The Dark has some added backstory, but it comes across as contrived and tired. In one it’s a fog that turns people murderously insane, in the other it’s darkness. The Dark is basically a retread of the same terrain that The Fog already dealt with in a much better fashion. The spectators at a football match are the first to be touched by the Dark, turning against each other even more so than opposing supporters usually do.
And then the Dark begins to spread all over town. This piece of real estate isn’t gonna sell, so the owner orders it torn down. Joining forces with a blind psychic and her daughter they soon discover that there’s something in the house, something dark, that’s affecting people who come into contact with it.
Enter Chris Bishop, a professional debunker of hauntings, who is asked to look again at the Beechwood House, an abandoned building in the area where a mass suicide took place less than a year earlier, with victims including a notable occultist. A girl sets her house on fire, a nurse strangles a patient with her hair, a dirty old man kills a couple of taunting teenagers. One night strange killings are taking place on Willow Road. His following works would display a more experienced writer, and while The Dark is a step out of the past, it also still contains all those trademark vignettes where a character is introduced only to be killed a paragraph or two later. By 1980 Herbert was starting to turn away from the fast-paced style of The Rats and The Fog that made his career. The Dark is a 1980 horror novel by James Herbert, where a sentient darkness is making people violently insane.
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