Stephen Gilbert

Stephen Gilbert (22 July 1912 – 23 June 2010) was a Northern Irish author. On the strength of his early novels in the 1940s, Gilbert was accounted by E. M. Forster as "a writer of distinction", but he is chiefly remembered as the author of Ratman's Notebooks which sold over 1 million copies and was twice made into a horror film named Willard (1971 and 2003) in the United States.

Early life Stephen Gilbert was born in Newcastle, County Down in 1912 into a prosperous Irish Protestant mercantile family and grew up mainly in an affluent district of Belfast East. Like his near-contemporaries C. S. Lewis and Louis MacNeice, the young Gilbert was sent "across the water" to school. From age 10 he attended The Leas, Hoylake on Merseyside in England and from age 13 Loretto School, Musselburgh in Scotland. He returned from Musselburgh without a Leaving Certificate,

In Belfast, he worked briefly as a court reporter for the Northern Whig (a witness to magistrates imposing fines on failed suicides; Gilbert in later years volunteered with the Samaritans). From the mid-1930s, he was working full time in his father's tea and seed business, Samuel McCausland Ltd.

Relationship with Forrest Reid In 1931, just before his 19th birthday, Gilbert met the novelist Forrest Reid, then in his mid-50s. Reid's many novels reflect his fascination with teenage boys and he was drawn to Gilbert. The two commenced a turbulent relationship that lasted until Reid's death in 1947. Reid acted as a mentor to Gilbert and depicts an idealised version of their relationship (opening with a holiday encounter in the seaside town of Ballycastle) in his novel Brian Westby (1944). The relationship appeared platonic, but Gilbert found Reid's demands, and interference in his affairs, excessive. A second novel, Bombardier, appeared the following year. It is based on his volunteer wartime experiences with the 3rd (Ulster) Searchlight Regiment, Royal Artillery in France, including the evacuation at Dunkirk (Gilbert was awarded the Military Medal for burning a bridge in the face of an enemy advance). Monkeyface told the story of an ape-man missing link who is brought from the jungles of South America to the U.K. and learns to speak English, but struggles with adapting to modern human society. Burnaby follows a young man's strange experiences with an eccentric uncle's research into the possibility of the survival of the human soul after death.

Post-war family and political engagement While in service during World War II, Gilbert corresponded with his fiancé Kathleen Stevenson, a distant relative, who had joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). She was stationed in North Africa where she was twice mentioned in dispatches. They lived there until a few years before their deaths.

Ratman's Notebooks In 1968 Gilbert did have an unexpected success with Ratman's Notebooks, the last work published in his lifetime. The story of an emotionally deadened, but embittered, youth who trains rats to attack and kill his enemies, it was filmed twice in the United States as Willard. The first film adaptation, directed by Daniel Mann and starring Bruce Davison, Ernest Borgnine, Sondra Locke and Elsa Lanchester, was released in 1971, opening to good reviews and high box office returns. It was followed in 1972 by an original film sequel called Ben.

The original film was remade in 2003, directed by Glen Morgan and starring Crispin Glover, R. Lee Ermey and Laura Elena Harring. More loosely based on Gilbert's original work, it was also a relative box office success.

The Bloody City Stephen Gilbert died at a nursing home at Whitehead, north of Carrickfergus, County Antrim on 23 June 2010 at age 97.

In 2015, five years after Gilbert's death, Valancourt Books, an independent American publishing house dedicated to "the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction," published a limited edition of an unfinished novel. Edited and compiled by the playwright and comedian Andrew Doyle, it draws on manuscripts in the possession of the author's son, Tom Gilbert, and of Queen's University, Belfast.

The Bloody City