James Herbert died this week. I'll say this for him: he gave me one of the more intense reading experiences of my life. When I was 11, my tastes were more or less fixed on SF and fantasy, with an occasional foray into the yellowing thrillers (Arthur Hailey, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean) to be found on the shelves in the spare bedroom. At school, though, there was only one writer who counted, and that was James Herbert.
Boys who generally showed no interest in books were furtively passing round copies of The Rats and The Dark, marking particularly grotesque passages, quoting them to each other with the same mix of disgust and fascination the girls (I later learned) were getting from the goldfish scene in Shirley Conran's Lace. I was (still am) a sensitive child, who tended to take things to heart, and, in general, I avoided horror novels, but I didn't want to be left out.
The Dark was supposed to be about an ancient malignant evil. I knew about that from The Lord of the Rings. How bad could it be? Very bad indeed, as it turned out. The Dark is a force, a visible evil miasma, the type of thing that came easily to English imaginations before the clean air act. It makes people do terrible, often sexually violent, things. We'd just moved into an old house, which had been owned by an elderly lady. My room had no carpet. The bulb in the ceiling light flickered. I had no paranormal investigators to help me fight. I succumbed to a state of abject terror … I did finish it, but I had to do it by daylight, in cheerful communal places, mostly the living room. I never read another.
