Lair (1979) by James Herbert
Readers unfamiliar with Lair may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.
The Rats (1974) was a short, tightly focused urban horror novel. Its novelty and winning narrative procedure lay in following a central protagonist through his fights against human and animal foes, alternating with cut-away chapters that each followed a canon-fodder character through their own horrific encounter. These cut-away vignettes, their social scope and specificity, are carried forward to Lair, a sequel to The Rats.
As with The Rats, Herbert focuses on the class divide between characters. While there are no proletarians in Lair, there are farmers, tutors, and scientists from the middle classes, as well as government bureaucrats and various grandees from the international corporation Ratkill.
At the center of Lair, protagonist Lucas Pender has a vendetta against the rats that wiped out his family during their London rampage, and against any government bureaucrats and his Ratkill superiors who express "wait and see" attitudes to growing evidence that mutant black rats, far from being wiped out in London, have moved north and infested rural Epping Forest.
Lair is rural horror.
Rural, set in a protected parkland, with a conservation education center catering to visiting students. Epping also has private residential housing accommodating six thousand locals in homes and trailer parks. There is a deer preserve. And a police training campus. Herbert has prepared vignettes throughout the novel in these zones, and they are dramatic indeed. The most mischievous depicts forty year old Brian Mollison, a school gym teacher and flasher. Like Mary Kelley in Chapter 5 of The Rats, it is a portrait by turns humorous, horrific, and poignant.
[....] Exposing himself to the elements in secluded places sufficed at first, but exposing himself to people proved to be much more thrilling. He discovered this one day at a new school in which he had been appointed games master. His mother – stupid cow – had neglected to mend the elastic in the trousers of his tracksuit and when he had demonstrated to the boys – it was a boys’ school – just how to jump into the air from a squatting position thirty times without a break, the trousers had slipped to his knees revealing all to the delighted pupils.
It could have been the beginning of a persecuted career – at least in that particular school – but he had cracked down hard on them. His rage had been more to cover his embarrassment than real anger at the boys, for he realized after he had whipped up his trousers again that his body was responding to the secret pleasure he had experienced. It was just as well the tracksuit was a loose-fitting, baggy garment. Whether he would have been just as nasty to the boys and his future pupils had the incident not occurred was debatable for he was already of an unpleasant disposition, and if his mother hadn’t loved him, then he would have been unloved.
Through the years he was very careful with his perversion, for he needed the job as PE instructor to keep himself and his semi-invalid mother – silly bitch – and the slightest hint that he might be in any way peculiar would mean an abrupt end to his career. Not that he considered himself peculiar. It was more of a hobby.
To stand on a crowded tube train in the rush-hour wearing his loose-fitting raincoat, the one that had bottomless pockets, would almost make him faint with excitement....
The Brian Mollison sections ( like the Mary Kelley vignette in The Rats) disturb horror reader complacency and expectations. Men in raincoats are for many of us today a Benny Hill punchline. However, James Herbert expertly depicts such types as rounded characters trying to weather storms of abjection.
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Lair is superbly balanced: Herbert is a master of cross-cutting between arcs of parallel action in different park settings. His one-time-only characters are frequently more emotionally “real” than his chief protagonists. Reverend Jonathan Matthews appears in very few pages, for instance, but his plight and predicament -- like Mollison's -- resonates more effectively than flat and single-minded ramrod Pender.
Farmer Ken Woollard, for example, dooms himself and his wife. Instead of reporting evidence of rat activity to Pender, he lies to keep the government from quarantining his stock.
His head swung round to the door and he stared at the wood panelling. Except . . . for the faint scuffling noise from inside the house.
Curious, he placed his ear against the wood and listened. More scuffling noises, the sound a cat makes when scuttling across the floor after a ball of paper. Or after a terrified mouse. Perhaps the surviving prodigal cat had returned. Yet the noise was too great to have been made by one animal. Woollard stood erect and cursed himself, annoyed at the silly way he was behaving. He was acting like an old woman, listening at bloody doors! It was those two snoopers – they’d put the wind up him with their bloody stupid questions about bloody stupid rats! He grabbed the door handle and pushed hard, barging into the narrow hallway without further thought.
‘Oh, Lord God . . .’ he said quietly, for once his anger overwhelmed by what he saw. The hallway was filled with black, furry bodies that wriggled and climbed over each others’ backs, that scuttled in and out of doorways, that leapt up at the walls as though trying to escape from the squirming, tightly pressed mass, that ran up the stairs and tore flesh from the bloody shape that lay sprawled there.
Nelly’s eyes stared down into her husband’s, but there was no life in them. A hand still clutched at the bannister rails and held her in that position, halfway up the stairs, on her back, as though she had slipped while fleeing, turning and grabbing for a rail as the rats dragged her back down, nipping at her legs, running up her body, sinking their teeth into her breasts.
Even as he watched, her fingers began to open as one creature ate its way into the tendons of her wrist, and she began to slide down, the dark bodies coming with her, refusing to let go of their prey. Her head was held up as though she was unwilling to take her eyes off him, but he saw it was because of the rat burrowing under her chin, pushing up the jaw as it worked its way inside.
She slumped to the bottom of the stairs, her knees high, feet held by the mass of bodies in the hallway, her head now rolling sideways, mercifully breaking the spellbinding gaze on him.
The farmer ran forward, his anger finally breaking forth, the one boot he wore stomping down on the vermin’s backs. He slipped, for there was no firm footing, the floor a moving carpet of bristling fur, and his hands clutched desperately at the walls for support. He was on his knees, trying to crawl forward through the creatures, but they struck out at him with sharp incisors, clinging to him as their companions had clung to his wife.
The farmer moved forward, slowly, painfully, his exposed foot already torn and shredded. He tried to keep them away from his face, but his hands were weighed down by bodies and he was unable to even lift them from the floor. He became motionless, resting there in the hallway on hands and knees, unable to see his wife beneath the sea of black creatures. Soon the weight of the rats on his back crumpled his body into a heap and he too disappeared beneath the ever-moving mass.
Mortal dangers in Lair cannot be gamed-away.
Jay
8 September 2024
