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I've had a sort of nagging issue with this series since the beginning, and as it winds down to its conclusion, I think I'm starting to finally figure out what it is.

Well, let me start with the positives, because my feelings on this book are overwhelmingly positive--true to form, Grant is still the master of pacing. Each chapter, still headered with that ticking clock, is subdivided into a series of vignettes told from different characters' viewpoints. And each one--yes, almost literally every single one--ends on a cliffhanger that makes you regret your time with this character is once again going on pause. He's a master of disseminating information at a pace that keeps you intrigued yet not frustrated, excited yet not overwhelmed. I read through these books like liquid butter, and I have such a narrow window for pacing tolerance that the mere fact of me finishing a book is enough to consider it exceptional, but I never have a problem getting through one of the GONE books.

Pacing, however, is not plot. The rate at which he doles out information is perfect, but the information itself is becoming more and more clearly made-up-as-he-goes. I guess I don't have a problem with this. His writing style has never been large on internally consistent logic--any fans of the Animorphs knows the rules can bend and wobble to fit any number of nightmarishly inescapable circumstances--but he's a creative and interesting enough writer that I don't mind the plot divots because I know I'll end up somewhere awesome. For instance, and spoiler alert from here on out--it's revealed in this book that Little Petey "used" the gaiaphage to create the barrier, so that the gaiaphage is a part of the barrier. However, it's unclear whether the association between Petey and the Gaiaphage is necessary for the manifestation of all his previous powers--were those monsters he conjured in Hunger an expression of the gaiaphage as well? What are the limits of Petey's powers, both in corporeal and noncorporeal form? These questions don't have answers, because I sense Grant doesn't want to limit himself with actual rules. So everything just sort of slides along, conflicts get resolved, but the overall mythology is frustratingly stalled, much like the show that provides Perdido Beach's name. Just like LOST, the answers in GONE aren't answers so much as distractions that seem to spiral closer and closer to some nugget of truth that will probably end up being totally arbitrary.

That said, I've forgiven LOST of providing me no real meaning, because I had so much fun on the journey that the destination didn't matter as much. I expect to resolve my issues with Gone's plot in the same way.

However, the plot is exciting enough to keep my interest, but the biggest problem I have with this series are the characters who carry it out. And they've always been on the cusp of relatable, identifiable humans, yet they always fall frustratingly short. Our main characters--Sam, Caine, Drake, and Astrid--have never much expanded beyond the archetypes they're meant to fill. Sam has always been stalwart and overwhelmed, Astrid, his girlfriend, has never breached far beyond her role as support and nurture of him (she did try once though, so I credit him that), Drake has always been an uncontrollable sociopath, Caine has always provided some kind of antagonistic foil. Their motivations don't much matter, because they're always *responding* to what's already happening, and each "happening" can pretty much be summed up by the title of each respective book. They're plot-driven books, and that's fine, but the times he edges up to actual character development/arcs always miss their target by such a narrow margin, and I think that's why these books frustrate me.

I have a few specific cases I want to discuss. First, Edilio. It's revealed in this book that Edilio is gay--something I've kind of suspected, so whatever those subtle clues were happened to be expertly planted (maybe it was just that we hadn't got a male gay character yet, and you know Grant wouldn't assign that role to a villain)--but the actual reveal was one of the silliest things that made the rest of the whirlwind story grind tortuously to a halt. Sam is trying to figure out some problem that is VERY URGENT with a VERY SHORT DEADLINE (I think it was right after they all found out Diana had been kidnapped), and Edilio calls his boyfriend "babe." First, I don't think a time of such heightened stress and awareness is the time for ANYONE to be throwing out platitudes, and second, that word itself is just so far outside of Edilio's character that I could almost see the hand of the author moving his puppet. The one word would have been forgivable, but then all the characters take a time out to address the social impact of this new revelation. It's okay, you're still a brother to me, I forgive you for being gay and not telling me. Realistically, Sam might have jerked, but I think that particular gaffe would have been temporarily postponed with some awkward silences and avoided gazes. The fact that everyone stops everything to address a *socially relevant teen issue* just felt so pandering and dishonest. I like that we're trying to address these things, but not at the expense of the believability of the story.

Besides a few minor little issues like that (another that comes to mind is Dekka and Orc's discussion of her sexual identity, though that felt a little more natural since they were both kind of avoiding what they'd been ordered to do), my biggest complaint is with the characters I DO like and DO respond to. Each book has one, and I know this is entirely personal, but there's always one character whose arc I find really compelling, really interesting, really moving. In Lies (I think?), it was Mary. In Plague, it was Dekka. In Fear, it was Diana.

I guess I just love my female tortured souls.

Since this is a review for Fear, though, let's talk about Diana.

Diana's whole arc in this story was absolutely horrifying, but I never really got the sense that Grant understood why. Horror, in general, can be fantastic, but I feel like it also has to be specifically relatable to intrinsic human fears. They have to reference things that real human people are actually afraid of. There is a lot of horror in these books that doesn't work because it's outside the realm of anything anyone ever experiences. The monsters Petey conjured in Hunger, for instance. No one's ever had to deal with that, so the whole scene felt like abstract time-filler. But there are bits of horror in these books that are excellent. Common situations slightly twisted, standard fears augmented and perverted, so that they become nightmare fodder. The wasps in Plague are a great example. Huge, growing tumors spreading painlessly through you, killing you from the inside out, and all you can do is know, you can't change it, you can't cure it. You can only wait for it to crack you open and leave your rotting corpse behind. That happens in real life, and it's just as horrifying there, too.

