In this case with the twist that his early exposure to the fog has left him immune to it. Just like in ‘The Rats’, the hero ends up working with government scientists and the military to defeat the menace. Once again, the hero (in this case, Department of the Environment inspector John Holman) is an everyman character who gets wrapped up in the events by chance at the start of the book, and continues his involvement because he’s that kind of guy.
These are typically centered around characters who appear simply to be killed, but like in ‘The Rats’, Herbert gives them convincing and fairly detailed back stories before bloodily executing them. The structure of the two books is identical with a slowly evolving linear plot interspersed with horrific vignettes. Indeed, whilst these are differences from ‘The Rats’, there are more similarities. In a nod to his first book, Herbert also throws in killer pigeons and cats who turn on their owners. A memorable early scene has a group of school boys attacking their teachers and each other in a bloody, sexual frenzy. Most shocking of all is the fact that children are not immune to the fog’s effects. Herbert mixes utterly random acts of carnage (a bus driver ploughing his vehicle through passengers waiting at a bus stop), with more personal ones (a man decapitating his wife and carrying her severed head around). The violence in ‘The Fog’ is as graphic as that in ‘The Rats’ but even more shocking because for the most part it is humans delivering it. Like ‘The Rats’ it has a plot that isn’t a million miles away from the disaster movies that were popular in the 70s but again Herbert ramps the horror up to eleven and produces something which has some lastingly disturbing moments. There are no furry critters this time, just a weird fog drifting around England which sends anyone who breathes it in violently insane. The premise of ‘The Fog’ is as simple and immediately attention grabbing as that of ‘The Rats’. A fact that probably says a lot about the fevered imaginations of adolescent boys. Interestingly, there is one sequence I vividly remember having described to me that isn’t in the book at all. I first read it as a teenager back in the 80s, but long before that I’d been gleefully relayed the details of some of the more horrific scenes by school friends with older brothers who had read it. His debut must have been a tough act to follow, but somehow he manages to up the shock factor with ‘The Fog’. The year after ‘The Rats’ smashed its way onto the horror scene, James Herbert published his second book. CriminOlly thinks: Horrifically effective set pieces and a chilling central concept overcome a weak plot 4/5 Reviews
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