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Musings: The Gift of James Herbert and the Rats Trilogy

Today would have been the 43rd birthday for the Dylan Kowalewski, the founder of Monster Librarian.

Dylan grew up in a little bitty town in upstate New York. It didn’t have a lot going for it, but it did have one thing beloved of book lovers everywhere, and very rare indeed these days: a used bookstore. The store, Granny’s Attic, was in walking distance of his house, and whenever he had the means, he would head there. It was in Granny’s Attic that Dylan first fell in love with horror– and especially killer animal horror. I have a considerable collection of it in my possession now, most of which looks like it was well-loved even before he owned it. I’ve written about Guy N. Smith and his Crabs books before, and he just loved those (and pretty much everything else Guy N. Smith ever wrote) but he also discovered, at an early age, The Rats by James Herbert.

As Dylan planned out the beginnings of Monster Librarian, he realized that he would need to start with some reviews already up, and since nobody knew about us or was sending us books to review at that time, he started with his own collection, including reviews of a few books by James Herbert, including The Rats. So at this time, as a birthday gift, I’m sharing with you some of the earliest reviews from Monster Librarian, written by the man himself about books he truly loved.

Reader’s advisory note: If you ever read reviews of Herbert’s killer animal books, you will see that the readers he has are huge fans, and, for many of them, one of his books is the one that got them hooked on reading. If you’re trying to engage a bored reader, you might want to keep it in mind.


The Rats by James Herbert

New English Library, 1974

ISBN:0450053296

Available: New and Used
 

Giant killer rats invade London, and it is up to a small group of government folk to find a way to stop them. Herbert’s style of writing is easy to read, and the story is by far superior to the many killer rat movies made over the years.  Once it starts, the plot moves very quickly and is engrossing.  It is followed by Lair  and Domain.

Editor’s note: The Rats was republished in 2014 with a forward by Neil Gaiman. The 2014 edition is is not the edition reviewed in 2005 by Monster Librarian– he reviewed the original, 1974 paperback edition– but I’m sure Dylan would approve. How can you not like Neil Gaiman?


Lair  by James Herbert

Pan Macmillan, 1999

ISBN: 0330376195

Available: New and Used
 

Second in the killer rats trilogy by James Herbert, Lair continues the story of mutant killer rats invading England. The book doesn’t break any new ground, but if you enjoyed The Rats then you will probably enjoy Lair.  Sometimes, when reading a sequel, it isn’t that you are necessarily looking for something new, but rather you liked the first book and just want more of the same. This isn’t a bad thing at all, just be aware of what you are getting.

Contains: Rat violence.

Editor’s note: The currently available edition of Lair is not the version reviewed here, which was published in 1999, but is a reprint edition published in 2012.


Domain by James Herbert

Pan Macmillan, 2000

ISBN: 0330376233

Available: New and Used
 
Talk about having a bad day– the survivors of nuclear war in England have to face not only a lawless world with roving gangs of thugs, but also a pack of killer giant black rats. This is a plain, old-fashioned, fun read. Herbert does a fine job of keeping his story moving along. It is a fine addition to his other giant rat books, The Rats and Lair. There is a movie tie-in, Rats.

Contains: violence

Editor’s note: The currently available edition of Domain is not the edition reviewed here, but is a reprint edition published in 2012.

Enjoy!


Posted on September 5, 2016 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: 5 Books By Women Writers That Horror Readers Might Not Know (But Should)

Far be it from me to dictate an entire canon of works (at least today) but there are definitely some books by women authors that deserve to be known better than they are, and they often get shorted because the story of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein is pretty amazing, so everybody writes about her. There are lots of great women writers who aren’t Mary Shelley, though, and I can only claim to have read a few of them, despite my intention to do better. Here are some books you might have heard of but passed on for some reason– or maybe they are unknown to you.

1.) Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Toni TheMorrison is a great American writer, so I hope most people at least recognize her name. Beloved was made into a movie, so it’s you may at least know of that. The story concerns Sethe, an escaped slave, living in Ohio many years after her escape, in a house haunted by a ghostly child.  To say more than that is to give away what was (to me, anyway) the breathtaking, visceral shock of some of  the book’s later events. Morrison uses a nonlinear writing style, and the events move back and forth in time, so this is not a quick, light, beach read. But it is certainly one that will leave an impact.

2.)  The Keep by Jennifer Egan

The Keep is a nested story, with a story about a character situated in a Gothic trope– visiting an acquaintance who is renovating a castle with Gothic terrors and trappings, which is also a playground for bored people who want to imagine they are living in the Gothic… and all of this is framed by yet another story. The Keep does not tie up all of its loose ends, so if that bothers you, be warned. It’s really hard to describe this in just a few sentences without giving up some of the surprises in the plot, but suffice it to say that it is suitably creepy and unsettling. I’d save this for when you have plenty of time.

3.) The Castle of Los Angeles by Lisa Morton

The Castle of Los Angeles won a Stoker award in 2010, and was mentioned in the second edition of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror. Two of our reviewers chose to review it independently of each other, and both of the reviews were glowing. Despite her reputation as a horror writer, though, it is possible that you might not have come across this book, because it was published by a small press, Gray Friar Press, that does not (to my knowledge) seem to exist anymore. Cemetery Dance has republished it as an ebook, but hard copies appear to be only available used, so you would probably have to be looking for it specifically, or be blessed with serendipity, to come across it. The Castle of Los Angeles  takes place in a haunted theater, the Castle. While it uses many Gothic tropes, Morton makes them her own, and her eccentric mix of characters and their reasons for living in the Castle make it a unique contribution to the haunted house genre. It is a treasure for lovers of quiet horror.

