But as robust as this trend was, dogs never became the new rats. That job was left to cats.
Angry puppies were England’s worst nightmare, even in the future England of talking animals depicted in The Haven. Credit 62
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Eye of the Tiger
Imagine what it was like to be Nick Sharman. For three years he woke up every morning, checked the papers, and saw that no one had done it yet. He didn’t want to do it. He kept waiting for someone else to do it, because it was so damn obvious. Then one morning, three years after James Herbert had unleashed his Rats, Sharman picked up his pen and unleashed…The Cats.
Just as we’re predisposed to like dogs, most people consider cats far too lazy and irresponsible to engage in organized mayhem. Write a scene in which an army of cats descends on London, and most people will assume that at any moment they’ll lose interest and start rolling around in a sunbeam or chasing laser pointers. Kitties are just too cute and fluffy to be scary, and scenes of their soft paws poking under doors induce giggles rather than gasps. When a radio announcer is buried alive in an avalanche of mewling kittens, the immediate reaction is not one of horror but a soul-deep “awwwww…”
In fact, it’s the humans who look like the sadistic monsters in Cats Gone Wild books, saying things like, “So, the plan is to wait for the cats to show themselves and then go at them with flame throwers.” When the felines are finally burned alive with napalm and the survivors are machine-gunned, it feels like something of an overreaction, especially when we all know that a helicopter dangling a bit of string could have led them out of town just as efficiently.
But cats have an inherent nobility that dogs and rats lack, which is probably why humans feel better when we bring them down to our buffoonish level by dressing them in reindeer antlers for holiday cards. Ha-ha! Look at the covers of Night-Shriek and Satan’s Pets! The kitties are wearing wigs! Ha-ha-ha!
You’re not laughing. What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? And your liver? And your face?
Before the internet, cats were sometimes considered less than cute. Credit 64
When Alan Ryan took his novel Panther! to Signet, he also brought a cover by his friend, artist Jill Bauman. The publishers didn’t like being told what to do, so they rejected the cover and commissioned new art by Tom Hallman. Published here for the first time is Bauman’s unused cover (above), along with the image that was used in its place (right). Credit 65
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Today’s Menu: You
There is not an animal that walks, crawls, swims, or flies that does not want humankind dead. Bears hate us, bats hate us, dogs and cats clearly hate us. Let’s face it, humans are delicious. In the eyes of animals, we are walking pizzas, and the best thing is that we deliver ourselves.
In the four years after James Herbert’s The Rats, every critter got a turn at the all-you-can-eat human-meat buffet. Authors reveled in an escalating arms race to find new creatures—bees, alligators, fire ants!—that could tear us apart like chicken wings. A mere year after his public-health-scare screed Rabid, David Anne thought he had a winner in The Folly (1978). What man could contain his screams when confronted with killer rabbits? And not just any rabbits—genetically engineered rat rabbits “from the spawning-ground of hell.”
Those bunnies have nothing on Academy Award–winning screenwriter George Wells’s sole novel, the scrotum-ripping Taurus (1982), about Mexican bulls retired from the bullfighting circuit who get stoned on agave roots and go on a crime spree across Mexico, murdering women with their enormous penises, killing men by goring them in the crotch, and generally demonstrating that bulls are “the most virile animal the world has ever known.”
Apparently no species is too cute (The Folly), domesticated (The Farm, Taurus), or satisfied with its diet (The Predators) to want a piece of us. Credit 67
More stoned animals go wild as geese, pigs, goats, even cows get high on ketamine and unleash hell on Old McDonald’s murder farm in The Farm (1984). The pigs proved popular and trotted off into the sequel, The City (1986). Animal-amok literature reached peak lunacy with Mark Washburn and Robert Webb’s The Predators, in which a Kodiak bear and a great white shark battle each other on pay-per-view cable. Whichever one loses, the reader wins.
Seafood Gumbo
In the wake of Jaws, humanity was under siege from an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet of aquatic horror. Enraged tuna (Fleshbait, 1979), mutant lampreys (Pestilence, 1983), and even the lowly jellyfish (Slime, 1984) all worked together to make people the catch of the day. But the stars of this feeding frenzy turned out to be killer whales. As Arthur Herzog (author of bee-attack best seller The Swarm) reminds readers repeatedly in Orca (1977), killer whales are the only animals besides humans that kill for revenge.
Peter Tonkin builds a better Jaws with Killer, dropping the awkward Mafia and infidelity subplots from Peter Benchley’s best seller and cutting right to the good stuff: five characters, stranded on an ice floe, at the mercy of a pod of killer whales, led by a crazed super-whale escaped from a military laboratory. It’s a nonstop symphony of chaos as these angry pandas of the sea bite off blue whale tongues while botanists toss dynamite at herds of stampeding walruses. Arms are eaten, whales’ brains are stabbed, and burst bodies sail through the air like exploded paper bags.
Next up: crabs. What could drive a crab to kill? Doesn’t take much, as it turns out. They’re the angriest residents in nature’s death zoo. You barely have to look at one sideways before it’s making menacing clickety-clicks.
Like some kind of crustacean Churchill, King Crab leads his minions out of the Irish Sea and onto Britain’s holiday beaches in Night of the Crabs (1976). It is an awesome sight. Crabs enjoy nothing more than a nice rampage, so for them it’s an excellent bonus to discover that someone has brought their favorite food to the party: human guts. Don’t mind if I do, say the crabs, although in their language it sounds more like clickety-click-click, as they start with the tramp platter.
Don’t go in the water. Don’t go near the water. You know what—move to a landlocked nation and stay there. Credit 68
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As the crabs topple our bridges, it seems that humanity has no choice—mankind is on the menu. Yet King Crab has made one fatal miscalculation. He has eaten Professor Cliff Davenport’s favorite nephew. Now it’s personal.
Davenport is not only Britain’s top marine biologist, he’s also its loneliest. Only constant work can fill his long, solitary nights, and now he commits his stiff upper lip and his sad coping skills to avenge his nephew.