I’ve just finished The Fog and I wanted to get into the habit of writing the review before I start the next book. I managed to get almost 1/2 way through The Fog before I had written the review for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and that is frankly not acceptable!
The review for The Fog will be a bit easier to produce than my previous books. Firstly, I didn’t create any notes for this book. I still think that side notes are a great way to expand your enjoyment of what you are reading, but this book didn’t incite me to discover much. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, just a fact 🙂
The Fog is an interesting book and I am really glad that I read it. It was not a literary masterpiece, but I guess that it was never meant to be! The story wasn’t hugely convoluted, there weren’t complex threads winding through each other. Some of the detail was dubious, clunky and contradictory, so I found that I was quite regularly jerked out of the story thinking; “… But why?” Or “what about the xxx you just mentioned?” Or “Grrrr.” So you would think that I didn’t like the book? I must say, that straight after Captain Corelli’s Mandolin this was definitely a change, but that is one reason why I chose it. None the less, the story has some very endearing qualities, and is at the very least a horror story from the tried and tested recipe that James Herbert was a driving force in creating.
In The Fog He took a relatively good action story and added a generous handful of overly described gore, a gritty lead character who would not stop until the work was done and a soupcon of slightly out of place sex scenes… Horror perfection.
As I said, I think that the book was a bit disjointed. I still found myself happily thinking “why the hell not?” quite regularly and that dispelled the effect of the odd clunky section. This book pleasantly reminded me of horror books that I read many years ago. It is of its time, it was gory not scary, it was meant to be fun and it was!
Ratings wise, I have to follow my basic metric for these things, and it may be a revelation to you, but that is based on IMDB. Almost always, the hive mind that rates films on the IMDB site get it right for me. If a film is over 6/10 I will like it. 7 or 8 and it’s worth crossing the road for, and 8 or over and you usually have cinema gold. I’ve given The Fog 6.5/10. I have to acknowledge the dodgy plot holes and the like, but 6.5/10 is well worth a read if you get the chance.