Domain (1979) by James Herbert

Lair by James Herbert (1979): Late, prolific English horror novelist James Herbert really had a gift for blending left-leaning social commentary into his blood-spattered works. Lair, the second novel in his Rats trilogy, isn't quite as agit-proppy as The Rats or Domain. Nonetheless, it takes a lot of shots at upper-class twits, self-serving politicians, and money-grubbing corporate types.

The two co-dependent sub-species of giant rats that brought London to its knees in The Rats seem to have been vanquished when this novel opens. Four years have passed. But in the idyllic private forest of Epping Wood, a protected green space just a few miles from the centre of London, England, something is stirring. The two-foot-long black rats and their two-headed, nearly immobile overlords have adapted to life in the forest. And boy, are they hungry!

This time around, a plucky male biologist who works for the world's biggest rat-catching corporation (the Rat Invasion of London created some great business opportunities) and a plucky female forest guide are our main protagonists. This is an early James Herbert novel, so be assured that they will engage in a graphic five-page-long sex scene before the story's over. 

The super-rats soon create lots of mayhem and a lot of headless bodies stripped of all flesh. As a second book in a trilogy, Lair is a bit more restrained than the first and third novels. The action stays confined to the forest. Really, it's a pastoral from Hell. 

The gruesome scenes are very gruesome and quite inventive. The bureaucrats and politicians are dangerous idiots. The adaptation of the super-rats seems logical and well-thought-out, as do the social frictions between the two sub-species of super-rats. There's trouble in Rat Paradise! But they're still super-hungry! And, in what I think is a first for Herbert, the supporting pervert character doesn't die. Or does he? In any case, Herbert really didn't like Phys. Ed. teachers. Recommended.

Stoned Immaculate

Shrine by James Herbert (1983): Late British "chiller" writer James Herbert is in fine form here with this lengthy supernatural thriller about miracles and monsters and money-grubbing. In a small town near Brighton, a 12-year-old girl seems to start performing miracles, from levitation to healing the sick. She says she's operating on the behest of the Virgin Mary. But if so, why does she seem so focused on the ancient, weirdly twisted oak tree near her parish church?

Herbert deftly juggles a fairly large cast of characters, keeping things in the air while he also develops the supernatural and possibly psychic manifestations that begin to cause people from across Great Britain and, ultimately, the world, to flock to the small church. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic authorities fast-track their investigation into whether or not these events can be classified as 'true' miracles worthy of endorsement by the Church.

The miracles are a bonanza for the town's businesses and for the Roman Catholic Church. But as the girl seems to become more powerful, the skeptical parish priest seems to noticeably weaken and wither the longer he remains in close proximity to either her or the church. And whenever the girl heals people, terrible things happen to nearby livestock, a fact that goes unobserved by the general population.

A strange alliance will be created between the two priests who are skeptical of the whole affair and the ambitious, agnostic small-town journalist who first reported the story and has become famous because of it. But their efforts may be impotent, given the power the girl appears to possess.

Herbert really does a lovely job here of mixing deft characterization, social commentary, occasionally gruesome horror effects, and more rarefied moments of existential and psychological terror. A scene in the church basement amongst ancient, broken statues really does the job. So, too, does the finale, an apocalypse that manages to evoke pity as well as horror. Highly recommended.

Underground Horror

The Rats by James Herbert (1974): The late, prolific, popular horror/thriller writer Herbert gives us his first novel here. Americans often only know Herbert through Stephen King's section on him in the non-fiction horror survey Danse Macabre. That's a shame, because King severely underestimated Herbert there while praising him with faint damns as a pulp writer moving towards a more mainstream approach in the late 1970's.
As with a lot of British writers of horror and horrific science fiction, Herbert shows the mighty influence of John Wyndham in many of his novels, including this one. We regard apocalyptic events from the position of ordinary people who assume roles of importance in the novel. By the end, London (England, natch) comes under attack by a seemingly limitless army of giant rats swarming up from the sewers and subway lines. Think of it as the Return of the Repressed, but with giant, man-eating rats!

However, Herbert is also very much concerned with the plight of the working and lower classes in modern England. This leads to some keenly observed stretches in which those terrible rats attack poor people and others excluded by the traditional power structure, including gays and the mentally ill. The authorities pretty much ignore the terrible fates of these outsiders until the disaster suddenly erupts over everything. As above, so below: by not paying adequate attention to the living conditions of those who are most powerless, the powerful end up facing armageddon.

Ultimately, a schoolteacher from a working class background holds the key to defeating the vast army of giant, hyper-intelligent mutant rats that are the monsters of this particular Herbert novel. The plot moves at a blistering pace, with the disaster fleshed out by the experiences of minor characters other than the protagonist. And the rats -- well, the rats are a great antagonist. And as this is just the first novel in what's generally known as Herbert's Rat Trilogy (to be followed by Lair and Domain), you can be sure that they're a formidable foe. There are many horrific set-pieces of terror, the grotesque, the bloody, and the sad. It's a great, terse horror novel. Highly recommended.

