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Post by Ross Warren on Mar 20, 2013 19:06:17 GMT 1
Passed away in his sleep aged 69. Wasn't a massive fan but The Rats was one of the books that got me interested in horror.
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Post by Jason Whittle on Mar 21, 2013 11:56:33 GMT 1
The more I've learned about the 'art of writing', the more it's pointed to James Herbert's work being mere hackery: excessive adverbs, dodgy speech tags, and one-dimensional characters brought in just to suffer a gratuitously violent end.
I love it.
At the 'literary' end of horror, I often find myself at worst reaching for the dictionary to work out what's going on, and at best stopping to think, 'that's a really good phrase'. Both are counter-productive; either way you take yourself out of the story.
Not so with James Herbert; you just get drawn into his world. You're not sat down examining the prose, you're THERE, down in the tunnels fleeing the rats, or avoiding the Nazi hordes in a paralysed post-war London.
He sidestepped all pretensions and literary snobbery, and at his best, he broke all the rules of writing to produce a celebration of the dark side that anybody could enjoy, regardless of education or class.
Sadly, I don't think we'll ever see his like again.
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Post by benedictjjones on Mar 21, 2013 12:41:10 GMT 1
sad times. '48, the dark, the rats, the spear and the fog are all books that i enjoyed. a real loss for the horror community.
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