Remembering The Rats - November 2024
Pan Macmillan have issued a 50th anniversary edition of James Herbert's The Rats, first published in 1974.
I discovered the novel when I was working as a chef at the Union Jack Club in Waterloo and living in the staff accommodation way up on the 24th floor The year was 1977 and I was 19. Friday was my day off. It was also pay day. I think the wage was around £25 a week after a deduction for the accommodation. Which wasn't bad, given three meals a day were thrown in.Once I'd picked up my pay packet on a Friday morning I would wander over to W.H. Smiths on Waterloo Station and treat myself to a paperback novel to read in the coming week. I remember being drawn to the cover of The Rats, the title in big block red letters and a vicious looking black rat apparently emerging from the Thames. The blurb on the back put me in mind of 'Tomorrow, the Rat' an episode of the BBC TV scifi horror series Doomwatch featuring carnivorous rats I'd watched a few years earlier.
Stephen King is quoted on the cover of the 50th Anniversary issue saying 'I loved it then. I love it still'. A sentiment I would wholeheartedly agree with. King's Salem Lot (1975) was another book I bought from the paperback stand in W.H. Smith's at Waterloo. It was The Rats and Salem's Lot that made me realise that horror could involve ordinary people in contemporary settings rather than always be about Victorian gentlemen in gothic castles and haunted mansions.
The Rats was James Herbert's debut novel. The rodents in question are cross bred between common black rats and mutated rats smuggled into the UK from a nuclear test site in New Guinea. The alpha rat is a hairless two headed Albino monstrosity which can communicate with the blood thirsty pack through alpha rays.
Attacks on humans take place in everyday places, a canal, a cinema, London Zoom, One scene in particular stuck out for me. It took plays out on the platform of a London Underground station. The character waiting there hears a roaring noise from the darkness of the tunnel followed by a blast of wind. He thinks his train is approaching. But it isn't. It's a huge pack of ravenous, blood thirsty rats. For a long time I couldn't sit on the platform at Waterloo without thinking of a tumbling horde of rats when the wind from an approaching train came gusting out of the tube tunnel.
The Rats kicked off a trend, creating a whole horror fiction sub-genre where everything from cats, crabs and slugs turned on humanity, intent on devouring our fresh and stripping us to the bone. My article published in Spooky Isles on this subject can be found here.
The ending of The Rats set up the prospect of a sequel. In fact it spawned two sequels Lair (1979) and Domain (1984) and a graphic novel, The City (1993). A Canadian film adaptation, Deadly Eyes, was made in 1982. The novel turned Herbert into one of the UK's leading horror writers with 23 best selling novels under his belt before his death in 2013.
My story 'He Slashed Some Lines For Wiskers', inspired by The Rats, was performed by Gloria Saunders at the Liars League Halloween event in 2014. You can read or listen to the story on this link.
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