I've just finished The Fog, one more book from the list which is starting to seem much longer than it did at the start...
Overall I enjoyed reading it. It was easy to read, a grippingly action-packed plot and actually becomes a more feasible story line than the blurb suggests. I found the story actually had a few similarities to Cell, the main similarity being the theme of human instinct. In both books this is split into two different categories. One explores survival instinct, what a person is actually willing and able to do in the interest of self preservation, and the other explores what would happen if the human mind were completely stripped bare so that basic instinct and nothing else controls us. It's an interesting concept, certainly a thought-provoking one. I did have a couple of negative feelings about it though. Firstly, I found some of the content a bit unnecessarily disturbing. In particular there were a couple of occasions in which frankly paedophilic acts or thoughts were just mentioned and glossed over as though there was nothing unusual about them. I'm not really sure if this was intentional but it just felt a bit odd and unnecessary, none of them were in any way important to the plot. My other negative would be that there just wasn't anything really new or exciting about the story or the writing. It had me hooked because I wanted to find out what happened with this tragedy at the end of the book, but it's not something I would read again.
Anyway that takes me on to my last classics section book, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Horror, which doesn't feel very festive but oh well . I am going to re-read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde because it's been a while since I did and I like it anyway. The other two stories included, 'Olalla' and 'The Body Snatcher', are new to me and I'm really interested to see how they'll compare. So I'll be back once I've finished