4.) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

If you are purely a horror reader you might not have come across the brilliant Connie Willis, who is primarily known as a science fiction writer. Among her other works, she has written a loosely connected series of books about historians in an alternate future who use time travel in their research. In Doomsday Book, history student Kivrin’s research trip to the Middle Ages is derailed when the tech running the machine collapses, having entered incorrect coordinates that send her to the time of the Black Death. The tech turns out to have contracted an unknown and deadly disease that spreads rapidly through the area, and the time travel lab is quarantined due to suspicion that the disease escaped from the past when Kivrin went through, trapping her there. This isn’t horror in the traditional sense, but the reader is a witness, through Kivrin, to the despair and terror caused by the Black Death. The parallel plot of the quarantine during the spread of the unknown disease in the future is more science-fictional, but Willis does not pull her punches, and she doesn’t seem to have compunctions about killing off characters you’ve grown to care about. The story builds over the course of the novel, and it is exhaustive in its detail, so you have to be patient, but it is so worth poking your toe outside the horror genre to delve into the horror and consequences of the spread of an epidemic disease.

5.) Nameless: The Darkness Comes by Mercedes M. Yardley

While she has published short stories and novellas before, this is Mercedes Yardley’s debut novel, and the first book in her Bone Angel trilogy. It’s relatively new, having just been released in December. We just reviewed it here, and when I asked my reviewers for a book by a top woman writer in the horror genre, this is the one that was suggested.  Luna, the protagonist, can see and speak to demons. When her niece is kidnapped by Luna’s brother’s ex-wife, a demon named Sparkles, the game is on! Described as “whimsical”, “gritty”, and “macabre”,  this novel, while technically an urban fantasy, gets high marks from lovers of horror as well.

 

I hope you’ve had a great month of reading women horror writers this month– but don’t stop now! Enjoy!

Posted on February 29, 2016 by , Reply

Book List: Breaking Cliches in Zombie Fiction

I was reading a blog post on realism in zombie fiction by Brian Parker, a writer of zombie fiction. Somewhere in the middle of it, he addressed the problem of the Mary Sue in zombie novels:

If you’re like me, you likely roll your eyes at the stereotypical protagonist in zombie fiction. You know the type, it’s some guy or girl—devastatingly handsome or beautiful, but overlooked by the rest of society—who works at a video game store. When the shit hits the fan, they come out of their shell and use their secret level-84 ninja skills to become the unlikely leader who saves their friends and/or family. Everyone in the group is an expert shot and every time they pull the trigger, heads explode. Sound familiar? More on that in a moment. Don’t forget the quintessential part of a typical zombie novel: The main character’s love interest is unattainable before the zombies appear, but once their competition is killed, the guy gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after.

Luckily for us, there are zombie stories out there that successfully break, or at least subvert, these character and plot cliches.  Here are a few worth checking out.
 The List  by Michele Lee

This is a brief novella that can be read in one sitting, and you’ll want to do that. The story is told in first person by an unsympathetic protagonist with poor social skills who has a lot of built up resentments against the other residents of his apartment building. At the time of the story, he’s been holed up safely for quite some time, and has successfully avoided getting infected by the zombie virus. He is about to emerge and work his way through the building by taking out the now-zombified residents of the building, one at a time, in brutal and gory fashion. Despite the unsympathetic narrator, the voice is fantastic, and there is plenty of dark humor. In the interests of full disclosure, Michele is a reviewer for Monster Librarian and the editor for our companion blog Reading Bites, but that doesn’t affect my recommendation here.

 Allison Hewitt Is Trapped by Madeleine Roux

We’ve previously reviewed Allison Hewitt Is Trapped. I’m not going to claim realism here, but I also wouldn’t call Allison a Mary Sue. She’s a graduate student who works in a bookstore (no video games here– each chapter is named for a book) and is trapped in the break room with the rest of the bookstore staff and a couple of customers, with no apparent rescue in sight,  blogging about the experience on a miraculously still-existing military Internet network. I find Allison’s ability to wield a fire ax as a deadly weapon, without prior experience, to be unrealistic, but even since its publication in 2011, there aren’t enough books in this subgenre with women who are snarky, resourceful, save themselves, and can strangle their enemy with a laptop cord. The story doesn’t end exactly unhappily for her, but there’s a companion book that takes place many years later, and the zombies still are ravaging pretty much everything, so I wouldn’t say it’s a happy ending either.

 

 Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

Never be afraid to check out YA fiction– there are some powerful works out there. Ashes is one of these. The main character and narrator is Alex, a teenage girl with terminal brain cancer and considerable camping, hiking, and general survival skills, who decides to run away to the forests of Michigan to spend her last days. While she’s there, an electromagnetic impulse hits, kills millions of people, destroys communications and technology, and turns the majority of children and teenagers into flesh-eating zombies. She is joined by Ellie, a spoiled and obnoxious nine year old who is orphaned early on, and Tom, a soldier she encounters in the forest. Oh my gosh, this is a dark, brutal, and desperate read. Anyone who thinks YA is light and fluffy can think again. I also think it’s a very realistic portrayal. Alex doesn’t suddenly discover she has super survival skills– her skills are a big part of the reason she escapes the EMP in the first place. Tom doesn’t mystically discover he has weapons skills– he’s a trained soldier. And nothing is more realistic than an obnoxious nine year old. This is the first book in a trilogy, and I really recommend it.

Posted on January 27, 2016 by , Reply
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