Posted: Mar 11, 2010 10:41 pm
Seeing as we have a Stephen King thread, I thought it was my bounden duty to open a thread to thump the tub for James Herbert, arguably Britain's greatest exponent of horror fiction and (equally arguably) sort of the British Stephen King. As a young whippersnapper I grew up on the books of both men (yes, I know: I was allowed to read pretty much whatever the hell I liked) and so I have a very strong affection for Herbert's very British brand of horror. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but to me the early novels - The Rats; The Fog; The Spear; The Dark; The Survivor; Shrine - remain the best even though Herbert is still very much in harness and still publishing. Horror novels generally never actually frighten me in the way that they're intended, but I still remember that Herbert's Moon (1985) was one of the most genuinely unsettling and downright creepy books I've ever read.