The Fury by John Farris
I had a difficult time maintaining interest in this book. When I was getting somewhat involved in the story about the young girl, Gillian, it shifted around to characters I didn't know or care about that didn't appear to have any relevance to the story. (Of course, I knew they would have relevance later on, but at the moment I didn't care about them.)
The book started to grab me when the young girl's twin brother (who died at birth then had to quickly find another body into which to be born) tried to visit his sister astrally at night. That was when I started to see the point of the book. Honestly, if I hadn't been reading it for school I wouldn't have stuck with it.
On the whole, I didn't like The Fury. I know it's a popular and successful horror novel, but at no point was it scary and none of the characters grabbed me because the action shifted around so much. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in as far as the characters were concerned. I think the book was trying to ride on the coattails of Carrie and The Exorcist, jumping on a popular theme of that era (the late seventies.)
This isn't the story I would tell about Gillian and Robin (the astral twins). I would concentrate on their feelings and experiences rather than on constructing some kind of international plot to kidnap them and use them to gain worldwide power (as Farris did.) (Mind you, not that I presume I could do it better than Farris.)
Horror is a personal thing to me. It's the scariness you feel when you're alone in the house at two AM and hear a scratching in the wall, see a shadow in the mirror you know isn't natural or feel something brush against the back of your hair. Horror is not (in the world of Sally) car crashes and political plots.
I found inconsistencies in the plot. The timeline was off. When events start happening to Gillian, they culminate at the end of the book in a couple of weeks. We meet Robin later on in the book when he is kidnapped and taken to PSI Institute. One and a half years pass for him until the end of the book. This bothered me for some reason.
Unrealistic character reaction and motivation was another problem for me. Gillian is in the hospital with a bad flu. Her stay ends in a Carrie-like bloodbath, killing several people. That same night her mother (coincidentally) finds her wandering in the streets and doesn't think anything of it, never calls the hospital to find out what happened. Neither does Gillian say anything about the experience.
For me there wasn't sufficient motivation (or evidence of brainwashing) established to convince me that Robin's father would kill him.
I could ignore these things if I felt more for Robin and Gillian, if we got into their emotions more.
This book made me want to make a concerted effort to not date my writing. The Fury was published in '77, but it had a late sixties/early seventies feeling about it, that I don't find in some of my favorite horror novels written during that same period. Not that's necessarily bad for a novel to be a period piece, but this felt dated. I can't exactly explain the difference.
What I did like: Gillian's impressions of her astral travel are occasionally put into poems that are very apt and give us a feel for what is going on with her without spelling it out. Since impressions from astral travel are very difficult to put into words, I thought this was a fitting device. I wish Farris had used it more.
The sexual relationship between fourteen-year-old Robin and the twenty-nine-year-old female research doctor was interesting and I think fairly well done. It's something that probably wouldn't fly in our oppressively PC times, but in the seventies would have been titillating and edgy.
The concept of the astral twins is fascinating. But, as I said before, I would have made the novel Gillian's and Robin's personal stories. People's inner experiences and feelings are more interesting to me than the larger concerns of the world. I prefer small foreign or independent films that focus on daily experiences than huge action/adventure movies. So my perceptions are skewed to those tastes.
All in all, an unsatisfying read for me, but it did contain some interesting concepts, and I discovered something about what I don't like.
I had a difficult time maintaining interest in this book. When I was getting somewhat involved in the story about the young girl, Gillian, it shifted around to characters I didn't know or care about that didn't appear to have any relevance to the story. (Of course, I knew they would have relevance later on, but at the moment I didn't care about them.)
The book started to grab me when the young girl's twin brother (who died at birth then had to quickly find another body into which to be born) tried to visit his sister astrally at night. That was when I started to see the point of the book. Honestly, if I hadn't been reading it for school I wouldn't have stuck with it.
On the whole, I didn't like The Fury. I know it's a popular and successful horror novel, but at no point was it scary and none of the characters grabbed me because the action shifted around so much. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in as far as the characters were concerned. I think the book was trying to ride on the coattails of Carrie and The Exorcist, jumping on a popular theme of that era (the late seventies.)
This isn't the story I would tell about Gillian and Robin (the astral twins). I would concentrate on their feelings and experiences rather than on constructing some kind of international plot to kidnap them and use them to gain worldwide power (as Farris did.) (Mind you, not that I presume I could do it better than Farris.)
Horror is a personal thing to me. It's the scariness you feel when you're alone in the house at two AM and hear a scratching in the wall, see a shadow in the mirror you know isn't natural or feel something brush against the back of your hair. Horror is not (in the world of Sally) car crashes and political plots.
I found inconsistencies in the plot. The timeline was off. When events start happening to Gillian, they culminate at the end of the book in a couple of weeks. We meet Robin later on in the book when he is kidnapped and taken to PSI Institute. One and a half years pass for him until the end of the book. This bothered me for some reason.
Unrealistic character reaction and motivation was another problem for me. Gillian is in the hospital with a bad flu. Her stay ends in a Carrie-like bloodbath, killing several people. That same night her mother (coincidentally) finds her wandering in the streets and doesn't think anything of it, never calls the hospital to find out what happened. Neither does Gillian say anything about the experience.
For me there wasn't sufficient motivation (or evidence of brainwashing) established to convince me that Robin's father would kill him.
I could ignore these things if I felt more for Robin and Gillian, if we got into their emotions more.
This book made me want to make a concerted effort to not date my writing. The Fury was published in '77, but it had a late sixties/early seventies feeling about it, that I don't find in some of my favorite horror novels written during that same period. Not that's necessarily bad for a novel to be a period piece, but this felt dated. I can't exactly explain the difference.
What I did like: Gillian's impressions of her astral travel are occasionally put into poems that are very apt and give us a feel for what is going on with her without spelling it out. Since impressions from astral travel are very difficult to put into words, I thought this was a fitting device. I wish Farris had used it more.
The sexual relationship between fourteen-year-old Robin and the twenty-nine-year-old female research doctor was interesting and I think fairly well done. It's something that probably wouldn't fly in our oppressively PC times, but in the seventies would have been titillating and edgy.
The concept of the astral twins is fascinating. But, as I said before, I would have made the novel Gillian's and Robin's personal stories. People's inner experiences and feelings are more interesting to me than the larger concerns of the world. I prefer small foreign or independent films that focus on daily experiences than huge action/adventure movies. So my perceptions are skewed to those tastes.
All in all, an unsatisfying read for me, but it did contain some interesting concepts, and I discovered something about what I don't like.
posted by Sally Bosco at
1:42 PM
