James Herbert

I'm under the impression (rightly or wrongly) that there aren't many horror fans on this site. But surely someone must have read some of James Herbert's stuff?
He is one of my personal favourites - I find him far more 'scary' than Stephen King.
Have read most of his stuff more than once and am currently re-reading Shrine.
Favourites would be The Dark, The Rats trilogy, and Others. Recently re-read The Fog and had forgotten how gruesome that particular scene was.

Anyone else like his work?

I've read The Fog. That was yucky. Not scary, just disturbing. Especially that one scene........ouchie!!!

I've also read Haunted but I was very disappointed by that. Didn't scare me, or entertain me one bit.

I've read The Rats, but that was years back, and most of the appeal for me was that it was based in and around the area I was living in at the time. Plus I was a bloodthirsty little teenager. Also read Shrine, but again years ago. That was the one with the old 'third nipple' bit as I recall.

The thing with me and horror is that I used to read loads of it. But now I rarely read any, and if I do it's generally as cross-over into other genres. Horror books for me were an adolescent thing that I grew out of. Supernatural monsters became a lot less interesting to me than real, real live human monsters. So Hannibal Lecture holds more appeal for me now than It would. I can still read horror now and then, but I don't devour it like I used to.

I have read a few of his books and liked them. I have once upon a death in my TBR pile but it's not calling me. Anybody read that?

Regards
SillyWabbit

I've read loads of his stuff. Haunted is still his best.

I read Once recently, and though it's not bad, it just didn't appeal to me. This particular one seemed a bit too padded for my liking. Lots of gratuity, without enough tension and scares for my liking. Shame, since Herbert's usually pretty good.

I have to agree about Once - I didn't like it at all. It had no substance to it, the story line seemed to be secondary to the soft porn which began to get very tiresome. If I want soft porn I'll read Jackie Collins.

The only book of his I've liked is Fluke, which I gather is nothing like his usual work? I loved this, I thought it was very thought-provoking and emotional. I have bought a few of his more recent books but haven't been able to get into them. I must see if I can find Fluke to read it again!

I recently read Nobody True and thought it was one of the worst books I have read in a long time. It had a reasonably interesting premise (someone being murdered whilst having an out of body experience and being stuck on Earth as some kind of spirit trying to discover who murdered him) but the repetitive and clumsy style of writing really annoyed me. It was written from a 1st person perspective which caused problems with the plot - e.g if there was some information the central character needed to learn he had to overhear it in a conversation between other characters. The problem with that was you had lots of improbable conversations between characters along the line of 'do you remember when this happened' etc.

Has anyone else read this one? I am not sure if this is just a bad example of his work. Either way I don't think I'll be tempted by his other books!

I read one of the Rats books when i was trapped on holiday with no reading material. Thought it was very foolish, and not in the least scary.

Spoiler:
Every time the rats struck i thought 'why exactly are they eating him alive?'
I know they were mutants but that doesn't excuse them from completely unnatural behaviour.

Guess horror isn't really my thing!

Fluke is on to read list tho

I think "The Rats" is a book that most people read when they are younger.I think I was 14 or so.At the time I thought it was great but in retrospect it seems a bit lame.But i guess herbert was still learning his craft at that stage. I never got round to reading the two sequels,i wonder if they do much to add to the story? Anyone here read them?

James Herbert is by far my favourite author. Among my most loved titles would be Others, Nobody true, Crickley hall.
Does anyone know of any more work coming out in the future from Herbert?

gallagher672003 said:

I think "The Rats" is a book that most people read when they are younger.I think I was 14 or so.At the time I thought it was great but in retrospect it seems a bit lame.But i guess herbert was still learning his craft at that stage. I never got round to reading the two sequels,i wonder if they do much to add to the story? Anyone here read them?

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I finally got round to reading "Lair" and "Domain" and enjoyed them both. But "Domain" was by far the most entertaining. The Rats re almost secondary to the story as Herbert goes into horrific detail of nuclear war.

It took me 23 years to get round to it but it was worth the wait.