Fear

October 2016, 272 pages

Available material: English sample

Foreign editions: Poland (Stara szkola), Macedonia (Antolog)

A thriller, a horror story – Karika takes an opportunity to portray the darkness within us and our society.

A burnt-out man in his thirties comes back to a suburban part of town at the foot of a mountain that conceals a chilling secret – in exceptionally cold winters children go missing. All the failures and disappointments that he has experienced so far are nothing compared to the hell lurking in the place where he grew up. The characters and surroundings are very realistic, although there is a hint of the supernatural and mysterious and the evil is intentionally not specified or explained. This thriller is a masterpiece at evoking a sense of unfounded fear in the reader (like some of Stephen Kings’ works do). Karika also refers to the Dyatlov Pass incident and the mysterious deaths of the members of the expedition that happened in the northern Ural Mountains in 1959. There are some similarities between those stories: the arctic cold, the mountains and the terrifying presence of something intangible and dark. In this haunting novel with elements of the supernatural, Jozef Karika delivers a sensitive narrative about the way our childhood affects our lives. The end of the story is so unexpected it will shock you.