Customer Reviews

Rats

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This is first of the Rats trilogy and wow what a book. It was a scary as hell! Dark and very grusome in places. The book kept me gripped throughout - infact i had difficulty putting it down once I started. The ending was satisfying but left it open for the sequal which I will be reading next.

The Rats is one of those horror stories that exposed the fears and concerns of a particular generation. During the 70s rats were a very vocal social concern in metro areas to the point where rat infestations were making word wide press when they occurred in areas such as NYC or (as in the case with this book) London. Read "Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants" by Robert Sullivan to understand just how this problem grew and, in turn, represented the social/economic boundaries and impressions of the time.

Here, Herbert stays far from the historical route and instead, tells a straight up horror story. These are not your standard variety Norwegian rats either, these are giant, super intelligent, mutant rats bread from some atomic testing site and inadvertently released into our populace. And yes, that is far fetched, and yes that does show the fact that this was written in the 70s, and yes, that feeling is further justified by the out of place social rants that the main character thinks...in other words, there are many ways that this book shows its age.

But at its core, there are some genuine skin crawling scenes, scenes of real horror that shine through and make this a worthwhile read. Just remember, that you need to place yourself firmly in an early 1970's mindset, you need to accept the whole mutant rat concept, and suspend further disbelief of a government's reliance on a high school art teacher to be part of a team of scientists that not only have to solve the rat crisis but contain the 100% lethal-24-hour-killing-black-plague-like virus that is spread by their bites. If you can do that, then this book will impress you. Otherwise, it will be an average read with a few above average scares to get you buy.