Read Part One
The mid-1980s saw a change in Herbert’s work, of which Moon (1985) although it contains many similar elements to The Jonah, is the first example.
The hero of this transitional novel in Herbert’s oeuvre has a “softer” name than his usual heroes – Childes – which reflects his vulnerability. He’s a teacher in the shiny new 80s field of computing, and a very different character from Harris in The Rats who was as tough and no-nonsense as the inner-city kids he taught. Like The Jonah‘s Kelso, Childes has a repressed past and no memory of his mother. However, Childes possesses a telepathic connection caused by these repressed energies. He is being sought out – h(a)unted – by the “monster” that is behind a string of gruesome murders and mutilations on an (unnamed) Channel Island. Several years previously, this psychic link led Childes to help uncover a previous string of murders, and understandably therefore become a figure of interest to the investigating police. This telepathic connection gives him paralysing visions during which he shares the creature’s senses as it goes about its deadly business. In this, then, there is an attempt at (however unwelcome it may be) communing – or at least contacting – the Other: “she was in him and he was in her”. Ultimately, Moon is a more progressive novel than The Jonah but the Other still must be destroyed.
The love interest here is Amy, another younger woman with an extremely close relationship with her overbearing father. Childes is estranged from his wife and daughter who live on the mainland, and it’s perhaps no surprise that Neil Gaiman, in his foreword to the 40th anniversary edition of The Rats, calls Moon Herbert’s “loneliest” novel, written during a year’s “writing-and-tax exile in the Channel islands.”
A decisive step away from explicit levels of gore, and the introduction of another male with a sensitive side, came with 1986’s The Magic Cottage, which is full of surprises. To start with, there’s a first-person narrator: session musician Mike Stringer; secondly there’s an actual loving relationship at the heart of the book, between him and his partner, children’s illustrator Midge (something only glimpsed before in Shrine). Okay, “Mike” is a typical Herbert lead name, and Midge conforms to the previous waif-like girls (“women” hardly seems appropriate) that his lead characters are attracted to, but even so this is progress. Thirdly, there are actual pop-culture references for the first time (Phil Collins, Steven Spielberg)1. But the final surprise is that such an atypical tale is arguably Herbert’s best book.
Mike and Midge relocate from London to the New Forest village of Cantrip (nice touch), and buy a cottage under whose (seemingly innocent) spell Midge has fallen. At first, all seems well: incredibly so – an injured bird is healed overnight while inside the house, and Mike & Midge’s relationship and creative passions achieve a new intensity. Weirdly, problems they’d spotted on their first visit (cracks, dampness, all the usual problems of an old rural building) seem to have disappeared by the time they move in. The cottage, clearly, is powerful: but other people want that power. Enter the Synergists, a local cult led by mild-mannered Messiah, Mycroft. Midge falls under their spell after they heal an injury of Mike’s, and claim that they can put her in touch with her dead parents. Mike is sceptical, and this breach between the two lovers accelerates the action as things turn nasty.
Although he’s the narrator we know very little about Mike Stringer beyond his past as a hard-living rocker. He’s sceptical of the “magic” happening all around them, yet also hyper aware (unlike Midge) that things are getting weird. His age is never stated and though intended to be youngish never comes across as being under forty. He’s not, therefore, such a break from previous heroes.
Unlike previous novels though, there’s a real sense of atmosphere and, in particular, place: the deep forest is nicely evoked, as is the couple’s isolation. Things go so well – far too well – that there’s suspense in waiting for it all to fall apart. And that, again unusually for a writer of “thrillers”, is what makes this – arguably his slowest, least explicit work – one of the most page-turning2.
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1987’s Sepulchre is probably the closest thing Herbert wrote to one of the stereotypical chunky airport thrillers of the time. In it we also see the first influences of the new kid on the horror block, Clive Barker, and especially Barker’s debut novel, The Damnation Game.