The Fog by James Herbert (1975): The late, prolific, popular horror/thriller writer Herbert throws London under the bus again in his second apocalyptic horror novel. This time around, the horror moves inexorably towards London after being unleashed from the earth by a mysterious, improbable earthquake that devastates a small country town. The monster is...fog! How British is that?

Yes, fog. A growing and seemingly undispersable yellowish cloud of fog prowls the English countryside before heading straight for London. What is it? Where did it come from? Why won't it disperse? An investigator for the Ministry of Environment, having been literally plunged into events while driving through the village during the earthquake, is our protagonist as the forces of the government try to contain the fog.

Why contain it? Because the fog seems to magnify and unleash the worst personality traits of many of those who breathe it for even a few seconds. Rapes, murders, suicides, mass suicides, cannibalism, a guy getting his Johnson cut off with garden shears, a suddenly homicidal group of Hare Krishnas: this fog is a killing machine.

As with Herbert's other apocalyptic novels, scenes of horror and pity contrast with scenes of quiet characterization and a couple of graphic sex scenes. He was certainly an inheritor of the pulp tradition early in his novelistic career, but Herbert also looked with a critical eye on how governments treat the under-privileged and the excluded. His flair for the bloodily horrifying, while certainly a pulp staple, also points in some of its more graphically awful moments towards the rise of Splatterpunk. Highly recommended.

Rats and Bats and the Third World War

Domain by James Herbert (1985): Technically, this is the third novel in Herbert's Rat Trilogy, following The Rats and Lair. But you don't need to have read the previous novels to enjoy this one -- I haven't, and there's nothing difficult to follow here.

Herbert's really great at excruciating physical horror. Domain hits the reader with two horrors for the price of one: nuclear strikes on London, England, followed by the rise of giant mutant rats from London's sewer systems. Come for the nuclear apocalypse, stay for the rats!

And boy, these rats are bad news. After an intense and detailed description of the nuclear devastation of London, Herbert follows some of the survivors into the sewers as they head towards a governmental bomb shelter disguised as a subterranean telephone relay station. Will order be restored? Hey, where did all these giant, super-intelligent rats come from?

If you enjoy scenes of visceral horror, rats, and nuclear war, then this novel is for you. It's one of the two or three strongest Herbert novels I've read. The science gets wonky at times, but hey, giant rats! Recommended.

　

Nightwing by Martin Cruz Smith (1977): This early Cruz novel, written before Gorky Park made him a break-out star, is a terse, thrilling account of the present-day descent of a colony of Mexican vampire bats onto the New Mexico region inhabited by the Hopi.

An Ahab-like bat researcher and a somewhat aimless, hopeless Hopi Deputy will ultimately be the only people who can save the area before, as the researcher notes, the United States is forced to remove New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona from the map.

The novel combines compelling exposition (yes, compelling exposition) on Hopi mythology, vampire bats, and Black Plague transmission with a tense, exciting disaster narrative. There's more than one ecological narrative at work here: the bats have been chased out of their natural habitat, and this makes them much, much more dangerous than they were before, while the quest to contain them, and the plague they carry, is fatally compromised by the attempts of a Navajo leader to sell oil rights to portions of Navajo and Hopi land.

Smith creates winning, sympathetic characters under pressure, and also manages the difficult feat of positing a rational, natural apocalypse which may or may not also have supernatural origins. The portrait of the Hopi people is fascinating throughout. So too the vampire bats, a predator with no fear of humanity, and with an awful lot of similarities to humanity: they come, and they strip an area bare of life both through their predation and through the diseases they carry, diseases that don't affect them because bats have the strangest mammalian immune systems on the planet.

Bats in their entirety are the most successful mammal on the planet besides humanity. Here, Smith turns them into a natural force worse than any hurricane or earthquake. They make for a terrifying antagonist, rendered in full horror but with full honors to their biological distinctiveness. When Charles Darwin first saw a vampire bat feed, he was left speechless. One feels that way for awhile after the explosive, somewhat hallucinatory finale of this novel. Highly recommended.

London and Mexico After Midnight

The Dark by James Herbert (1980): Herbert gives us an apocalyptic struggle between Good and Evil, though this time expressed in pseudo-scientific rather than religious terms. A somewhat Satanic cult leader commits mass suicide with his followers in a London (England) suburb. A year later, what appears to be a sentient cloud of pure evil begins to sally forth from the site of the suicide, corrupting many of those it meets to act on their worst impulses. And it's pretty much up to three paranormal investigators and a medium to stop the rising tide, as conventional methods prove insufficient.

Herbert seems to have a good time destroying large portions of London, with a cloud-fueled soccer riot probably the best set-piece. Herbert's protagonists have an astonishing ability to survive physical punishment (the oldest and wisest paranormal investigator seems to get strangled every ten pages), which is good, because they must endure a lot of it.

This is an enjoyable horror novel in which evil operates more like a plague than the sort of thing one normally sees in horror novels. The protagonists are sympathetic if somewhat broadly drawn, and the stakes convincingly high. While this is horror, the depiction of the civil authorities pitching in to fight a supernatural menace also contains echoes of an awful lot of the British science-fiction-disaster tradition seen in the Quatermass series, Doctor Who, and the novels of John Wyndham. The sudden ending is quite loopy. Recommended.

