During the '80's horror boom, legendary comics writer and artist John Byrne decided to try his hand at novel writing and Fear Book was the result.

The Dennisons, a nice New York couple decides to finally buy that house in Connecticut they've always wanted. They find a perfect little house in the town of Fairharbour and get settled in. It turns out the Hansons (who had been renting the house before the Dennisons bought it) left rather suddenly and the Dennisons continue to receive their mail. Mainly a bunch of catalogs.

Into this picture of tranquility comes the Catalog. An unobtrusive little book with a blank red cover. Sam Dennison accidentally looks through this book and is horrified by what he sees. So much so that he burns it and makes his wife promise never to look inside one should another arrive. The Catalogue then starts to arrive daily...

This is one of those stories of the supernatural getting an innocuous toehold in reality and then geometrically progressing to become something monstrous that Bentley Little can write so well.

John Byrne is a gifted storyteller with a sure hand. Years of comics writing has given him a knack for pacing and he handles his characters pretty well. He handles the family and neighborhood dynamics believably and does a good job showing the supernatural threat worming its way inside this small community.

The main characters are pretty well fleshed out, but some of the secondary characters can be two-dimensional. Dialogue was down to earth and believable. Overall I was very impressed by John Byrne the novelist.

The two big problems I had with this book were two secondary characters. The first is Sam's lawyer friend Phil Marsdon. Every thing he says is crudely offensive. That doesn't bother me, but it quickly became unbelievable. Any of the (infrequent) appearances of Phil Marsdon became an annoyance as all he would do is fly off the handle in a rage or make rude remarks. More should have been done with Phil.

The other character that got in the way of this book was Katherine Goodbridge, a professor of the paranormal the Dennisons turn to. She came off like one of Mr. Byrne's comic book characters. She is not shown to have much personality, but always has exactly the right answer. Also she spends paragraphs at the end dishing out all of the other character's deepest secrets in a somewhat clumsy way.

These two characters do not ruin the novel. Really they stand out because the author has done such a good job making everyone else believable.

I would recommend picking this one up if you're in the mood for a nice quick scary story. It isn't quite a classic, but the premise is something different and it is very well written. In the '90's Mr. Byrne put out a second novel: Whipping Boy. I was impressed enough by Fear Book to seek that one out. Too bad he hasn't written more novels. ( )