Batman: Fear Itself

Novels based on characters from comics and mangas have become popular. Recently DC Comics licensed and release a number of novels based on their comic book characters.

Batman: Fear Itself (2007) is written by Michael Reeves who received an Emmy Award for his work on Batman: The Animated series.

{warning: contains spoilers}

The basic premise of this novel is simple. If you are a best selling horror writer who seems to be losing his edge and his sales, what and how far will you go to reestablish yourself as a writer?

Grey Berwald is that horror writer. His solution was to turn to the master of horror, the Scarecrow a.k.a Dr. Crane for help. The Scarecrow gave Grey a neurotoxin to spray on his novels so that whoever read them will have a heighten state of fear. Things went wrong when some people cannot handle their fear and caused accident and death.

Batman/Bruce Wayne and investigative reporter Maggie Tollyer investigates and finally confronts the Scarecrow.

Reeves works with some interesting premises; How far will you go as a writer to get sales and reach the top of the best seller list? Do you have limits in what you will and will not write? Are you responsible for what people do after they have read your writing? Will you sell your soul to the devil?

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