Lair - James Herbert

[franklinmarsh]

Lair - James Herbert - NEL 1979. (Republished by PanMacmillan 1999 - thanks to Alastair Brannen and the Barbican library - if you thought the '79 cover was sh*te.....)
James Herbert! The Rats! The Fog! Where did it all go wrong?Nowhere really. He just honed his craft and continued as a best-selling author without the need for that good ol' mid 70s sex 'n' violence delirium in such an extreme form. Pity, really. But his writing is so good and, if needs be, he can still send shivers down the spine and get the gorge rising so his later novels are always worth a look. Before returning to Lair I had the feeling it may have come after Fluke. Following the two trail-blazers JH had come up with The Survivor - mucho toned down from his previous excesses but with a tense supernatural flavour and enough nastiness to pique interest. 'Twas then he went wildly experimental with Fluke. Anyone who has read this after reading the previous novels must have had a shock - but not in a good way. All power to Mr H for trying something different but - what a disappointment! I was wrong - the partial return to form The Spear followed. Taking into account the gap between hardback and paperback - and the fact that Fluke may not have been quite a best-seller as the original Herbert tomes - was a sequel to The Rats a necessity? Without sales figures I'm speculating wildly but I can't help wondering if a real return to form meant an attempt to recapture former glories. But James didn't just want to replicate. He wandered from the straight and narrow and had little fun along the way. No way could The Rats be duplicated.
The Rats had a little epilogue, hinting that there was more to come. This is reproduced as The Prologue of Lair. We are then faced with Signs, Onslaught and...er...Lair.
After a couple of lines from The Teddy Bears' Picnic the book proper begins with "Bl**dy vermin!". We're on Ken Woollard's farm and his two top mousers are missing. He's seen Rat signs but is loathe to report them (even though it's now the Law.) Even when he discovers the tatty remains of one of his cats, he doesn't want to involve the authorities. Ken lives near Epping Forest. That's the big change. Having been Urban Guerrillas in the first outing, the deadly rodents have seemingly repaired to the countryside - although Herbert frequently points out just how close to London this rural idyll actually is. A couple of wicked wind ups - The forest headkeeper's horse takes flight in panic from....a white deer - some kind of warning symbol. A sunbathing girl is stalked by..... her husband and children. Nice topicality - the family are having some fun days out because the husband is on strike at the local car factory. Lots of hints of something lurking in the forest. What can it be?
Luke Pender is on the case! Ratkill troubleshooter. Returning from the North he's almost instantly despatched to the forest Conservation Centre. They've had a few odd incidents. Luke knows Ratkill supremo Stephen Howard from University. He's got a good career, making good money, but there's something else....
He's discovered brown rats around the country are becoming resistant to warfarin. That's the problem with Rats - adaptive little buggers. He's been given a bit of background on William Bartlett Schiller - the nutter who picked up a rat or rats from a New Guinea atomic testing range and bred them with good ol' British black rats - forming the horrendous mutants of the first Outbreak. But he feels Howard's holding something back.
A few Herbert vignettes - a Reverend who worries about losing his faith, a well dodgy flasher and Cor! Jenny Hanmer - who runs classes for children at the Conservation Centre. She's busy teaching the kids about wildlife and avoiding the advances of fellow tutor and beardie-weirdie Vic Whittaker - who's married - the bounder! Her latest class get a rude shock when fishing for water skaters in a handy pond. Three large and unfriendly rodents are swimming across it. Luke turns up and investigates. An eerie sequence as the couple investigate the unwelcoming forest t'other side of the pond - and find a family of stoats ripped to pieces.
Despite their best efforts to get forest authorities to take this seriously (remember last time?) the inevitable red tape, dithering, internal politics and ineffectual authority figures conspire to frustrate them. Indeed, when Luke contacts Howard, he's keen to down play their discoveries - the forest superintendent having used a contact at the Ministry Of Agriculture. A big meeting of all concerned is called. And so ends Signs.
Many commentators cited part of the popularity of the film version of Jaws striking a chord with American audiences as down to the Mayor's efforts to keep the beaches open and hush up shark attacks as being a parallel to the Watergate affair. Always annoying in this type of book. The heroes just can't get their message through and you know there will be deaths.
Onslaught begins with an explanation of the Rats' migration and the hideously deformed mutant leader. Then some classic Herbert Rat attacks. An adulterous couple - they've got to go! This is a morality tale. Not necessarily - surely a Barnado's boy made good and his fellow campers will not succumb? Even the Reverend is not safe. A throwaway refence to the abandoned and ruined Seymour Hall Estate. The return of the flasher. The meeting - gas 'em! Then we go into overdrive as the Rats decide to hit the Conservation centre, a Police training camp, a mobile home park.
OK it's not The Rats but Herbert does a great job throughout the book of maintaining suspense - and the rat attacks are truly harrowing in places. Even minor characters have a bit of background and substance. There's just enough pulp roots showing to make it a fast, enjoyable read. And the second half of the book is very very good. Rats vs The Army. Ratkill protective suits proving less than adequate. A truly chilling denouement. When Luke and Vic are faced by a marauding army of Rats you do wonder - what would it be like to be in that situation - I'm gonna die!
And there's an epilogue.....