Liam Halloran is employed by ‘Kidnap & Ransom insurance company’ Achilles Shield, to be a bodyguard to psychic Felix Kline. Kline is the secret weapon behind energy & minerals company Magma’s success: he can detect sources of ore years before scientific methods. Achilles Shield is based in St Katharine’s Dock, the scene of the 1980s docklands redevelopment which was a physical embodiment of Thatcherism. The Magma building, judging by the description, is clearly modelled on Richard Rogers’s Lloyds with its (post)modern angularity, steel and glass. We’re clearly deep into Thatcher’s rule to judge by references to the “long recession”, and there’s a nod to the growing environmental awareness of the time (the ozone layer, acid rain and what was then called the “greenhouse effect” – you know it better as the climate disaster we’re now all trooping merrily into – were all beginning to take up column inches in the press) with a mention of “resources…we’re rapidly running them down.”
In his clunky, clumsy way, Herbert makes Halloran his first non-English hero, and in being introduced to us while taking out a team of IRA members he is explicitly presented as “good Irish”, as opposed to the IRA’s “bad Irish”. This was written at a time of intense IRA bombing activity in England and Herbert, however ham-fistedly, wants to reassure readers that not all Irish are the same. That said, non-English people in his books are easily identifed because their accents are rendered in caricature. Irish are easily identified because they ALWAYS say things like “sweet Jaisus”, “Jesus, Mary”, or talk of the “divil”. His final book Ash – aside from being excruciatingly bad – is unintentionally hilarious in its attempts at Scottish accents. Really, they’re so bad it isn’t even worth being offended by.
Halloran’s nationality, though, is the only thing to really distinguish him from previous heroes, although we do get a full back story for the first time in a Herbert book. Upon the introduction of our female lead, Cora, we get a physical impression of Halloran, none of which comes as a surprise to regular readers: “there was something about his eyes…he looked like a man who could be cruel. Yet there was a quiet gentleness about him too.” Although in many ways no different (Halloran has “a coldness that’s worse than nothing”) Herbert has packed a bit more into him. He’s not just haunted – by the murder of his father at the hands of his mother’s IRA cousins – he went off the rails entirely. We’re asked if he is “a bad man turned…good? Or just trained?”
Kline, unfortunately, looks stereotypically Jewish, his “complexion swarthy, almost yellowish…a hooked nose.” Like The Damnation Game‘s Mamoulian, he is far older than he looks. The chapters telling the backstory of Kline’s retainers are written in a brisk, storytelling style unlike anything else in Herbert’s ouevre and in places contain some of the best (but also some of the worst) prose he ever wrote.
Curiously, and perhaps taking a cue from Barker’s more outré sex scenes, Cora is into masochism. In a historic first, the male lead in a Herbert novel doesn’t satisfy her: Halloran then suffers a crisis of confidence that almost derails him. He doesn’t take it well and to deal with it, he subsequently rapes her. Troublingly, (like in The Ghoul) Cora enjoys it in the end. Despite this, there’s little effort to render Halloran ambiguous: he’s still portrayed as the good guy, although in a novel whose epigraph is “there are no absolutes” perhaps this is entirely deliberate. “Virtue, righteousness…often held little sway over evil, bcause its own rules inhibited. Sometimes only evil could defeat another evil.”
Kline has further powers and can make you see things: he plays with “reality”, and like Mamoulian stresses the “unreality of reality”. His secluded mansion Neath is like Joseph Whitehead’s Retreat in The Damnation Game. Kline, in fact, is like both Whitehead and Mamoulian: he is both a threat and the threatened. In a nice (if possibly inadvertent) echo of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, in which the detective ends up committing the very crime he has been assigned to solve, it turns out that the reason Halloran has been employed as bodyguard – Kline senses an immediate threat to his person – provides the opportunity for him to fulfil the prohecy, as it were. In the end, Halloran is the very threat he’s been assigned to prevent.
