Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Watership Down was already a hit in England, but in April 1974 it debuted in the United States, where Richard Adams’s saga of brave bunnies outsold Peter Benchley’s angry shark, remaining on the New York Times Best Seller List until January 1975. In the United Kingdom, the first animal rights groups were standing trial for carrying out raids on animal-testing laboratories. And over in a grungy part of London, a 28-year-old advertising copywriter named James Herbert was writing his first novel, all about his deepest childhood fear. It was called The Rats.

Year of the Rat

It was the year punk rock broke: 1974. It was also the year James Herbert published The Rats, which is pretty much the same thing. By the time Herbert died in 2013, he was the United Kingdom’s most successful horror novelist, with 54 million books sold worldwide. He wrote ghost stories, alternate histories, and thrillers, but his first two books—The Rats and The Fog (1975)—are proto-punk ragers: nasty, mean, anti-establishment sleaze ripped straight from Herbert’s id and redeemed by his complete and utter conviction to go there. Stephen King has noted that Herbert’s books have a “raw urgency,” and if by “raw” he means “totally flayed of skin” and if by “urgency” he means “gripping you by the collar and screaming in your face,” then we agree.

The former is a blockhead of a book. What is it about? Rats. What do they do? Eat everyone. Martin Amis, reviewing for the Observer, wrote that the novel was “enough to make a rodent retch, undeniably, and enough to make any human pitch the book aside.” But even back then no one cared what Martin Amis had to say, and the initial 100,000-copy print run sold out in a couple of weeks.

By chapter 3 the rats have eaten a puppy and ripped the flesh off a baby. There’s stream of consciousness narration as people are eaten alive. “Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me.” The only thing the rats don’t eat is Harris, a man of action. A no-nonsense East London art teacher who comes complete with a girlfriend in need of constant rescue, Harris is practical and tough and suspicious of so-called experts. When the city of London hires exterminators, Harris scoffs.

The undersecretary of the Ministry of Health gasses the rats and they disappear. Problem solved? Not so fast, sneers Harris…and the rats come swarming back. They overrun a train and eat an assortment of Londoners. Only Harris proves inedible, saving his school by punching the rodents to death. Next up: ultrasonics. Harris thinks gas is for girls and ultrasonics are stupid. Instead he grabs an ax, drives over a living carpet of rats, and finds the gigantic two-headed rat boss. “Its body popped like a huge balloon filled with dark red blood.” The End.

In the future, Herbert would design his own book covers, flouting conventions, insisting on white backgrounds (black was standard for horror) and shocking his publishers by combining silver and gold foil. Credit 60

Proving that smaller was scarier, Herbert moved from hungry rats to insanity-inducing bacteria. Credit 61

The man of action in Herbert’s next book, The Fog, is John Holman, who’s investigating a military chemical weapons site for the Department of the Environment when a fissure opens in the earth, sending a toxic gas spraying from its maw. It forms a cloud and drifts across England like a deadly fart, turning cows psychotic, making schoolboys castrate their gym teachers (Herbert hates gym teachers), causing pigeons to peck people to death, and making a pilot fly a loaded plane into the GPO Tower. In one of the book’s most famous scenes, 148,820 people commit suicide by walking into the sea.

The gas turns out to be the work of a bacteria called a mycoplasma that has grown enormous, but Holman could give a flip. He’s going to blow it the hell up. Scientists, cops, and government officials try to stop him, but inevitably they return red-faced. “Erm, it seems we might owe you an apology, Holman,” they stammer. Damn straight, crybabies! London goes insane while Holman plays football with a severed head, drives a Devastation Vehicle over some religious fanatics, machine-guns a crowd of berserk bus drivers, saves the day with a bomb, then rescues his girlfriend and swears to bring down all the bastards in government. The End.

Herbert turned out two Rats sequels: Lair in 1979 and Domain in 1984, which don’t quite stand up to the original (though the rats still eat a lot of gym teachers). It was The Rats (and to some extent The Fog) that set the template for everything that came after, for Herbert had revealed a great truth to aspiring horror novelists that would guide British horror books for the next twenty years: human beings are delicious, and England is full of them.

Man’s Worst Friend