This review first appeared on scifiandscary.com
You can imagine the scene. The offices of publishers the New English Library in the late 1970s.
ā€œThat book about rats is an absolute farking smash,ā€ says a sweaty publishing exec with a fag hanging out of his mouth, ā€œbut we need more, and Herbert canā€™t write them quickly enough.ā€
ā€œI know!ā€ ejaculates a keen underling, ā€œwhat about if we got someone else to write something similar.ā€
ā€œWeā€™ve already got Smith doing crabs, you plum,ā€ grumbles the exec.
ā€œYeah, but maybe thatā€™s too subtle,ā€ continues the junior. ā€œI mean, giant crabs and rats are totally different.ā€
The exec takes a drag on his Benson & Hedges: ā€œSo what youā€™re saying is we need something that the public canā€™t help but realise is like ā€˜The Ratsā€™ā€
ā€œThatā€™s right! I was thinking we could just change one letterā€¦.ā€
And so ā€˜The Catsā€™ was born (possibly) and the world is, I think, a better place for it.
It certainly makes an interesting companion piece to this monthā€™s other book, ā€˜The Rageā€™. Thereā€™s an obvious similarity (both books are about killer animals), but aside from that theyā€™re as different as, well, cats and dogs.
ā€˜The Rageā€™ ended up feeling like the novelisation of a dull government safety film. ā€˜The Catsā€™ is far more honest about its origins and a lot more fun as a result. Itā€™s nonsensical, fast paced and enjoyably gory, with enough of a 70s Britain vibe to make it feel very appropriate as a subject for this column.
The story is a straight Rats rip off with a couple of potentially interesting twists. Rather than the titular felines being motivated purely by their basic animal instincts, theyā€™ve been infected with a virus by a twisted scientist. Everything has been fine with his experiments until the temperature rises during a heatwave and the animals become viciously psychotic. The young schoolboy who has been helping the scientist tend to them is similarly infected, giving the book a sympathetic human monster that ā€˜The Ratsā€™ lacked.
From there things progress quickly. Really quickly. One minute the cats have escaped the lab and there have been a few attacks; the next the whole city is infected with a plague of vicious moggies.
Like Herbert, Nick Sharman uses short vignettes to introduce characters and kills them. He lacks his more famous counterpartā€™s talent for this, but the gore can be fun even if the characterisation is often lacking. Thereā€™s one particularly effective scene where a hippy on acid lets himself get eaten alive. It all builds up to some pretty impressive carnage at the end, with soldier, flame throwers, and lots of shouting.
The book is set in London, like ā€˜The Ratsā€™, but it lacks the great sense of place that book had. It is more obviously topical though, with IRA bombings, race riots, unemployment and the welfare state all getting references. The heatwave element is topical too, readers in 1977 would no doubt well remember the record-breaking temperatures that scorched Britain the year before. Thereā€™s also a scene where one of the characters drives past the house I was living in at the time.
Ultimately, it falls into a middle ground between ā€˜The Ratsā€™ and ā€˜Night of the Crabsā€™. Itā€™s not nearly as good as the former, or as enjoyably bad as the latter. The main problem with it is that the cats completely lack the menace that Herbert managed to instil in his rats. They seem silly rather than threatening and result is a book thatā€™s entertaining enough but never even remotely scary.
Still, as a cat rather than a dog person, I am pleased to report that it was way better than ā€˜The Rageā€™.

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This book was an attempt to capitalize on the success of The Rats (which is a masterpiece if you're into that kinda thing), and it really is a lot like The Rats, right down to all the characters who are introduced only to be brutally slaughtered a page or two later. And when are people going to learn that when the government comes in with their schemes to solve a big problem, it always goes horribly wrong? Hasn't anyone seen Die Hard? Or current reality?

Predictably, the writing here isn't great. But this gets extra points for the fun absurdity of the premise, which includes the military fighting cats and possessed children with flamethrowers. ( )