Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction

by Grady Hendrix

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.