I read this novel (to be precise, and oddly enough, in its French edition) long time ago. I don’t remember what I thought at that time, but the book I remembered all right. And after so many years, being now in the process of rereading my classics, I suddenly realised I haven’t read it in English yet. Time to fill the gap.
The story plot is a simple one, and the synopsis on the book cover tells it all. “The peaceful life of a village in Wiltshire is suddenly shattered by a disaster which strikes without reason or explanation, leaving behind it a trail of misery and horror. A yawning, bottomless crack spreads through the earth, out of which creeps a fog that resembles no other. Whatever it is, it must be controlled; for wherever it goes it leaves behind a trail of disaster as hideous as the tragedy that marked its entry into the world. The fog, quite simple, drives people insane.”
And when it says insane, it doesn’t exaggerate. It starts with the main character, John Holman that, after having rescued a little girl from the earthquake, also becomes the first victim of the fog, experiencing first-hand this madness. And it goes from bad to worse. How worse? The worst-case scenario. This is what another synopsis tells the readers, possibly to warn them about what they are going to find in those pages (and talk the faint-hearted out of it). “In an exclusive private school, students sexually assaulted and mutilated their teachers, then savagely turned on one another… At a seaside resort, thousands of people joined in a monstrous act of self-destruction… In a lonely room, an old lady was shredded and eaten by her beloved pet cats… In the city, mass copulation and insane slaying spread.Time was running out for mankind…”
Controversial? You bet. The book came out in 1975, and there have been since then many claims of excessive gore, violence, gratuitous sex. ‘The Fog made me a lot of enemies. Fortunately it also made me a lot of friends.” This is what the author declared in 1988 in occasion of a reprint of the novel.
Gore, I can’t deny: it delivers plenty. But it does it with mastery, and this has contributed to make the novel a classic, albeit I’m not sure it qualifies as “literature classic”. Sex is a different story though, and this is one of the aspects I didn’t like. Not because there’s a lot of it. Sex scenes are just two in the whole book, and not particularly graphic. But they’re not well written either, and they could have been left out, or cut short, without qualms: they don’t serve any purpose. Moreover, one of them features two girls. Now, I guess it was a bit too much for many readers back in the 1970s. I did find it a bit disturbing too, for the way the whole topic has been treated, unflattering and discriminatory towards women, clearly from a masculine, old-fashioned (read: outdated) perspective. (But again, I think it was a sign of the times this book came out. Now a writer would be more careful with certain statements about “normality”, and rightly so.)
Another area of disagreement among reviewers of this novel is about the stories of a series of minor characters that get insane due to the fog, all of them in slightly different ways but all without exception terrifying. Some felt this “steals” attention from the main character in an unnecessary and often uninteresting way, others found these stories one of the highlights of the book. I would say I sit somehow in the middle. I do agree a couple of them are too lengthly, but in my opinion they, contrary to the sex scenes I mentioned above, do serve a purpose, narratively speaking: to show how the fog produces a different kind of madness in people, possibly related to the people’s own characteristics.
The Fog reminds me of the famous Carpenter’s 1980 (horror) movie with the same name, but with a completely different setting – USA – and more supernatural activity. And this leads to one of the things I like the most in Herbert’s novel. Here you can’t really say where the fog comes from, if it is a man-made monstrosity, like a science experiment gone awry, or a evil presence spreading on the UK for unknown reasons, or the modern version of a Biblical plague. Toward the end of the book you get your answer, which I won’t disclose here. The point is, you don’t need to know. The only thing that matters is the way it affects you, and how you can deal (or not) with that. The result is an overwhelming feeling of dread, that makes you shudder and shiver your way through the 345 pages of the novel. It’s a page-turner, and no, you can’t stop reading. And this is what makes it a classic, despite its weaknesses.
Herbert, who was considered (the writer has recently passed away) a true horror master, wrote many other books, some equally famous, such as The Rats Trilogy, which you can read about here. The Rats was, incidentally, his first book and an immediate best-seller. As written in his obituary by the Guardian, “Herbert’s 23 novels have sold 54m copies worldwide. He was published in 34 languages, including Russian and Chinese. In 2010 he was made an OBE and received the Grand Master award at the World Horror Convention.”
For more about James Herbert, visit his official website.
Herbert was a staple part of my youth. Was saddened to hear of his death.
Me too. I guess we are not the only ones…