James Herbert, British Horror Novelist, Dies at 69

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/books/james-herbert-british-horror-novelist-dies-at-69.html

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James Herbert, a British novelist who wrote supernatural thrillers and horror stories and whose menagerie of marauding rats, serial killers, evil spirits, ghosts and ghost hunters filled books that sold millions of copies and frightened readers around the world, died on Wednesday at his home in Sussex, England. He was 69.

His publishing house, Pan Macmillan, announced the death on its Web site without citing a cause.

Sometimes referred to as the English Stephen King, Mr. Herbert was hardly a household name in the United States, but his international sales were eye-popping. His 23 novels, translated into 33 languages, sold more than 54 million copies, according to his publisher. His best-known books — and by the lights of many critics his best — were his first two: “The Rats” (1974), a grisly tale of a mutant, murderous rodent species that overruns London, which was adapted for the 1982 film “Deadly Eyes”; and “The Fog” (1975), in which a mysterious chemical haze, oozing from the earth, turns the people who encounter it monstrously insane.

His prose could be lurid: “Flesh was ripped away from the back of his neck,” he wrote of the first victim in “The Rats.” “He couldn’t rise now for the sheer weight of writhing, furry vermin feeding from his body, drinking his blood.” And he absorbed criticism for it. In one well-known review, the writer Martin Amis wrote (pseudonymously) that a scene in which the rats devour a baby was “enough to make a rodent retch, undeniably — and enough to make any human pitch the book aside.”

On the other hand, the visceral punch delivered by such imagery was very much part of his appeal to his fans, among them Mr. King.

“Herbert was by no means literary, but his work had a raw urgency,” Mr. King wrote in an e-mail on Thursday. “His best novels, ‘The Rats’ and ‘The Fog,’ had the effect of Mike Tyson in his championship days: no finesse, all crude power. Those books were best sellers because many readers (including me) were too horrified to put them down.”

Mr. Herbert was born in London on April 8, 1943. His parents operated a fruit stall, and the images of rats crawling over piles of discarded fruits and vegetables were a spur for his first novel. Before he became a writer, however, he was a designer. He studied at the Hornsey School of Art and was working as an art director for an advertising agency when he wrote “The Rats.”

His survivors include his wife, Eileen, whom he married in 1967, and three daughters.

Known to be miffed at being dismissed by those who considered his fear-inducing stories less than literary, Mr. Herbert veered away from straight horror tales and wrote books that edged into other genres, borrowing elements of fantasy, crime and supernatural stories.

In “The Survivor” (1976), which became a movie directed by David Hemmings, the lone man to walk away from the crash of an airliner encounters forces from the afterlife. In “Fluke” (1977), which also became a film, starring Matthew Modine, the main character is a dog, the reincarnation of a murdered man.

Mr. Herbert’s 1978 novel, “The Spear,” a tale of neo-Nazis in England, brought him unwanted attention after a judge ruled that he had borrowed illegally from an earlier book, “The Spear of Destiny,” by Trevor Ravenscroft. In “Moon” (1985), a man who owns the unwelcome gift of envisioning bloody crimes before they occur becomes entangled with a serial killer.

“There are few things I would like to do less than lie under a cloudy night sky while someone read aloud the more vivid passages of ‘Moon,’ ” Andrew Postman wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “In the thriller genre, do recommendations come any higher?”

Mr. Herbert’s later books include “The Magic Cottage” (1986), a haunted house tale involving a young artistic couple and a local religious cult. Ghosts and hauntings were subjects Mr. Herbert often revisited. He wrote three books, including his last, “Ash” (2012), that had a parapsychologist, David Ash, as their central figure. “The Secret of Crickley Hall” (2006), another ghost story about a couple who move to a country house after their son disappears, was adapted for a BBC mini-series last year.

“I’ve actually seen a ghost,” he said in a recent television interview, “so I know they’re really around.”