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Post by dem on Jun 1, 2009 17:48:12 GMT
The last time Mrs S was there at the H. Cem (last year I think), she took along a couple of young Mexican girls who were all agog about the *ahem* notorious legend. They insisted Mrs S ask HRH Misery Guts about it, and (knowing no fear, as Mrs S does) she did, at the very end of the guided walk. Cue HRH foaming at the mouth, hands flapping, eyes rolling and cries of "we never talk about that!!!!!!!!!!". Wish I'd been there to see it, although I have encountered HRH Bride of Ejacula's funny turn on a previous occasion. I really shouldn't have bought those fake gnashers from the joke-shop with me... Apologies, I'm seriously off topic. Mark S. Absolutely commendable performance from Mrs. S. and as to the plastic fangs - you didn't really, did you? - my admiration knows no bounds. Honest, having been asked about the "notorious legend" on every tour for over thirty years, you'd think by now the barking old fossil would've accepted that it's the only reason why people are paying good money to walk around her crummy cemetery when they could have a freebie in Kensal Green without the hassle? Anyway, back once again with grim Jim .... You'll remember - yeah, right! - that Holman and Casey stopped to help when the school coach came off the road as Hodges drove into the fog? Well, Holman's recent blood transfusion seems to have rendered him immune to it's lethal influence, but Casey is another matter ... Quite by chance, Holman's boss at the Ministry has also had an encounter with the killer cloud while driving to work. Reunited with his finest agent, Mr. Spiers interrupts the debrief by leaping through the window. Holman doesn't stick around to be arrested for murder and heads for Casey's flat but - too late - she's already a raving, drooling maniac! Their incredibly violent wrestling match continues for several pages with only a brief interlude for blouse repair before Holman eventually triumphs. The police wait until he has her safely bound and gagged on the bed before making their entrance .... These necessary plot interludes, exciting as that last one was, can be a bit of a nuisance because up until now (p. 100) the vignettes have been so strong you wanna skip stuff and catch up with the next doomed bystanders. Chapter eight's pair are miserable, booze-sodden Harry who comes to grief at the savage beaks of his beloved racing pigeons, and molly-coddled Midlands Bank employee Edward Smallwood who gets in some serious ass-kicking on his way to a final showdown with his manager, Mr. Symes .... |
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Post by goathunter on Jun 4, 2009 14:05:56 GMT
I know what you mean. Herbert became hit or miss for me after the boring Magig Cottage. I truly lost interest after the awful Portent. I tried again with Others and never got more than 50 pages or so. I had the exact same experience. I counted Herbert among my top favorites (along with King, McCammon, and Bloch) until around that time. I haven't bothered with any since then. Still, I have great memories of those early Herberts, especially The Fog, The Rats, and my personal favorite, Shrine. Hunter |
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Post by dem on Jun 5, 2009 9:30:41 GMT
I'm wondering if the people who picked up on Herbert with Portent or The Other think those books are the real deal but his earlier novels are just juvenile pulp rubbish? Recently i was watching a clip of Nick Cave & the Cavemen (post Birthday Party, fledgling Bad Seeds) giving a - to me - magnificent, raucous performance of I Put A Spell On You in London circa 1984. Underneath it, someone had commented words to the effect of: "that's awful! I'm going to see him tomorrow and i hope he doesn't play that!" Maybe the good people who rave about Crickley Hall feel the same way toward Lair?
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King recalls media response to the Reverend Jim Jones mass-suicide in Guyana tragedy, how one commentator remarked that "no-one could have imagined it". King flashed on Herbert's sad chapter concerning Mavis, the distraught lesbian who drives to Bournemouth intent on drowning herself, little realising she'll be helped on her way by the town's entire fog-addled population who march zombie-like into the sea, stomping her underfoot when, having changed her mind, she heads back for shore. "Wrong", thought King. "James Herbert imagined it".
Evidently, Herbert had a touch of the Nostradamus about him in '76 as not two chapters on we have Captain Joe Emming deliberately fly his Boeing 747 into the Post Office Tower, killing thousands as a result.
