Fear cover art

Fear

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Fear

By: Roald Dahl - editor, Cynthia Asquith, Mary Treadgold, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Wharton, L. P. Hartley
Narrated by: Rory Kinnear, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Tom Felton, Kevin Eldon
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Fear by Roald Dahl, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, Kevin Eldon, Tom Felton and Rory Kinnear.

Do you enjoy being scared? Featuring fourteen classic spine-chilling stories chosen by Roald Dahl, these terrible tales of ghostly goings-on will have you shivering with fear as you turn the pages.

They include such timeless and haunting stories as Sheridan Le Fanu's The Ghost of a Hand, Edith Wharton's Afterward, Cynthia Asquith's The Corner Shop and Mary Treadgold's The Telephone.

©2017 Roald Dahl (P)2017 Penguin Audio Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Psychological Satire Short Stories Comedy Haunted Scary Ghost

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Price of Fear: 20 Tales of Suspense Told by Vincent Price cover art
Ghost Stories: Stephen Fry's Definitive Collection cover art
The Travelling Grave and Other Stories cover art
The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories cover art
E.F. Benson's Ghost Stories cover art
The Man in Black: The Complete Series 1-4 cover art
Into the Uncanny cover art
Fear on 4 cover art
HorrorBabble's Ultimate Weird Tales Collection, Volume 1 cover art
The Winter Spirits cover art
The Yellow Brick Road cover art
The Other Passenger cover art
Classic Ghost Stories cover art
M.R. James: The Complete Ghost Stories Collection cover art
A Selection of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories cover art
Horror Stories for Halloween cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
This is a series of short stories with a sinister and twisted ilk, just like the other collections in the series (Lust, Deception, Treachery etc.). The cover itself is deceptive. Unlike the others, these are stories collected by Dahl, not written by him.

They don't have the same style as Dahl (think story with an ironic twist at the end), but they're still good!

NOT Roald Dahl!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A wonderful collection of classic ghost stories, well chosen (by a master) and very well read. these are NOT bedtime stories :-)

Absolutely classic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Well done, Roald Dahl for putting together this collection. A treat to find a well written and narrated set of stories with a hint of the supernatural. Not something you come across often.

Good collection of stories, well narrated

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Some genuinely creepy moments here -especially a couple of stories from the experts who knew how effective a slow build up can be. One of the things I liked best about this collection is that it features locations normally neglected in the genre - on board a ship for example - and interesting personalities, fully developed. A cold guardian and a damaged young girl are both transformed by a lengthy haunting. A loving but blinkered wife is brought to a new understanding of her husband's personality by an unexpected visitation.

And if you've seen American Werewolf in London, you'll know that dread and laughter are a dream ticket. In one story in particular, the description of the tremendous resentment demonstrated by a maid subjected to reasonable questioning by her mistress had me laughing, despite the sinister events which occasioned the interrogation.

Although most of the stories are set during the genre's golden age (the Victorian and Edwardian eras) the collection contains examples of what is still everyday contemporary horror too - as, for example, when a loved one walks through a door into the great silence, a mystery with no resolution. These authors know that leaving a certain amount up to the reader's own imagination - refusing to explain everything - is an effective way of magnifying dread. A picture on the side of a milk carton can represent the greatest horror of all, when you think about it.

Goosebumps

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Famously drawn from a long-list of 749 stories, these 14 ghostly tales reflect the best of spooky short fiction as viewed by curator, Roald Dahl. No stranger to a rum yarn, Dahl's choices range from late Victorian through to the 1960s, with the emphasis firmly on slow suspense and atmospheric chills. Amongst the authors selected here are some big guns of the classic Ghost Story format, but it's a selection notable for it's omissions as much as anything else (no room at the inn for Monty? And surely some Shirley would have been fitting?); frankly, even some of the efforts from the ghoulish glitterati are hardly their best (Sheridan Le Fanu's 'The Ghost Of A Hand' is terrible, whilst E.F. Benson's 'In The Tube' is a decent story strangled at birth by it's own speculative cod-philosophising). Interestingly, many of the stories feature ambiguous or diffident apparitions ('Afterward'; 'On The Brighton Road'; 'A Christmas Meeting'; 'The Telephone') and two of the stronger stories here (Cynthia Asquith's 'The Corner Shop' and A.M. Burrage's 'Playmates') are haunted by benign presences. I suspect a key criteria of Dahl's selections was how easily these stories would be adaptable to television.
For good, old-fashioned malignancy, the most potent pieces are F. Marion Crawford's 'The Upper Berth' and Rosemary Timperley's 'Harry'. Elsewhere, 'Elias and the Draug' by Jonas Lie is a creditable attempt to broaden the remit and move further afield (Norway, in this instance), but it is an unfortunately dull tale. Best in show, by some distance, is Robert Aickman's eerie and enigmatic 'Ringing The Changes'; easily highlight of the set for me.
Of the narration, it's a pretty good bunch: Tom Felton is okay; Rory Kinnear puts in stout work and lifts some of the more middling tales; and Julian Rhind-Tutt's dry, haughty voice is always a supercilious pleasure. Kevin Eldon is the revelation for me; I'd only known him from his oddball comedy roles but he has a wonderful voice for audiobooks, rather like Robert Hardy: ideal for golden age detective fiction or classic ghost stories, which is handy here...


The Six Weird Roads Of Death

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
As story collection go, id say this is one of the better. Worth a go.

Ok. Not a bad collection.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narration was boring, the stories were boring and not fearful at all. Too many long words in some of the stories. Very disappointed

Boring

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very poor selection of stories. Not worth bothering with. Narrators were good though only real plus unfortunately

Poor stories that don't grip you

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.