This is the 1991 New English Library (UK) paperback reprint of “The Rats” that I read. Needless to say, this review may contain some SPOILERS.

But, although I had thought about re-reading “Domain” ( seriously, it’s almost as bleakly terrifying as “ Threads“), I’d been meaning to re-read “The Rats” for ages. I also read the two sequels ( “Lair” and “Domain”) around that time too. Like pretty much everyone who has read “The Rats”, I first read it when I was about fourteen or so.

Smith’s “Crabs” novels all taking inspiration from “The Rats”. Linaker’s “ Scorpion“, Richard Lewis’ “ Devil’s Coach-Horse” and Guy N. In addition to being the forerunner of the splatterpunk genre, it also sparked something of a trend for stories about giant vermin in British horror fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, with novels like Shaun Hutson’s “Slugs” novels, Michael R. I am, of course, talking about James Herbert’s 1974 novel “The Rats”. It doesn’t even do anything that James Herbert hasn’t done before, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad book.Well, for the next novel in this month’s horror marathon, I thought that I’d re-read an influential novel in the history of modern horror fiction. If you like those kind of stories, you’re probably going to enjoy this book, even though it doesn’t really do anything that hasn’t been done before. Obviously it’s not quite what I do, but I am a career writer who makes music as a hobby, and so there was a nice little bit of synchronicity there.īut mostly, it’s just a bog standard haunted house story, with all that that entails. I also liked that the main characters worked in creative fields, with the guy finding work as a session musician and the woman illustrating children’s books. It also takes a while for the characters to now that there’s definitely something wrong, which helps us to avoid one of those awkward situations where we, as the reader, want to shout at the characters to get the hell out of there. There’s none of the gore that I find Herbert excels at, and it instead focuses on establishing a slow but steady sense of dread and paranoia. It’s also pretty cool how it uses animals to tell the story, a bit like an old nursery rhyme or fairy tale. It actually takes all of the familiar tropes that we’re used to from this kind of thing and plays them up to dramatic effect, like someone telling a joke with a deadpan expression and the faintest hint of a wry smile. I don’t think that there was anything particularly groundbreaking here, but Herbert is a talented horror writer who’s already proved himself at this kind of thing through The Secrets of Crickley Hall and the rest of his work.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about it. This book is basically a haunted house story, except that the house in question is a cottage and instead of it being haunted by a ghost, it’s haunted by the memory of magic.

James herbert domain review