I mainly wanted to thank you for talking about James Herbert. I really should read them again here sometime soon, since I don't really remember to much about them. It has been a long time since I have read these books. I believe that was also the movie I first laid eyes on Kate Beckinsale. That same year, Aidan Quinn played David Ash (one of Herbert’s only regular characters) in the film Haunted.
His novel Fluke, about a man reincarnated as a dog, was made into a more family friendly vehicle starring Matthew Modine and Nancy Travis in 1995. The other two were decidedly more mainstream.
In addition to 1982’s Deadly Eyes (screening at Trash Palace this Friday), there was the David Hemmings' film The Survivor in 1981. To date, only four of his twenty or so stories have gotten the theatrical treatment. His books are very graphic, in a violent (and sometimes sexual) way and usually involve elaborate showcases of carnage that would likely be costly to bring to the screen. James Herbert’s catalogue is perhaps one of the largest unmined resources for adaptation out there. The setting reminds me a little of Day Of The Dead, but I also remember Deep Blue Sea (especially the sequence where Jacqueline McKenzie gets it) striking a chord of familiarity with bits of Domain, as well. I often can’t believe that no one has ever tried to make a movie of this one. The story follows a group living in an underground government bunker and the subsequent breech by the rat hordes. After a nuclear holocaust, the black rats rise up from the ashes of a devastated London to feast upon the survivors. Herbert turned things up to the nth degree in 1984 with the release of the third book Domain (my personal fave). It was my kind of stuff – gory, gritty and concentrated. I absolutely BURNED through these as a young adult. They brought forth such blood-soaked imagery like no other author I’d ever read before. These novels filled my imagination when I was younger.
With this being Rat Week, I would like to fittingly focus on his books The Rats, Lair and Domain, known tentatively as The Rat Trilogy. When I was in my teens, sometimes two or three books would go by between visits without me knowing the wiser. Whenever my family or I go to the UK, I always make sure a trip to the bookstore is in order. James Herbert isn’t well known on this side of the pond because his works are seldom released here.
Herbert’s penchant for graphic mayhem grabbed me right from the first book of his I ever read called The Fog. His fictional England has endured innumerable disasters under his hand and no one fucks up London better than he does. British author James Herbert has always been one of my favourite writers.
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