To revisit my childhood, I've just re-read "Domain", the second of James Herbert's trilogy based on a mutant strain of black rat terrorising Epping Forest. Not merely by making a mess everywhere and causing a spot of Weil's disease, but by killing lots of people and taking their heads back to their hideously deformed two headed leader so it can eat their brains.
Together with "The Rats" and "Domain", "Lair" represents the first horror I ever read, and the horror was so vivid it stuck with me always.
The mass attacks by rats are terrifyingly described; Herbert clearly loves getting into our Winston Smith like 1984 heads, and invoking the primal fear the long incisors and scaly tails can cause in people. These giant, three foot long rats with the strength of a pitbull terrier don't just kill, they eat in bloody, visceral detail.
They bite the fingers off vicars attempting to escape from a fresh dug grave the rats are violating. They eat the toes of an adulterous (of course) woman as she indoors in outdoor sex with her lover, before tearing deeper into her flesh. They devour a tent full of Barnardo boys. They blind a man by eating his eyes, and cause a man to wonder why he can still feel the rat eating his heart.
A moving tube train? No problem for the rats, who slaughter the evening commuters before slowly eating through the cupboard the stationmaster was hiding in. School children are devoured en-masse. Cinema-goers are devoured en-masse. And in "Domain", a post nuclear holocaust London throws rats into the mix of radiation sickness and rabies atomic war throws up, a high Rad count being no protection against being eaten.
Worse, was the fact that in the "The Rats" if you survived the attack, you would die within 24 hours that would cause you to lose your senses and your skin to turn yellow, stretch and tear over your skeleton.
For the youngster, the fact that Herbert would throw in a wide array of terribly written sex scenes would provide a little light relief from the rodent atrocities that would infiltrate your dreams at night and make you want to sleep with the light on. No form of strictly heterosexual forms of intercourse is left undescribed, and just like in any American horror movie of the 70s, the participants are always first in the queue for a violent death.
And finally, few folk who ever read "The Rats" will be able to forget the phrase "You couldn't fuck a Polo mint with that!" in any kind of hurry.
Copyright BLoody Mulberry 09.08.14
No comments:
Post a Comment