　

Tomb Seven by Gene Snyder (1985): Labelled a horror novel by its publishers, Tomb Seven contains almost no horror. It's really a pseudo-scientific, ancient astronauts archaeology thriller about a dig in Mexico that unearths a seemingly impossible array of artifacts...and one weird 8-foot-tall skeleton. There's an awful lot of telepathic woo-woo stuff, much of it in need of less woo and more plausibility (cited for the millionth time in a piece of fiction about archaeology is the [in truth non-existent] Curse of King Tut's Tomb).

The protagonists -- a handsome Welsh archaeologist and a sexy Hispanic-American telepath -- have sex because that's how these things happen. And she is the most beautiful woman in the world, because that's also how these things happen. The telepath promises the reader that something terrible is coming. It never actually does. Sort of a wet firecracker. Not recommended.

Moon Trap

Moon by James Herbert (1985): James Herbert has often been called England's version of Stephen King. This isn't a bad comparison, though King doesn't usually have at least one vaguely soft-core, five-page-long sex scene in almost every novel. The comparison is made more interesting by King's analysis of Herbert's early novels in King's non-fiction horror survey, Danse Macabre.

I've certainly enjoyed the half-dozen or so Herbert novels I've read, and I enjoyed Moon. Herbert's good characters are sympathetic, if occasionally a bit too aesthetically pleasing when they're women (the protagonist's girlfriend is stunningly beautiful...why is this necessary?). Come to think of it, there's a thematic reason it's necessary, one that constitutes a spoiler alert if I explain it further.

Herbert is generally more ruthless than King, or at least more arbitrary when it comes to the question of who dies, and when -- there are a couple of wrenching sequences here that derive a lot of their power from that surprising arbitrariness, and Herbert's decision to not tie certain plot and character threads up neatly.

The plot recalls King's The Dead Zone: protagonist Jonathan Childes has psychic flashes. They once helped him stop a serial killer. But they also made him a media flashpoint when people found out that he was the only useful psychic to ever work on a police investigation. So he moves from England to one of the Southern coastal islands to try to lay low, and to hope that the psychic flashes are a thing of the past. But then horrifying visions start again.

Childes' skepticism about his own powers generates a fair amount of drama as we go along, as do the apparent limits of those powers: he can see what the killer is doing in his mind, but he doesn't know where, and he can't glean the killer's identity from these psychic links. This last becomes quite a problem when the killer suddenly realizes that Childes is psychically observing the killer's actions, and manages to start pulling information out of Childes' head that immediately puts his ex-wife, his daughter, and eventually everyone around Childes in mortal danger. It all makes for a quick, enjoyable read with some moments of visceral and existential horror. Recommended.

Monsters

Books:


The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezzi (2008-9): 'The Monster of Florence' was the name given to an Italian serial killer who murdered at least 16 people in the countryside around Florence in the 1970's and 1980's. Spezzi is the veteran Italian journalist who covered the story from its beginning, while popular American suspense novelist Preston got interested in the case after he discovered the villa he'd rented in 2000 was beside one of the Monster's murder sites and subsequently met with Spezzi to discuss the case. Ultimately, though, this isn't so much a non-fiction book about a serial killer as it is an indictment of the Italian legal system, from the polizia and carabinieri all the way to the prosecutors and judges operating at the national level.

Much of the pleasure of the book lies in the twists and turns of the real-life events, and so I won't give too much away. Florence itself becomes a major character, as Preston documents his own learning experience both about the city -- the centre of the Renaissance -- and about the Italian mindset both regionally and nationally. From the distant viewpoint of North America, it's easy to view Italy as a homogeneous state, rather than a collection of hundreds of tiny states that weren't joined as a nation until after Canada's own Confederation, and which used a wide variety of dialects (500 or more) which still linger in the individual regions. Besides Florence, Sardinia and its history plays a major role in the history of the Monster of Florence.

This is a very sad story in many ways, but the doggedness of Spezzi -- and the decency of at least some police officers and bureaucrats -- give one a little hope. The epilogue, written especially for the trade paperback edition, casts grave doubt on the rightness of the recent conviction of American student Amanda Knox for the murder of her room-mate. The Monster of Florence reads like a primer on how NOT to do police work: prosecutorial conspiracy theories, misconduct and child-like tantrums abound while a real killer remains unarrested and uncharged to this day. Highly recommended.


The Survivor by James Herbert (1977): A short, tense early horror novel from the writer most likely to be referred to as "England's answer to Stephen King." A horrific airplane crash in Eton leaves behind one survivor, the co-pilot, who can't remember the events leading up to the crash. People start dying. A medium shows up to try to help the co-pilot solve the supernatural mystery of how he survived and what's happening now. Shenanigans ensue. In the 'negative' column, Herbert gives us one of the ten clumsiest passages in literary history in the sub-sub category of 'Subtly establishing a person's race or ethnicity.' It's seriously hilarious. Recommended.