On Wednesday the 20th of March the bestselling and probably most beloved horror writer in the UK James Herbert passed away at the age of 69. In the wake of this unexpected event the lovely Mr. Jim Moon of the marvelous Hypnobobs podcast did and excellent tribute to the man and his work.
I'd never read any James Herbert before this week, being a child of the 80s I was a little too young for his first explosion on to the horror scene in the 1970s. Growing up I favoured more fantastical, science fiction based writing, not really venturing into horror until I started reading Stephen King and HP Lovecraft in my mid teens. After listening to Jim's latest episode and discovering that a lot of Herbert's work was at some frankly insultingly cheap prices on Amazon's Kindle store I decided to take the plunge.I went for "The Rats" for my first venture into James Herbert's twisted imagination and boy, I wasn't disappointed.
"The Rats" does exactly was it says on the tin, it's an angry little splatter punk pulp novel, a video nasty in paperback form and don't take that statement as a negative criticism, after buying the book at 5 pm I had the book finished and I was onto reading the sequel "Lair" at 8.30 pm. I literally couldn't put this book down, it was fast paced, exciting and despite its age, surprisingly scary. The book was Herbert's very first attempt at writing and it shows, the book is pretty rough around the edges, the characters are so thinly written as to be almost invisible and the many sex scenes begin to come off as somewhat juvenile. Despite these flaws the quality that Herbert would display as he matured as a writer come through, particularly in the heartbreaking passage about the life and downward spiral of Mary Kelly, many other writers would have just had her and the group of meths swilling vagrants she has fallen in with as mere rat fodder but he takes the time to make her a real person with thoughts and feelings and her unpleasant, sad death genuinely made me upset. I expect the fact that she had the same name as the last known and most horribly mutilated of Jack The Ripper's victims is not a coincidence, another woman who was let down by the society that was supposed to protect her.The setting of 1970s London was brilliantly drawn, this was truly the London that my grandparents and parents grew up in, the decaying wrecks of bombed out houses, the slum housing mixed in with the brutalist tower blocks and the abiding sense of ennui of a city gripped by strikes, power cuts and the three day week. As a life long resident of London suburbia as I read the book the locations were so well described I knew exactly where he was talking about, right down to the Tube station that the horrendous massacre takes place in, I've been there many times, in fact I think this added to the fear factor for me, I may never look at the tiny, jet black mice that infest the London Underground in quite the same way.
Simplistic and raw as "The Rats" may be in places the fact that it's still a remarkably effective and compelling novel the best part of forty years after it was first published speaks to the quality and talent of James Herbert's writing. I'm very glad that I picked up this book and I've now bought myself another five of his novels including the two sequels to "The Rats" and I can't wait to get stuck into them.
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