‘Still, that was the city, a great big filthy breeding place for vermin – animal and human…’
While James Herbert’s debut novel The Rats still holds a certain raw power, it is also a novel that never threatens to be anything other than what it is – a trashy horror novel. That’s ok. There is a place in the world for trash. And a place in my heart too. By the time Herbert published Lair, the first of two sequels to The Rats, he had found his voice as an author and begun to experiment with three-dimensional characters and authentic dialogue…
Four years after everyone assumes that the mutant rodents featured in The Rats have been eradicated. They resurface in London’s Epping Forest. Harris, the protagonist from the first novel, is dispensed with (although he is mentioned in dispatches) to be replaced by Ratkill employee Lucas Pender.
Lair retains the nasty shocks of The Rats but the Epping Forest setting breathes new life into the premise as does having a likeable protagonist. Herbert is more patient with his violence here, the rat attacks slowly build in intensity and scale until the unforgettable final showdown – a sequence which contains some of the British writer’s most accomplished and memorable prose. Again, it’s surprising that nobody has had a proper go at adapting the Rats trilogy for the big screen. It’s all there on the page. As vivid and as horrifying as any discerning horror movie fan could ask for.
By dispensing with the characters of the first novel and moving the action to Epping Forest, Lair is a bigger and better book than its predecessor. It also stands alone as a brutally effective work of horror fiction. You could read Lair divorced from the other two novels in the trilogy and still enjoy it just as much. I’m not sure the three whole chapters from the point of view of a flasher are really necessary, however…