The Fog – James Herbert
NEL – 1980 (First published 1975)
A poison cloud erupts from under the ground and causes the people who inhale it to go crazy. As it spreads it becomes more powerful, and it goes from driving a few isolated individuals to acts of sadistic violence to bringing the city of London to an apocalyptic hellscape.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like a particularly clever idea for a horror novel, but while reading it I was surprised at how clearly influential this book must have been within the horror genre. Every book by Harry Adam Knight, Simon Ian Childers and John Halkin I have read draws clear influence from this. I haven’t read Herbert’s The Rats yet, but I have a pretty song suspicion that this book combined with that one provided the blueprints for all of the horror fiction published by the aforementioned authors.
The Fog isn’t all that great though. The main problem is that it’s far too long. Harry Adam Knight’s The Fungus has a remarkably similar story, but being 100 pages shorter, it’s a more concise, enjoyable book.
The Fog is a novel driven by violence and destruction, but there’s complicated relationships too. I wasn’t terribly interested in them; the main characters in here are fairly dull. There’s also at least one overly graphic sex scene. This one wasn’t rapey or violent or anything, but it went on for ages. I didn’t see the point. I hate to sound like a prude, but I don’t really want this level of romantic detail in a novel about a cloud of maddening virus.
The sheer carnage in this book was pretty impressive. I hadn’t read anything by Herbert before this, and I was genuinely shocked at the brutality in here. This book came out in the mid 70s, but parts are as sickening as anything the “splatterpunks” put out a decade later. There’s one scene near the beginning of the book in which a crowd of schoolboys turn on two of their teachers. It involves a gang rape and garden shears. I sat dumbfounded after reading this part. I’ve made it sound bad, but I haven’t conveyed quite how sick it really is. I wouldn’t want to ruin it on you!
Also, although I wasn’t hugely impressd with the novel overall, it does include my favourite chapter of any novel ever. The poisonous fog affects people to different extents; some go on bloody killing sprees while others just hang themselves. One of those affected merely runs around his village kicking his neighbours up their bums. This part of the book is a seriously brilliant piece of writing. I laughed so hard. Genius.
Otherwise this was quite a clunky read. Herbert has the annoying habit of skipping ahead a bit of the story and then going immediately back to fill in the details. He seemed to think this was a cool narrative technique, but I found it annoying. Also the speed at which doctors in this book manage to create a vaccine is laughable, if not downright insulting, to anyone reading it in 2020.
The Fog is not a great book, and James Herbert is not a great writer. This isn’t without its charms though, and I’m planning to read Herbert’s Rats trilogy and The Spear in the future.
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Nocturnal Revelries 