James John Herbert, OBE (8 April 1943 – 20 March 2013) was an English horror writer. A full-time writer, he also designed his own book covers and publicity. His books have sold 54 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into 34 languages, including Chinese and Russian.
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Biography
Born in London, Herbert was the son of Herbert Herbert, a stall-holder at London's Brick Lane Market. He attended a Catholic school in Bethnal Green called Our Lady of the Assumption, then at 11 won a scholarship to St Aloysius Grammar School in Highgate. He left school at 15 and studied at Hornsey College of Art, joining the art department of John Collings, a small advertising agency. He left the agency to join Charles Barker Advertising where he worked as art director and then group head.
Herbert lived in Woodmancote, near Henfield in West Sussex. He had two brothers: Peter, a retired market trader and John, an insurance broker. Herbert would write his drafts in longhand on "jumbo pads". In 1979 Herbert had to pay damages when it was ruled that he had based part of his novel The Spear on the work of another writer, The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft. In 2010 Herbert was honoured with the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, presented to him by Stephen King. Later in the same year, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours, presented by Prince Charles.
On 20 March 2013, Herbert died suddenly at his home in Sussex at the age of 69. No cause of death was given and a spokeswoman for the publisher said that he had not been ill. He is survived by his wife, Eileen, and three daughters. His estate was valued at £8.3 million.
Work
His first two books, The Rats and The Fog, were disaster novels with man-eating giant black rats in the first and an accidentally released chemical weapon in the second. The first print run of The Rats (100,000 copies) sold out in three weeks. Herbert wrote three sequels to The Rats: Lair, which deals with a second outbreak of the mutant black rats, this time in the countryside around Epping Forest rather than in the first book's London slums; in Domain, a nuclear war results in rats having become the dominant species in a devastated city; the third sequel, the graphic novel The City, is an adventure set in the post-nuclear future.
With his third novel, the ghost story The Survivor, Herbert used supernatural horror rather than the science fiction horror of his first two books. In Shrine, he explored his Roman Catholic heritage with the story of an apparent miracle which turns out to be something much more sinister. Haunted, the story of a sceptical paranormal investigator taunted by malicious ghosts, began life as a screenplay for the BBC, though this was not the screenplay used in the eventual film version. Its sequels were The Ghosts of Sleath and Ash. Others of Herbert's books, such as Moon, Sepulchre and Portent, are structured as thrillers and include espionage and detective story elements along with the supernatural.
The Jonah is in large part the story of a police investigation, albeit by a policeman whose life is overshadowed by a supernatural presence. The Spear deals with a neo-Nazi cult in Britain and an international conspiracy which includes a right-wing US general and an arms dealer.
'48 is an alternative history novel set in 1948 in which the Second World War ended with the release of a devastating plague by the defeated Hitler and, like The Spear, features British characters who sympathise with the Nazis. Others narrates the story of a physically deformed private detective. Herbert had previously tackled the theme of reincarnation in his fourth novel, Fluke, the fantasy story of a dog who somehow remembers his previous life as a human being. Rumbo, one of the characters from Fluke also turns up in The Magic Cottage. Once... includes another reference to the character of Rumbo (along with an in-joke of elven folk having names of reversed titles of Herbert's previous novels; 'Hanoj', 'Niamod', 'Noom', etc.).
Nobody True continues the theme of life after death, being narrated by a ghost whose investigation of his own death results in the destruction of his illusions about his life. Herbert described Creed as his Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The character Joe Creed is a cynical, sleazy paparazzo who is drawn into a plot involving fed-up and underappreciated monsters.
Reception
"Herbert was by no means literary, but his work had a raw urgency," said Stephen King. "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."
"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?"
Adaptations
The Survivor (1981 film)
Deadly Eyes (1982 film adapted from The Rats)
The Rats (1985 computer game for the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum)
Fluke (a 1991 five-part BBC Radio 4 reading; a 1995 film adaptation)
Haunted (1995 film)
The Magic Cottage (1998 BBC Radio 4 Dramatisation)
The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012 three-part BBC One television serial)
The Unholy (2021 film adapted from Shrine)