[erebus]

I love Lair and find it better than the vastly overatted Domain.

Dunno why nobody has commented on this thread but I just want to tell you what a great review and write up you have done. Nice post this.

[dem bones]

I always get Lair and Domain confused. Is Domain the one where the Prime Minister and the Cabinet are eaten by rats in their bunker or is it this one?

And yes, another top FM review and no mistake. To be fair, it did receive an enthusiastic response when it first appeared on Vault Mk. I
Vault Mk. I.
He's very good on The Dark, too (last post but one)!

[franklinmarsh]

Cheers Erebus! This was brought across from the old board. I was filled with enthusiasm at the time. Justin was putting the Paperback Fanatic together at the time and was hoping for NEL Horror reviews so I really went for it with this one and Origin Of The Crabs - then lapsed into my usual coma.

[funkdooby]

Feb 27, 2009 15:53:37 GMT erebus said:

I love Lair and find it better than the vastly overatted Domain.

Dunno why nobody has commented on this thread but I just want to tell you what a great review and write up you have done. Nice post this.

Is Domain overrated? I always thought everyone agreed it was crap

I do love Lair, though - including the cover (of the paperback, anyway).

[David A. Riley]

Is Domain overrated? I always thought everyone agreed it was crap

I borrowed an unabidged version of this from our local library on audio discs to listen to while driving in the car. I gave up on it halfway through. Utter rubbish. Not a patch on the others, in my view anyway.

David

[vaughan]

If you’re going to define a sub-genre, going to have a best seller with it, going to create a little niche market, then others are going to follow. Call it inspiration, call it homage, claim whatever artistic device you feel legitimizes it best – but let’s face it, it’s an economic goal that will drive it to market from a publishers standpoint.

Once something is big, it’s emulated, copied, manipulated first in small ways, and then larger ways, until yet another sub-genre materializes. Then it all starts again.

But who could argue that more of the same should be denied the guy that started it all? James Herbert had given us The Rats, a hugely popular book, and if anyone was going to benefit from its success, surely Herbert was the guy most deserving? And so we got The Lair, a sequel to The Rats, appearing a mere five years after the original.

The Lair runs a familiar path, although things are fleshed out a little better, the basic story benefiting from an additional fifty-odd pages on the original. Transpose London for Epping Forest, and you probably already have a pretty good idea of what new opportunities this inspiring scenery afforded Herbert. Rather than the hustle and bustle of urban life filling the pages, you have the broken tranquillity of the forest.

Herbert is careful to refer back to scenes in the first book, giving nice continuity, and while there is in reality little new going on here, the story feels smoother, more satisfying, one might say more “professional”. That can sometimes be a bad thing, but not in this case.

Still, having said that there is still one jarring sequence in the book. Amazingly for a title with 244 pages in all, things take a severe turn for the worse on page 191 through 200. I mean, a nine page seduction sequence! These novels are riddled with hilarious sex scenes, but in this case Herbert is apparently enjoying it way too much, and this seems to go on and on. Wholly unnecessary, it enlightens and enlivens nothing, and is a bit squirm inducing – which is saying something when you’re reading a book about giant rats!

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh overall, given you can skip pages 191 to 200 completely and not miss a thing of consequence, it’s just curious to me when Herbert seems to lose his own plot. We’ll set that aside though.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I enjoyed The Lair. It follows the path of the first novel, but when they’re this good it’s a road you don’t mind travelling a second time. Herbert does a good job (for the most part) keeping things chugging along, and the action sequences are a little better that those in the first book.

