Bookworm Blurbs

A peaceful village in Wiltshire is shattered by a disaster which strikes without reason or explanation, leaving behind 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. (source)

I didn't like this book for so many reasons. To be honest, the chances of me liking it weren't all that high because I'm not a huge horror novel fan, so the fact that it's in the genre wasn't really in its favor. But I have read a few good ones (my favorite is Ring by Koji Suzuki - go read it if you haven't already!) and with those as a base of comparison I think it's safe to say that I'm not just being biased - this book is simply not good. 

I think the main reason for that is that this book isn't really scary - it's just super messed up. The whole premise is that there's this fog that's making its way around England and it's causing people to go insane and do all sorts of horrible things. The things that Herbert describes are absolutely awful. They're disgusting, they're depraved, and I am completely stunned that anyone would ever think of writing these acts down in a book, even if it is a horror novel. Herbert most definitely could have conveyed the unnatural effects of the fog without getting quite this bad. 

The really sad thing is that parts of the book that aren't super disturbing are just plain boring. I really had to force myself to get through this. I felt like there was a lot of repetition and, messiness aside, very little action. Even the ending was anticlimactic - it was very inconclusive and I felt like it seemed as though Herbert didn't know how to end the book so he just stopped writing. Sometimes, open-ended endings work, but in this case it felt lazy, in my opinion. 

This is definitely not a book I will be revisiting and I am happy to be putting it behind me. I will also not be reading anything else by Herbert in the future (or at least I don't intend to). The one good thing that has come out of this was that I now know which horror novel not to recommend to readers, haha. I think that even horror novel fans will be disappointed by this one.