Wickedly wonderful and enjoyably evil, A History of Fear is a tale of the tortuous journey one man takes into the depths of his own personal hell. Lucas Dumas crafts a compelling story sure to satisfy the deepest desires of psychological thriller fans.
A twenty five year old American is not the first thing that comes to mind when someone might ask you to picture the most infamous murderer in Scotland. Grayson Hale, or the Devil’s Advocate as the tabloids would come to call him, did not fit the profile for violence nor was he the type of person to seek attention. His claim that the Devil made him slaughter a classmate ruined any chance of that..
Serving a life sentence for the crime, Hale is found hanged in his cell. A handwritten manuscript holds the secrets, but will it simply show the rantings of a madman or in the end… was this mild mannered man telling the truth?
Dumas utilizes an interesting structure for the story, leaning heavily on a first person viewpoint as readers watch the slow and inevitable trainwreck that is Hale’s mental state. Supplementing the horrors of the main storyline are snippets of the research and interviews from an investigative journalist as well as court documents. We are sucked and enveloped as the exploration of Hale’s personal anguish, we are snapped back to reality in these perfectly placed interludes that force us to form our own theories on Hale’s sanity.
Fans of horror, psychological thrillers, and general crime can all find elements of their preferred subgenre within these pages. If you like it when things take a darker turn, then you simply must read A History of Fear.
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