Diana's pregnancy is absolutely terrifying. Maybe just as a female reader who, even in my mid-twenties wouldn't know what to do with an unplanned pregnancy, but even without the additional paranormal elements--if this pregnancy had been played exclusively straight, it still would have been horrific. Maybe even moreso.

Is there any terror a teenage girl has more than becoming pregnant? Any taboo more crippling? Any mistake with bigger consequences? There aren't many. And that horrible, cultural, biological truth, alone, in the normal world, could be a great tale of horror, but combine that with the utter indifference of the FAYZ, the fact that there are no doctors, no experts, no parents or authority figures, no choice and a great number of people that would probably want to see her dead--a teenage girl having to go through a pregnancy all alone, without any of the technological comforts our society has granted pregnant women--is one of the more visceral, immediate horrors this series has caused in me.

That said, the delivery of this situation is sparse and impersonal. Grant permits himself a third-person omniscient view, but it's for the most part internal. We get to hear thoughts, fears, confessions of guilt and surrender. These internal monologues never feel particularly personal, though. Diana, when she gets the few opportunities to think about her situation, is never really worried about all those things she does not have. She never really feels much at all about it. Most of the descriptions of her, when we're in her viewpoint, are physical--the amount of times she has to pee, the shape of her belly, the color of her nipples. When we do get descriptions of her mental state, it's usually that she's worried that her baby is going to be a monster, or guilt over the cannibalism she committed three books ago. We never really get her thoughts on becoming mistakenly pregnant, on how she's going to raise a baby in as hellish a place as the FAYZ, self-pity about what's happened to her, or any kinds of normal feelings you'd expect for her to feel. In addition, no one ever treats her with the kind of cruelty that unwed mothers still get all the time, the kind that's becoming codified in a number of different state legislatures. This seems like such a ripe, relevant topic, and it's not even touched upon at all.

I can almost forgive it because the author, as a man, can and will not ever be pregnant. But the author's job is to imagine what these things feel like, based on what he already knows. The lack of an attempt is troubling, and a commonly recurring pattern. Characters are not people--they're archetypes with the vaguest suggestions of personality. And, more often than not, we're informed of these character traits rather than being able to witness them.

As an example--Drake. Drake was a great terrifying character in GONE, one that even got the attention of horror connoisseur Stephen King, and there's one scene that my mind always goes to when I think of him. That horrible, awful scene in the classroom where Drake coerced Astrid into calling her brother a retard was perfect. How sociopathic, cruel, and unforgiving do you have to be not only to force someone into using a word they find contemptible, but to force them to betray their very family? It was not a cerebral scene--if I remember, the words Drake used were very simple and direct--but it was incredibly effective.

Drake doesn't have many scenes like that anymore.

The best example of this is Drake's supposed hatred of women. It's appropriate for his character, sure, but the reader never really sees it. There's a sort of confounding scene where Dekka and Astrid (I think) are discussing it, and the tone is something like, "boy, Drake sure does hate women." "He sure does." These characters are informing us of this trait, rather than allowing us to see it. We get this again in Drake's narration, but it's still as unremoved and abstract. "Women sure are awful," or something. There's never a reason for it--not that there has to be--but it's like the trait is never really associated with his character. It's an additional thing we're not supposed to like. No more effective than if a character said, "I'd bet Drake would microwave a puppy if he had the chance." I would bet that too, but it doesn't mean anything if he doesn't actually do it.

There's ample opportunity for us to see this alleged raging misogyny, and that's when Drake is dragging Diana down to the gaiaphage. But he never really treats her with contempt, we never really get to see that it's *her* he hates, the very expression of her body--because, really, what is more feminine than pregnancy?--he just kind of treats her like he treats everyone else. And, not to be crude, but it seemed dishonest to me--Diana is still a pregnant teenager. That is a class of person in our society that does not earn much respect, and our society has offered up many potential choice slurs to wield against them.

Drake uses none of them.

I would not have relished him calling her a whore, or slut, or whatever--this series, for some reason, censors out what little profanity it references--but even just the suggestion of the act that conceived the baby, and how disgusted or superior Drake felt to it, would have illustrated it. Insulting and mocking Diana for expressing the foregone conclusion of an act perpetrated by a pair, while leaving the other in that equation totally unaccused, is exactly the kind of thing that encompasses contemporary "misogyny." Grant served it to himself on a silver platter, and he's a smart guy, so I'm really not sure why he didn't go that route.

There is one good expression of it I have to point out, though, and it's a great example of how simple these illustrations can be. After the baby is born, Drake realizes the baby has to be fed, and orders Diana to do it, calling her a cow. That is perfect. A single word that can dehumanize her, take away her personhood, compare her to an animal, belittle her into nothing more than livestock that produces some necessary byproduct. Cow is a lazy insult often hurled at overweight women, but this was so much better. Not particularly creative, not particularly incisive, but just so, so appropriate, I finally had a sense of exactly how Drake felt about Diana in particular, and women in general. Just like making Astrid use the word "retard," a single insult like that can do more than paragraphs of description in helping me understand Drake.

This is a long way of saying that Grant needs to show more and tell less with his characters. They feel like caricatures because we rarely get to witness the traits that supposedly define them. And, like I said, I realize that isn't exactly the point of this book, but caring about people who seem to be mere references would increase the stakes of the plot and further intensify the wild ride we've already been on. Not that I expect that to happen too much in the last book, but it's the main thing that's kept me from *loving* these books like I do Harry Potter or Hunger Games or, yes, Animorphs, and instead just liking them enough to finish them.

Not that it really matters, though. He'll still get my money for the last one.