James Herbert

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.

Biography Born in London, Herbert was the son of Herbert Herbert, He had two brothers: Peter, a retired market trader and John, an insurance broker. Herbert would write his drafts in longhand on "jumbo pads". by Trevor Ravenscroft.

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

He was the subject of a This is Your Life programme in 1995, when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at the London Dungeon.

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?" The Rats (1974; first instalment in the Rats series) The Fog (1975) The Survivor (1976) Fluke (1977) The Spear (1978) Lair (1979; second instalment in the Rats series) The Dark (1980) The Jonah (1981) Shrine (1983) Domain (1984; third instalment in the Rats series) Moon (1985) The Magic Cottage (1986) Sepulchre (1987) Haunted (1988) Creed (1990) Portent (1992) The Ghosts of Sleath (1994) '48 (1996) Others (1999) Once (2001) Nobody True (2003) The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006) Ash (2012)

Graphic novel The City (1994; fourth instalment in the Rats series)

Non-fiction James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (1992) James Herbert's Dark Places (1993)

Short stories "Maurice and Mog" "Breakfast" "Hallowe'en's Child" "They Don't Like Us" "Extinct" "Cora's Needs"

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)