and death, where one world is devoured by the terrible unknown, and where hope is replaced by fear, this story fed my sense of trepidation and dread. It had a nice dark feeling to it, macabre and moody, and very much what I hoped and expected it would be.