Of course there is a third book in the series – Domain. And yes it’s sitting on my shelf. I’ve heard only bad things about it, and talk about bloat, it runs for 420+ pages. Ouch! But maybe I’ll tackle it soon, just to finish things off. Hell, I’ve gone this far, and I’m the sort who is attracted to things people tell me to stay away from.

But even if we only had The Rats and The Lair we’d have a hell of a good time. Let’s face it, we wax lyrical about the significance of these novels, and the reason for that is that they’re just very very good. Perhaps this one was unnecessary, but as I have said, who can begrudge Herbert, of all people, going to back to the trough? Or the cellar.

[dem bones]

James Herbert - Lair (NEL 1979)

Reread this during a recent splurge and, while it's not quite The Rats it's still a damn sight better - and far more horrible - than i ever gave it credit for. Setting the action in Epping Forest was a masterstroke - plenty of residential areas close enough for the rats to wage war upon once they've rebuilt their confidence after the massacre of four years ago. I've never found Herbert's everyman heroes particularly engaging or convincing and Luke Pender the Ratkill man is another from the Harris mould, so strong, daring and decisive you wonder how he evaded SAS recruitment. His love interest, Jenny Hanmer, didn't do much for me either (must be getting old) but fortunately the support cast include some charismatic turns. Brian Mollison the P.E. Teacher/ serial flasher who hates his mother ("God how he wished he could have fed that old cow to the rats!") is hilarious and quite possibly the jammiest character ever to appear in a JH novel. Mollison escapes indecent exposure busts - to say nothing of gory death - on so many occasions you wonder if the unthinkable will happen and he'll see the book out. For this reader, Herbert's at his best when he piles grisly set-piece upon grisly set-piece and Lair is shot through with them. Reverend Matthews discovery of the disturbed grave is a masterpiece of graphic horror fiction, and pervy Brian's close encounter with the gnawed corpses of the randy Babs and Alan hits the spot. Unusually for a '70's NEL the ending doesn't capsize the rest of the book - Pender and Vic Whittaker at the mercy of the rat army in the cellar of Seymour Hall is so frightening you overlook the fact that nobody could escape such a dreadful situation and just go with it. Even that obese pink mutant with the two brains is both funny grotesque and frightening (though you wonder how it ever got mistaken for a pig).

So far everyone's been so uncomplimentary about Domain i'd be tempted to go for a rematch if it wasn't such a bulky bastard.

[David A. Riley]

My wife went to James Herbert's Guest of Honour speech at the recent World Horror Convention. I was needed elsewhere at the time so missed it.

He mentioned Domain, saying that the scene where all the government bigwigs had been killed off by the rats (I never got that far into the novel, as it happens) was inspired when he found out that there were miles of tunnels under London and secure, luxuriously kitted bunkers for the elite to hide in come a nuclear attack. Their death by rats was his way of getting back at them.

Makes the book sound more attractive somehow.

Don't know why....

David

[dem bones]

The discovery of the Prime Minister's gnawed skeleton is just about the only thing i remember of Domain and it takes an age to get there. I know The Dark and other later Herbert titles have their admirers, but outside of The Rats, The Fog and Lair he's never really done it for me which is a shame as i want to like his work. His more thoughtful novels just don't seem to have that incredible amphetamine rush about them.

[David A. Riley]

I tend to agree with you. I like The Fog and Fluke (though I know that's hardly a favorite with his "fans") and I quite liked another, more recent one whose name eludes me at the moment but involves a character who gets murdered while he's having an out of body experience - something, seemingly, this guy does a lot. He then tracks down his murderer. Reminded me a little of The Ka of Gifford Hillary. Though its decades since I read that Wheatley novel, and I may be misremembering it.

[jamesdoig]

The Rats and The Fog do it for me. My dad handed me a battered, dog-eared copy of The Rats one summer holidays when I was 12 or 13 - quite an eye opener.

[Craig Herbertson]

So long ago. The Rats I remember distinctly and the sequel. By the time it got to the Fog it was gone for me.

[Truegho]

I must admit, as big a fan of Herbert as I am, I did not like it when he started to tone down on all the gory horror and edge-of-seat thrills and chills.

[Truegho]

Domain was my least favourite Rats book. The first two were brilliant.