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==