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Haunted (1988) is one of the few Herbert novels to be filmed and was seen at the time as a major stylistic shift. It moves further away from the gore and is much closer to a Susan Hill-type ghost story, as he distanced himself from the splatterpunk violence of Skipp and Spector. This could be seen as a bid for literary respectability, as Herbert seems always to have been sensitive to criticism: in the Guardian interview he protested “‘I think all my books are literate…Susan Hill writes ghost stories – I make no comment about those ghost stories, but because she is part of the literati they are elevated.” An article by John Brosnan in the April 1989 issue of Starburst, however, is withering, and unimpressed by the new, “mature” Herbert: “I just don’t think Herbert is a very good writer…even his most recent, more ‘upmarket’ books, while slickly written, show signs of narrative strain.” He ventures that “[his] extreme sensitivity to adverse criticism…reflects a basic insecurity he has about his own work.” Whereas Brosnan calls Herbert “a mechanical writer who knows roughly how to put all the parts of a book together but can’t breathe life into the result”, Mark Lawson writing in The Guardian after Herbert’s death, saw nothing necessarily wrong with this, describing him as “a canny man [who] combined two of the most lucrative ways of hauling in audiences: teenagers queasy about mutants and zombies read him anyway for the extended and detailed sex scene he routinely introduced amid the mayhem.”
Brosnan, however has a point: Herbert’s characters are very different to those of Stephen King, who creates them with depth and shade so you get to know and care for them, and when things go horribly wrong it hurts. Herbert’s (with the odd exception) are more one dimensional, pragmatic figures there solely to fix the situation in which they find themselves.
Once more, Haunted‘s hero David Ash has a repressed childhood. Like The Jonah, we have a dead sister: Ash’s drowned when they were children, and he was to blame: “his psychic ability is repressed, severely so”. His efforts to investigate reports of a ghost at an upper-class mansion don’t go as the sceptical, rational Ash expects, and Ash himself is not guiltless: “[if] you…have been suppressing some dark memory, a terrible event from the past, then it might be that your collective subconscious…is now pushing that memory to the fore…your minds could be working together to bring into being an image”. Although his earlier leads were largely interchangeable, David Ash was a character Herbert brought back several times later in his career, giving Herbert the opportunity to build on and develop his persona.
1990’s Creed was seen at the time as a bigger departure from Herbert’s previous work than Haunted. This novel – for which a very early example of the now-standard book trailer was filmed – is the story of scummy paparazzo Joe Creed, who, while photographing the funeral of an old Hollywood star, stumbles into a bizarre occult conspiracy. At the time much was made of the fact that Creed was unlikable, but (as John Brosnan observed, above) none of his lead characters are fully-formed enough to spark an emotional connection anyway. In some ways, the anti-heroic Creed is the most likable, or most human, of his leads. The tone of the book is heavily ironic: “So, that’s for starters” the narrative voice breezily tells us after Creed has captured a mourner at Lily Neverles’s funeral masturbating over her grave. Whereas individual scenes in previous books may have been blackly comic, here that tone extends to the entire narrative and the result is the best-written book of his career to date. There’s also room for some tongue-in-cheek self-referencing: “didn’t he read somewhere that rats were taking over the city? Good idea for a book there.”
Creed‘s main problem – which weakens certain key plot points – is the evident influence of Clive Barker’s then-recent, game-changing Weaveworld. The scene where the mysterious Laura causes pools of Creed’s semen to form into floating entities (“phantoms of emissions”) seems unimaginable without reference to Weaveworld‘s Immacolata and the “by-blows” birthed when her wraith-like sisters rape unsuspecting men. The scene at a masked ball, where human and inhuman are indistinguishable, seems like it was inspired by the fecundity of Barker’s very visual imagination: but Herbert’s talents lay not in the fantastique, and instead his parade of wattle-headed or canine-hybrid characters is under-imagined and reads like a memory of a Bosch painting. This borrowing of existing imagery – as if straining at the limits of what his own imagination can conjure – is something he was guilty of a decade later in Once.
