The Spear - James Herbert

 THE SPEAR - JAMES HERBERT

From the cover, you wouldn't really know what The Spear by James Herbert is about. 'Instrument of terror, symbol of evil...' says the tagline, but again that doesn't really give much away. Even the main protagonist when asked 'Have you ever heard of the Heilige Lance?' has to say 'no' before the person asking the question waves the subject away with a dismissive 'it's an ancient spearhead that a certain arms dealer seemed to have an interest in'.

In fact, for the first half of the book, arms trading and the subterfuge around the whole industry is what it seems to be about, taking in Israel, Mossad, global terrorism, and a private detective agency. It's not until the protagonist - private detective Steadman - and the arms dealer finally get to properly meet that the story takes a sudden turn to the esoteric with the arms dealer asking 'Have you heard of the Thule Gesellschaft, Mr Steadman?'

The Thule Gesellschaft - in English the 'Thule Society' - the German occult group founded shortly after World War I that sponsored the German Workers' Party, that was later reorganized by Hitler into the National Socialist Workers' Party - probably more commonly known as the Nazi Party.

So, rather than arms dealing, the core of the story is about the establishment of the Fourth Reich. This time round, however, taking control of the Western World through stealth. Spreading fear, confusion and mistrust on a universal scale through worldwide terrorist attacks and the gradual breaking-down of the world's economic structure. Boiling everything down to one simple but major conflict: Right against Left.

'It would be the only choice for the people of Britain.' Steadman is informed 'No in-betweens, no fence-sitting. The public would be forced to choose. Civil war would be balanced in favour of the Right, for the majority would be the wealthy, those whose sympathy lay towards nationalistic pride; and the middle classes who had suffered so much between the elite of the country and the working classes, would choose to join them rather than be ruled by the economy-wrecking socialists. The choice would be made very easy for them. New leaders would emerge and their ideals would be uncompromising, just as Hitler's had been in the 1930s.'

And those ideals if not broken why try fixing them as in the eyes of the Far Right there's nothing so perfect and normal than racial purity and racial segregation, along with the dissolution if not extermination of marxists, communists, trade unionists, anarchists, gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, and anyone else deemed to be 'untermensch' - or in other words, 'subhuman'.

This being a James Herbert book, the supernatural is not too far away and is represented by the Heilige Lance, otherwise known as the Spear of Longinus the Centurion. The Spear of Destiny. The spear that was believed to be the weapon that pierced the side of Christ as he died on the cross. And just for good measure there's also the resurrection of Heinrich Himmler - the Reichsfuhrer himself - the head of Hitler's notorious SS and the architect of the Holocaust.

Whilst The Spear isn't Herbert's best book (and it certainly isn't as good as The Rats) it's still a well-written story told by a master storyteller, with Herbert obviously having done a lot of research into the subject of Himmler and his interest in the occult. And like it or not, the occult side of Nazi Germany is an interesting subject if only for the fact that its place in World War II is always downplayed to the point of hardly ever being mentioned at all.

The unsettling thing about The Spear, however, is that there are elements of it that still echo to this day, particularly around the subject of Fascism and how those who knowingly or even unwitingly advocate for its rule along with the methods utilised to bring it about. 

As the saying goes: Fascism doesn't start with concentration camps - that's where it ends.

John Serpico

The Rats - James Herbert

THE RATS - JAMES HERBERT

When first published in 1974, James Herbert's debut novel The Rats was like a firecracker being set off in a church. His writing was in a direct, no-holds-barred, straight-for-the-jugular style that left all other writers working in the same genre standing at the touch-line. Critics were apparently dismayed at the explicit horror he portrayed and were subsequently dismissive of him but for the thousands of readers who never read book reviews and never considered the opinions of Martin Amis and such like, James Herbert and his book The Rats was exactly what they wanted.

The Rats is a straightforward horror story about a new breed of vicious super rats the size of dogs, erupting from the slum houses and bomb-sites of London's East End and bringing terror to the people there. It's a relatively simple idea for a story, of course, but it's the manner in which Herbert wrote it that makes it so outstanding.

Each character is given a potted history, explaining who they are and how they've ended up in the job or life position they're now in. They're all then horribly slaughtered by the rats. Scenarios are set up whereupon the arrival of the rats cause maximum carnage and mayhem. So for example, Herbert has them attack a tube train stuck in a tunnel, a cinema audience, all the animals at a zoo, and a school full of children.

Herbert exploits to the hilt the inherent dislike if not fear of rats in most people and imagines all the places where an attack by hordes of them would be most dreaded; so it's in darkened places such as down in a tube station or in a cinema, or when in the daylight it's against the most vulnerable such as children and animals.

Herbert paints a vivid picture of a neglected London where tramps gather on wastelands at night, where children are tough but their environment tougher, and where the working class eke out their lives under the governance of incompetent authorities. As a depiction of early 1970s Britain it's a very accurate one, a depiction that at the time was hardly ever represented in the media. Re-reading The Rats today, it's apparent that Herbert was pre-empting the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock by almost three years. His London is one of no future and his rats are Year Zero made flesh. His was the modern world. The Rats was Punk Rock in book form, acting like a brick through a window.

Pre-Punk Rock the music industry was dominated by lumbering dinosaurs such as Genesis, Pink Floyd, ELP and so on until the Sex Pistols and their bastard children scared and chased them all away with a dollop of urban realism on the end of a broken stick. In a similar fashion, James Herbert and his Rats book did exactly the same but to the likes of Dennis Wheatley and H P Lovecraft - the supposed establishment figures of horror writing. Spread by word of mouth, The Rats was picked up by a whole new generation of readers, propelling itself away from the typical type of books aimed at teenagers and out to the council estates and inner cities where copies would be passed around.

Punk Rock corrupted and ruined many a teenager's life for the better and so too did The Rats. James Herbert captured both the dreams and the nightmares of children and thrust them screaming into the present. The dreams and nightmares of those children were never the same again.

John Serpico