(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
The Fog was provided as a digital ARC ahead of its release on 4 September in Australia.
The slow creep of horror that accompanies gothic thrillers is one of the reasons this particular genre is so widely read.
There is something strangely enticing about reading a story where the protagonist has terrors and darkness visited upon them in ever-increasing, debilitating waves, coupled with a vicarious sense of bearing witness to someone else’s descent into a nightmarish set of circumstances, with it made all the more compelling if you are safe and sound in your own cosy little slice of the world.
And it’s even better for complete cowards like this reviewer if all this hairs-raised-on-theback-of-the-neck reading takes place during the daytime and with only those you love and trust nearby.
Best to avoid, for instance, remote islands off the coast of Northern Ireland, which is something Kate, the protagonist of The Fog by Brooke Hardwick, manifestly does not do when she accepts an invitation to a highly specialised writers’ retreat on Rathlin, a select invite-only getaway which promises to cure her writing block by digging down into, exposing and healing the depths of her trauma-shattered psyche.
On the surface, it’s just what Kate needs – a chance to exhume the troubling secrets of her past and to come to grips with why her dream marriage to the very lovely Hugh broke down in ways that still consume her a year or more later.
Cold air floods the sweathouse.
Ewan has removed the stone blocking the entrance and is calling us.
‘The weather’s closing in.’
Ruby rushes past me, squeezing through the small entrance first. I follow her, my breathing ragged, my head spinning. Outside, the sky is black, and the wind swirls dry leaves in great twisting spirals. I’m not sure how much time has passed, but the atmosphere on the island has changed.
Sure, the island is bleak and dark, and the manor where the retreat will be based is as foreboding as it is richly expansive, but Kate is so desperate for answers that she’s willing to put up with the pagan ritual-laced therapies which verge on the cruel at times, fellow retreat goers who seem to be falling further into madness as the ten days wear on rather than finding any form of healing, and a setting which seems straight out of horror movie central.
Kate hears odd sounds in the middle of the night, finds herself lost in boggy wastelands and weirdly intrigued by the retreat leader Cormac who offers the sort of unconditional love and support that Kate is craving, and while it all unnerves her to varying degrees, she sticks with the program because she doesn’t any remaining options left to her.
It’s either find the truth and walk into a brighter, more healed future, or … well, Kate, doesn’t want to think about that, and so as things get weirder and stranger and more inexplicable, she hangs in there, hoping that out of the most unorthodox of therapeutic settings, she’ll find some sense of peace and closure.
As the retreat goes on, and The Fog weaves it weirdly disconcerting but utterly compelling spell on you, you hear witness to what one desperate person will do to fix the past, and set herself up for a future that they suspect won’t happen if they walk away.
Kate is fresh out of choices, and so, this increasingly bizarre retreat is the only way out for her from the lingering pain and trauma of her past; if it fails, then that, most likely, is that.
(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
What makes The Fog so brilliantly absorbing is the way that Hardwick ramps up the scares and the tension without once losing sight of the raw, bloodied & broken humanity at its heart.
No one in this story is psychologically or emotionally well, and the story ends up resting on various degrees of brokenness, and as these are exposed, with Kate experiencing more and more illuminating flashbacks, The Fog slowly but surely begins to expose just dark and twisted life can be for those lost in the trauma of secrets without a name and with seemingly no end.
The way that the layers are peeled off Kate are thoughtfully and sensitively done (by the writer, not so kuch the therapist), and while there is a sense of gothic melodrama to proceedings, the novel manages to somehow stay quite affectingly grounded, especially as the final act beckons and the temptation to go big and overwrought no doubt beckons.
The Fog, however, while it delivers the most incredible of endings, and answers a ton of questions that have been building up through its unnerving slow burn of a narrative, doesn’t lose its focus nor its sense of groundedness and so, even when all the dark truths are being laid bare, and characters exposed for who they really are – sometimes good, other times oh dear go NO bad – you still feel like here are real people grappling with all too real things in a setting that for all its gothic horror, still harbours the most basic and honest of human realities.
A black shape scurries across the cliff. It’s the size of a large animal. The size of a man. It stops still for a moment, and I see the form in silhouette, a long scarf whipping in the wind. A jolt of fear whips through me.
Who is it?
Key to this focus is, of course, Kate.
While she undergoes some very bleak and emotionally harrowing moments which leave her feeling like she’s going very mad indeed, and her dream of finding healing recedes well into an unreachable distance, she sticks with it somehow, the very picture of someone who has undergone severe trauma, wants to find some release from it and who will do anything to make it happen.
As she comes to understand what is true and what is not, and how vastly different what happened to her is versus what she remembers it to be, you are always left feeling, thanks to Hardwick’s beautifully empathetic and well-judged writing, as if you are sharing the journey with a very normal broken person in markedly abnormal circumstances.
It’s this anchor to very relatable, grounded humanity that keeps The Fog on an arrestingly even keel, and even as things beginning to spiral into some very nightmarish places in the brilliantly executed final act, Hardwick never lets us forget that there are real people walking amidst gothic terrors.
Atmospheric as hell (quite literally, it feels, at times) and possessed of both narrative grandeur and harrowing emotional intimacy, The Fog is a first-rate gothic thriller that delivers all the scares and the thrills and a slow-building sense of psychological horror made manifest, leaving you feeling haunted and yet released, as Kate’s finds her hopes for the future broken and shattered at the one place she thought she’d find healing, and she has to fight, and fight hard, to grasp hold of a redeemed future that matters so much to her.