In the Heart of James Herbert's Lair

My love affair with the works of James Herbert began when I was just 11 years old. Having been forcibly moved from one side of the country to the other, a distance of about 251 miles and a 6-hour car drive, I suddenly found myself lonely, depressed, and friendless. There was no one to talk with. There was no one to play with. There was no one to explore with, trespass in forbidden woods with, nor hack secret paths through privately owned fields with. There was just my own miserable, sorry-for-myself company and a constant feeling of loss, isolation, and separation. Yes, life in my new home was just going to be just like life in my old home.

So, how had I coped for the previous 11 years? The answer is books. Like so many who have grown up to become writers, my love of writing was born out of my love of reading. And I read everything. Every subject. Every genre. Everything I could get my hands on. By the time I had reached 11 years old, I had all ready devoured the works of H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe, in addition to the likes of Eric Carle, Penelope Lively, and Gillian Cross of course. But what really fascinated me, even though I wasn’t actually allowed to read them, was the row upon row of pulp horror fiction that lined the shelves of my local bookshop. Well, that lined the shelves of my local supermarket anyway.

The supermarket's book department was split into various sections. Every genre had its own place. It wasn’t like it is now where you have a section for house and garden, a section for crime and thriller, and a section for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Back then, each one of these genres had its own section, all of them bursting with stories of every type. The horror section was what fascinated me the most. it was a dozen shelves high and crammed with books, and not multiple copies of two or three titles by just two or three different authors like today either. It showcased the best that the horror genre had to offer, the worst that the horror genre had to offer, and every gruesome variation in between. To my 8-, 9-, 10, 11-year-old self, it might have been a glimpse of heaven.

As I said, being so young I was not allowed to actually read any of these books. But I was allowed to stand there and bathe in the garish, gaudy, and sometimes gory glory of their covers. There were monstrous, contorted figures, giant crabs with pincers held aloft, and a forbidding black rat with yellow staring eyes, black bristling fur, and a red, toothy maw. It was the latter that would become particularly significant all of those years later when I was on the other side of the country, standing in what seemed like the world’s smallest library, staring at row upon row of what an overhead sign indicated was hardback fiction. And in case you were wondering, yes, the library did have a paperback section. It was a single, solitary stand of period romances, all heavily thumbed.

I should explain that hardbacks in this library were the type that had no dust jackets. This means that they had no cover blurb either. The back of the books, if they were marked with anything, tended to have puzzling quotes along the lines of: “Cussler has done it again!” The first few pages just inside of the books contained information pertaining to the title, author name, and publication dates only. There wasn’t even any indication of what else the author had written. This made it difficult to determine what the story was actually about since all that you had to go on was the title, an enigmatic cover image, and a less-than-informative by-line. Fortunately, after a long, seemingly fruitless search amongst the shelves, I chanced on the following combination: the title Lair, a cover picture of a rat, and a by-line that read: “The rats have found their Lair.”

At the back of a mind a vague, a half-forgotten image formed, the memory of standing in the book section of my local supermarket staring at a particularly perturbing book cover featuring a huge rat with blood-dripping teeth. Could it be connected somehow? I thumbed through the story’s first few pages. I didn’t get very far as the opening prologue about a trapped rat birthing its litter, including one that was strangely and disturbingly misshapen, had me hooked. I took the book straight to the checking-out desk, raced home, and read it within a few days. I then read it again. And again. And again.

It would be a few months before I saw anything else by James Herbert sat on those library shelves. When I did see something it was a strange book with a strange title and an even stranger cover. I immediately borrowed it and read it. Shrine, however, was nothing like Lair. Where lair had been a like an epic monster movie, Shrine was a much smaller story about a little girl who had either been witness to a vision of the Virgin Mary or was a veiled vessel for evil. Admittedly with its cover image of a glowing girl and a tree, and its less than explanatory single-word title, I would never have given Shrine a second glance if I hadn’t read Lair first. Looking back, this now seems unthinkable.

Since that first encounter with one of James Herbert’s monstrous creations, there have been many more. No prizes for guessing where most of my paper-round money went in the next few years. The strange thing is that my love of James Herbert’s work didn’t fade away with the passing of my youth (as my parents might have hoped). It has stayed with me ever since. I think of nothing of rereading Lair or Shrine or The Magic Cottage whilst at the same time partaking of Dumas, Orwell, and Dickens. In fact, I take the greatest delight in rereading James Herbert’s books. That isn’t to knock Dumas, Orwell, or Dickens of course. But, to be fair, they never thought to write about giant rats, an ancient evil reborn, or a mysterious cottage under siege by a nefarious cult. If they had, I might have showed a much greater interest in them sooner.

James Herbert ... 8 April 1943 to 20 March 2013