I've tried and dropped two novels this week. The Fog by James Herbert and The Spawn by Shaun Hutson.
The Fog started strong but quickly devolved into weird small-town soap opera. A secret government agent is spying on another branch of the same government, he drives into the nearby town and an earthquake hits, opening a massive fissure through the town...which the spy promptly drives into. Several people and buildings fall in along the fissure. The spy finds and saves a girl and pulls her out of the fissure. Only there's a fog that drove him insane as the cliffhanger of a chapter...and he's perfectly fine at the start of the next chapter which is a few weeks later. The fog wanders around and every 50 pages or so drives someone mad. Like a group of cows that go mad and beat their owner to death.
It's well written but I don't care about any of the characters and there's not enough horror or action to keep my interest, so did not finish.
The Spawn also started strong...but a bit too strong. A sadistic kid traps and tortures some bugs, including setting them on fire. His family is poor so they have old, dried out newspapers everywhere, and the sadistic kid has a little brother who he shares a room with. In the first chapter the younger brother, mother (there's no father around), and the sadistic kid are all horribly burned in excruciating detail. The brother and mother die in the fire. The sadistic kid is horribly scared and loses an eye, but survives and goes to a mental institution. The premise includes reanimated aborted fetuses with telekinetic powers. It sounds like a madhouse romp but the style of writing and level detail make it a hard, quick pass. Gah.