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When asked (in a 2001 magazine interview with his biographer Craig Cabell) which horror writers influenced him, Herbert responded “none, really,” before going on to admit that the Bela Lugosi Dracula was more of an inspiration than any book. In light of his distance from the horror “scene” this isn’t particularly surprising. Cabell elsewhere claims that with the reclusive Herbert “there is more mystery” than with Stephen King. Although friends with King, Herbert was only an occasional interviewee in the horror press, and wrote almost no short fiction – the lifeblood of the genre.
King, in Danse Macabre, calls him “probably the best writer of pulp horror…since Robert E Howard” (my italics), and this distinction (pulp as a lower form of literature within the genre) is interesting but not unfair. He also claims that Herbert is “held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre on both sides of the Atlantic [but] remarkably few people have actually read Herbert”, but perhaps this refers to his U.S. readership. In the U.K. Herbert’s work was astoundingly popular, and it’s difficult today to emphasise how big horror fiction was, to the extent that he could appear on a prime-time chat show such as BBC1’s Wogan (with Clive Barker, and of course at Halloween). And remember that this was an era of four TV channels, with none of today’s myriad sources for genre fans to find their horror fix: therefore such an appearance meant that he was, as a genuine bestseller, part of the cultural mainstream.
“Death confers dignity on the famous for only a short time, as within a year or so their reputations begin to dip. Then, as the wheel turns, so time reconfers dignity and importance, and the dead are rediscovered and reappraised, their legacies balanced out.” Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics
In his masterful Paperbacks From Hell, Grady Hendrix illustrates how the start of the 1990s saw the end of the Horror Boom. “Horror was out. Serial killers were in. The horror-fiction market of the late 80s was glutted, and the inevitable crash was happening fast.” A name as big as James Herbert was immune from the fate of many authors with a lower profile and smaller sales figures, and indeed he continued to publish bestsellers into the twenty-first century, but his profile was not what it was and his publishers consciously marketed his books for years as “thrillers”. Stephen King’s early 90s books are also far less obviously “horror” than those from just a few years previously (Dean R. Koontz, too); Clive Barker, too, had for some time being venturing down a path towards more dark metaphysical fantasy than horror.
Horror is “back”, of course (and for true fans it never went anywhere: it was everyone else who left): was its rebirth seeded in the depths of the financial crash of 2008? Probably; and in last decade has only accelerated the seeping of darkness into so many forms of art and media, whether consciously marketed as “horror” or not (“post-horror”? what’s “post” about it?). And where, in this resurrection, is James Herbert? Well, of course the man himself is sadly no longer with us: he died far too young, aged 69, in 2013 but his books seem to all be in print, still. To a generation of subsequent writers, as I mentioned earlier, he was an inspiration but for younger horror writers, I wonder? There’s much, as we’ve seen, that would be anathema to writers today, and rightly so. But he, more than anyone except King, made horror in Britain a cultural force, and for that reason he deserves to be remembered.
Notes
1In the 1984 Fangoria interview, Herbert said he deliberately avoided pop-culture references: “it gets very tedious after a while and bogs down the story…all those brand names. With some writers it’s really studied and self-conscious.” He’d evidently changed his mind by the time he came to write Once with its egregious reference to Björk.
2For all that Herbert influenced a generation of gore-specialists, perhaps surprisingly The Magic Cottage was also an evident influence on Kim Newman’s Jago, which is also worth a read.
Sources
Moon (New English Library, 1985)
The Magic Cottage (New English Library, 1987)
Haunted (New English Library, 1988)
Creed (New English Library, 1991)
Jones, Stephen (ed.) – James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (New English Library, 1992)
Cabell, Craig – James Herbert: Devil in the Dark (Metro Books, 2003)
Jones, Dylan – Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics (Faber, 2020)
Hendrix, Grady – Paperbacks from Hell (Quirk Books, 2017)
Fangoria, January 1984
Book & Magazine Collector, London, 2002
image (c) Pan Macmillan
Into the Gyre 
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