Meanwhile, back in Holman's world, Casey has just attacked her Dad with a scissors and our hero has been inveigled into the Government's top-secret team to save the country from the creeping yellow mist. Jim - who can blame him? - uses the opportunity to get in his trademark everyman angry rant at the Establishment who cover-up each others cover-ups and keep us in ignorance at what's really going on, and, more commendably, even works in a brief history of the fog since it's cultivation by a mad scientist as the last word in biological warfare .....
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Post by carolinec on Jun 5, 2009 15:38:53 GMT
Recently i was watching a clip of Nick Cave & the Cavemen (post Birthday Party, fledgling Bad Seeds) giving a - to me - magnificent, raucous performance of I Put A Spell On You in London circa 1984. Underneath it, someone had commented words to the effect of: "that's awful! I'm going to see him tomorrow and i hope he doesn't play that!" Creedence Clearwater Revival did a damn good version of that on one of their early albums (it might have been their first?). John Fogarty's throaty vocals were perfect for that song. And there you have it, there IS more to my musical tastes than Jethro Tull!  But I degress - back to James Herbert. Yes, I'm sure you're right about different people liking different aspects of his work, Dem. In Ramsey Campbell's book of essays "Probably" he writes on Herbert something along the lines that he initially didn't like his writing at all, but later discovered a different aspect to it which he did like. I guess that was probably as Herbert's writing changed from what you might call the "trashy pulp" to the "newer horror" stuff? Just a thought anyway - and I'm not quoting Ramsey direct, it's just from memory. |
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Post by dem on Jun 9, 2009 9:31:29 GMT
Only thirty pages to go! The fog and the action shift to London with the inevitable results - violent acts and impromptu street orgies. The Government, important and necessary people are moved into a state-of-the-art Nuclear Bunker, the Royal Family hot foot it to Scotland and Holman (still the-only-man-who-can-save-us-all) has all the ammunition he needs to get angry on our behalf again at the selection process. Out in the rubble strewn, blazing streets, at least the damned are enjoying themselves. Samson the bus driver takes his whooping passengers on a dodgem ride many won't live to forget. And old girl who loves cats (vivisectionists pay well for her cast-offs) becomes at one with them. Chief Super Wreford comes up with a drastic cure for his wife's snoring. A tribe of Hari-Krishna decide love ain't all that great after all ... Holman and new sidekick Mason, meanwhile, are on a mission to retrieve a sample of the mutated mycroplasma at the fog's core. As they slowly make their way through the city in the 'Devastation Vehicle', who should come bombing out of the fog at them but Samson and his Bus of Death! While his mate is being kicked to a pulp, Holman escapes by commandeering an Anglia driven by a timid fellow who seems unaffected by the fog .... until Holman takes a look at what's on the back seat .... Just got to the bit where Holman's located the nucleus of the fog in the Blackwall Tunnel and that quote on the back cover - ""Out of the yellowish fog a man emerged. His eyes were fixed straight ahead and his lips were frozen in a smile. In his hands he carried the severed, still bleeding head of his wife." - is actually a sexed up version of the lines as they appear in the book, as if they couldn't find anything quite gory and ghoulish enough for the job. **** All finished and glad i persevered with it on the few occasions it got a bit laggy. The impression at times is of a very British take on the 'thirties sex & sadism pulps! Herbert continues the work he started with The Rats in single-handedly changing the face of East London (bad news for fans of the Blackwall Tunnel, Canning Town Gasworks and much of the A13 in general). Another welcome if understated (by Herbert standards) When Animals Attack interlude features the massed pigeons of Trafalgar Square versus a crowd of zombied out crazies, and the deus ex machina ending is exciting and at least plausible in the context of the novel. It didn't up my enthusiasm for an instant rematch with Survivor, Fluke, Spear or any of the other post- Fog novels, but i'm just glad it stood up to my happy memories the second time around. |
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Post by fritzmaitland on Mar 21, 2010 20:44:47 GMT
