Book Review: 'The Rats' by James Herbert
5 / 5 Stars
‘The Rats’ first was published by New English Library in 1974. This 27th printing was issued in 1990 by the New English Library / Hodder and Stoughton.
‘The Rats’ was the first novel by UK writer James Herbert (1943 – 2013) and a foundational novel in the genre that gradually would come to be known as splatterpunk. Herbert would in turn produce two sequels to ‘The Rats’: ‘Lair’ (1979) and ‘Domain’ (1984). A graphic novel, ‘The City,’ released in 1993, is based on the rats franchise but is sub-par.
Herbert, in a 2012 interview with the UK paper The Telegraph, stated that the inspiration for ‘The Rats’ was the segment in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ in which Renfield, the insane asylum patient, claims to have seen a small army of red-eyed rats confronting him.
At 189 pages of larger-font type, ‘The Rats’ has a simple plot; in the mid-70s a strange new breed of rat starts issuing from the darker, and danker, places in London’s East End. While rats normally are afraid of humans, these rats are quite vicious, and see humans as prey. Initially confined to the East End, as the plot progresses the rats expand their depredations to the city at large. The burgeoning rat plague is enabled by clumsiness on the part of the authorities, and the threat to the city only grows with the passage of time.
The protagonist of the novel is a school teacher named Harris; having grown up in the East End, his familiarity with the neighborhood proves valuable in efforts to control the rats.
There are several things that ‘The Rats’ does which make it stand out from the horror fiction of the early 70s, and those early days of the 'Paperbacks from Hell.'
First, unlike the majority of horror novels of the time, ‘Rats’ doesn’t use a meandering, prolonged buildup of suspense and anticipation before unveiling its horror content. In the very first pages of ‘Rats,’ the creatures are introduced, and bloodily so. The reader has the menace presented to them right from the get-go. There are no feints, no red herrings, no ambiguous visions, possible spectral phenomena, or Spooky Foreshadowings. Just clawing and scrabbling and biting vermin !
Second, the gore and sex in ‘Rats’ are more explicit and transgressional than in most other horror novels (with perhaps, the exception of ‘The Exorcist’) of the early 70s. In Herbert’s approach, there is no camera fade-out or dolly-back from the attacks of the rats; there instead are detailed descriptions of the mayhem visited upon hapless victims (which include an infant !).
Third, the narrative avoids doling out comfort or optimism. There are would-be heroes, but their efforts are fumbling, hesitant, and never a guarantee of success. What may be victories, may in fact be defeats. This existential, almost nihilistic quality to ‘Rats’ echoes that of the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, and is foundational to splatterpunk; things will get much, much worse if ever they get better !
I agree with the review of ‘The Rats’ posted to the Too Much Horror Fiction blog: this novel introduces “…a new graphic sensibility in horror fiction.” A copy of this novel belongs on every horror fan’s bookshelf.
