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, though two are so horrible and painful that they pervade the book. But when it was first published in 1975? Well, even that’s debatable. 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. Readers or moviegoers no longer wanted to be merely frightened, they wanted to be shocked rigid too. 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 into an unhealthy fascination is another matter). The Fog was my second.įor 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. The Rats was my first attempt at a novel. It was a book that (literally, you might say) went straight for the jugular. 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. 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. It was first published in 1975 (written in 1974) when spy stories and historical romances were the vogue. Fortunately, it also made me a lot of friends.
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