Just turned up a (hawk,spit) hardback reprint of The Fog. Published by NEL (huzzah!) in 1988 (Mine's a fifth (?!) impression 1989). The Herb wrote an intro which I'll quote in full - " The Fog made me a lot of enemies. Fortunately it also made me a lot of friends. It was first published in 1975 (written in 1974) when spy stories and historical romances were the vogue. In the United States, William Peter Blatty had made his definitive mark with the movie of The Exorcist , and word was going around about an interesting new writer by the name of Stephen King. In England a new kind of horror tale involving mutant rats on the loose in London's East End , a story that held scant regard for conventional moderation in its depiction of violence and the consequences, had created something of a stir. It was a book that (literally, you might say) went straight for the jugular. The Rats was my first attempt at a novel. The Fog was my second. For better or worse, they were the initial part in a growing explicitness of narrative, stories that rarely balked at expressing horror's true physical reality. Judging by the genre's swift return to public attention, through both the novel and the screen, that reality had been suppressed far too long (whether or not the sudden healthy release has transmuted in an unhealthy fascination is another matter). Readers or moviegoers no longer wanted to be merely frightened, they wanted to be shocked rigid too. Yet, for all that, is The Fog, a tale of murder, madness and mayhem, as graphically horrific as its longlasting notoriety would suggest? By comparison with today's standards, certainly not. But when it was first published in 1975? Well, even that's debatable. Ramsey Campbell, perhaps one of the most respected authors of the genre, has said in a reappraisal: ' The Fog contains remarkably few graphic acts of violence of violence, though two are so horrible and painful that they pervade the book. Herbert concentrates rather on painting a landscape of (occasionally comic) nightmare, and most of the episodes are of terror rather than explicit violence.' My point is - and this is an observation, not a defence - that much of the controversial extremism is in the mind of the beholder rather than on the page. I must confess, however, to being pleased with the effectiveness of its images. Nevertheless, with this new edition, the temptation was to rewrite, to smooth out the rougher edges, perhaps endow some of the characters with a little more depth. After all, a dozen novels on, and by the very nature of practice, I must have picked up a few more skills along the way. But by so doing, would I detract from the original? To me, The Fog provides an honest reflection of the transient mood of the horror genre in the seventies, being in some ways a throwback to the fifties and much earlier, whereby due homage (albeit subconsciously) is paid to Wells, Wyndham and Kneale - War Of The Worlds, Day Of The Triffids and Quatermass respectively - while advancing very firmly towards the eighties. And it's sheer energy that carries the story through to the climactic finale; refinement might well sap its strength. I think change would be an unnecessary indulgence on my part. Besides, I like the beast the way it is. James Herbert
Sussex 1988 Phew! Good on yer, Jim. And that ' a new kind of horror tale' is comfortingly close to Edge's 'A new kind of western hero.' '...reissued in this new edition to mark its New English Library sales passing the one million copy milestone in the UK alone.' No artist credited. 'A certain classic.' Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and The Supernatural |
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Post by dem on Mar 22, 2010 14:08:59 GMT
Nevertheless, with this new edition, the temptation was to rewrite, to smooth out the rougher edges, perhaps endow some of the characters with a little more depth. After all, a dozen novels on, and by the very nature of practice, I must have picked up a few more skills along the way. But by so doing, would I detract from the original? trust me, mr. herbert, you would, and thank your God you didn't go down that disastrous route. it would be a bit like Shaun Hutson smoothing out his Slugs or some meddling minnie translating Eat Them Alive into something approximating the English language. these novels are brilliant the way they are. they don't need any tarting up at all. |
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Post by erebus on Mar 22, 2010 15:13:41 GMT
Totally agree .
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Post by killercrab on Mar 22, 2010 15:56:01 GMT
I think a writer should have the right to present a past book tarted up if you like.Nothing stops anybody reading the original and it might be interesting to see a directors cut if you like? I'd certainly consider re buying some works if I thought I'd get some new enjoyment from them.My only caveat is that the original writer does the *enhancing*.
KC
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