Review: 'The Rats' by James Herbert (RIP)

 

Herbert, James, The Rats, Pan Books/Pan Macmillan/Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London, 1999.

Octavo; paperback; 197pp. Near fine.

 

I’m somewhat in catch-up mode on this one: I’ve never read a James Herbert book before and now, a month or two after he’s popped his clogs, I’m looking to see what the fuss was all about. I mainly blame Frank Herbert (because I always confused the two authors, growing up) and Stephen King for not getting here sooner. Stephen King because, well, if something is so prevalent and mainstream, it has to be no good, right? My experience of King’s work is that his first few books are okay and then they get increasingly self-involved and desperate – like he’s not writing because he likes it, but because he’s paying the rent. In the days when bookstores used to have ‘Horror’ sections (not a ‘Paranormal Romance’ department), I’d always be looking for Lovecraft, or Ramsey Campbell, or Guy N. Smith; there inevitably was just a wall of Kings and Herberts for me to pass over. Anyway, I’m here now and I thought I’d share my findings with you.

James Herbert (1943-2013) could write!

This, my first discovery in this foray, was a moment of clear relief. I’ve waded through a lot of absolute drivel in the recent past and so it was a delight to settle into something that wasn’t going to be a painful exercise. Herbert paints a snappy picture: his descriptions are apt and engaging; his dialogue works; his scene setting is a case of deft brushwork; his characters have psychological insight and depth. Unlike Stephen King – whose prose I find workmanlike at best (apart from Salem’s Lot – I don’t know what he was sniffing there, but he should have spent more of his cash on it) – Herbert had a storyteller’s ease and lightness of touch about what he did. There’s very little contrivance about what he wrote; I never find myself sitting back and asking “seriously?” Even when it’s about giant rats or ghosts. I never find myself gritting my teeth in anticipation of the woeful inevitability that I can see coming over the hill.

Too many writers nowadays seem to be writing in a vacuum. I’ve read quite a bit of recent stuff that has no emotional engagement and certainly no skill in transmitting the emotional qualities of the story the authors are trying to tell. There’s an old chestnut that writers should write about what they know, but too many current writers seem hell-bent on ignoring this salient piece of advice. For a case in point see my recent review of Alex Grecian’s The Black Country. Mark Z. Danielewski’s appalling House of Leaves is another. It’s like the new crop of writers out there feel that it’s more about their rock-star lifestyles and their interesting haircuts than the ability to pen a single, readable, piece of prose.

For example China Miéville. There’s a lot of talk about his books but after getting through all that there’s not a lot left behind. Is he Fantasy? Is he Dark Fantasy? Is he Horror? Or Steampunk? Or Science Fiction? It’s very European of him to avoid pigeonholing in this fashion, but I don’t kill trees if I can help it, so I want to know what I’m getting into before putting down my cash. For starters, how do I pronounce his name? All I can find online are potted monotribes about his funky politics...

Not so James Herbert. His books stand on their own merits, not the promise of something else coming down the production line which will build to a grander picture, or some steganographic code embedded in the text that only the true aficionado will be able to discern. It’s obvious that he walked the very streets that he wrote about and was able to convey every nuance of those locations and the people who populate them. He conjures his settings with an economy of words and conveys vivid sensation. And each of his books begins and ends a single story. (Okay, not all of them, but I’ll get to that...)

There is a problem. There had to be; it’s me writing this after all. In fact there are two, but one is barely worth mentioning so I’ll deal with it first.

Sadly, especially given that he’s just died, his books have dated. Like Ramsey Campbell, James Herbert was a writer of a particular place and time and his writing borrows of the ideals and practises of that continuum. In Campbell’s case, he writes characters that reek of the West Country in the 1970s, but he seems to rise above and to question the automatic behaviours of his creations; some of them even die as a result of their societal expectations. In Herbert’s case, it’s an instance of him sniffing what he was shovelling: he writes like a 70s London lad with all of that decade’s cringe-worthy attitudes and mores. It’s a small point, especially from someone who likes their literature about 90 years out of date, so I’ll just note it and move on. My big issue with Herbert’s stories is character disposability. This needs some explaining.

I mentioned above that Herbert provided psychological depth to his characters. This is good in that his creations seem that much more vivid and real; it’s bad because, whenever he starts dishing out psychological insights for a particular person, you know that individual is about to meet a gruesome end. I’ve read enough by now that, whenever I start to read about the tough upbringing and gruelling life story of some recently introduced player, I get a sinking feeling of inevitability. The more I learn about someone in one of Herbert’s books, the greater the likelihood that a giant rat will be tunnelling into their brain within the next three pages. Having read and learned so much about a character, I like to stick with them for awhile and see how they get on; as it is, meeting them is kind of like being left alone abruptly with that nervous partygoer who, you’ve heard, only has those violent turns occasionally, despite no-one knowing exactly what sets them off...

Conversely, Herbert’s main players don’t get nearly as much detail as the throwaway characters, to the extent that it feels as if he enjoys sketching these real-life, believable individuals, just so that he can mash them into nothingness in the most grotesque ways that he can imagine. It feels more than a little Hannibal Lecter-ish.

For the record, I’ve read The Rats (1974), the novel which put Herbert on the map as a horror writer, and The Ghosts of Sleath (1994), the second in a trio of books starring his first recurring character, psychic investigator David Ash (I know, I probably should have started with the first in the series, but it was there at the secondhand shop, and I wanted to see how it would stand up on its own). Of the two, I enjoyed The Rats most of all: the story was straightforward - by which I mean it was whole, in and of itself, not obvious - and the manifestations of horror truly gruesome. Ghosts, on the other hand, kept referring back to the previous book – Haunted – far too much and, like its predecessor, had a premise that was a bit too ‘clever, clever’ for its own good: ghosts haunting people, I get; ghosts haunting other ghosts? That’s stretching things. (For the record too, the premise of Haunted is that a set of ghosts hire the psychic detective to investigate their own nest, just for giggles. See what I mean?) So, on the basis of this, I don’t think I’ll be seeking out any more diversions with David Ash, psychic at large; I wouldn’t object, however, to reading another early diversion in Herbert’s oeuvre, such as The Fog, or The Spear.

I started this review vaguely apologising for never having dipped a toe in this particular pool of nightmare matter; now I find I’m enjoying the prospect of having expanded my reading circle.

Four tentacled horrors from me.