James Herbert

I read the The Rats when I was about thirteen or fourteen.

I was on holiday with my parents, somewhere along the South English coast. We were in the local fishing town and, for some reason, my parents had popped into a shop. Maybe it was WH Smiths, I can’t remember, but I do remember they sold books.

Like most people who write, whenever I see shelves of books for sale, I am drawn to them like a filings to a magnet. This is how I am now, and this is exactly how I was thirty-some years ago. Two books immediately caught my eye. I don’t know what possessed my parents to allow me to buy them, but they did, and so started my teenage obsession with James Herbert.

I quickly devoured The Rats in a couple of days, and then moved onto The Crabs (In the tradition of The Rats, the front cover screamed). Unlike James Herbert, Guy N Smith made me cry, so horrific were his descriptions of dismemberment by giant, mutated crabs. Thinking about it, we were by the sea, which maybe added an extra element of terror to the story.

But despite this, it seemed to me that The Crabs was lacking something, and, although I went on to read the sequel (Moon of the Crabs, or some such nonsense) I never read any more Guy N Smith books after that.

But James Herbert? I could hardly wait to get my hands on his next one. In true lad fashion I had to read them in the order he had written them, so next up was The Fog.

Herbert ramped up the kinky sex and sadomasochism in this book. The scene in the school gym, with the headmaster stripped naked and tied to the wall bars, whilst an aggrieved pupil approaches him with a pair of garden shears, is forever seared into my brain.

After that I read The Survivor, probably for me one of his creepiest books, and then Fluke.

Wow. Fluke was a complete revelation. A fantasy drama, with much in the way of comedy, about a man reincarnated as a dog. Had James Herbert given up on writing horror? No, it seemed he was simply stretching his writing muscles. I don’t know about sales figures, how well Fluke did, compared to his earlier books, but as far as I know, he never wrote outside of the horror genre again.

A shame. I enjoyed Fluke.

By now I had read everything the English Master of Horror had written. I was heavily into Stephen King by this point, having scared myself witless with The Shining in particular, but still, I needed another fix of my favourite horror writer.

And he delivered, with The Spear. Again, there are moments in that book I will never forget. I’ve never been able to look at hairdryers in the same way since.

I read a few more after that, but the end was in sight. As it turned out, James Herbert was a teenage obsession, and once I moved away from home, and hit my twenties, I quickly grew tired of reading his dark, warped stories of horror and mutilation.

Thought I’d left him behind forever.

But today, reading the sad news that he has passed away, I have a strangely insistent itch to revisit one of those books. Maybe The Rats, or Fluke. Or maybe The Survivor.

And maybe when I’ve finished reading it, I’ll sit in bed with the light on just a bit longer than normal.

And I’ll try not to think about garden shears and hairdryers.

James Herbert 8 April 1943 – 20 March 2013