The Dark
By James
Herbert
1980
Signet
Paperback,
314 pages
I first read Herbert’s The Rats as a teen way back
when and I fell in love with it. For a while, I grabbed every book of his that
came out. The problem is, apart from the subsequent rat novels (Lair in
1979 and Domain in 1984), much of Herbert’s work doesn’t fully satisfy
me. I find that he is prone to overwriting; a problem for someone like me with
the attention span of a two-year-old.
I only recently got around to The Dark; a novel
considered to be a masterpiece of horror fiction. And it is very good.
It is filled with gruesome set-pieces and enough gore to satisfy even a jaded
gorehound like me. The Dark is essentially the collected evil of humans, an
energy force that feeds on a person’s own insecurities and bad thoughts.
Obviously, this can lead to psychosis, murder, suicide and just downright nasty
behavior. There are some truly cruel ideas in this book. That is a good thing.
This is a horror novel. Look for the main character’s mental-hospital-resident
wife fucking with his head while under The Dark’s influence. Brutal.
True to form, however, Herbert overdid it just a bit. The
climactic ending starts with 100 pages left in the book and I started
struggling; I just wanted to see how it ended. This caused me to put the book
down and go to sleep a few times while in the stretch run. But overall, I give The
Dark a thumbs up. In my worthless opinion, it is probably his best
non-rodent book.
This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #7 (Jan. 2021)
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