There’s something rather worrying about discovering that a problem you thought had been dealt with hasn’t actually gone away. It’s one thing to survive an infestation of giant, flesh-eating rats, but quite another to discover that the survivors have been quietly breeding and preparing for another go. In Lair, James Herbert returns to the nightmare he created in The Rats, taking the story out of London’s streets and into the seemingly more peaceful surroundings of Epping Forest. It’s a bigger, more elaborate story, and while it doesn’t quite have the raw shock value of the original, I found it a thoroughly entertaining escalation of the same gruesome idea.

Four years after the original outbreak, the authorities and the public are keen to believe that the danger has passed. The rats have been eradicated, London has returned to normal and the whole business is becoming an unpleasant memory. Unfortunately, one small group has survived, and the mutant creatures have continued to evolve and multiply. When reports of mutilated animals and unexplained disappearances begin to emerge around Epping Forest, Lucas Pender, an experienced rat-catcher, recognises the signs. Having lost his own family in the earlier outbreak, he’s rather less inclined than most to dismiss the warnings. His attempts to persuade the authorities to take the threat seriously soon bring him into conflict with people who would much rather believe everything is under control.

I liked the decision to move the action away from the urban environment of The Rats. Epping Forest might sound like a more pleasant place to encounter wildlife, but Herbert makes excellent use of its dense woodland, isolated paths and hidden corners. The idea of something dangerous lurking beneath the trees is particularly effective because the setting initially feels so ordinary. People go walking, children play, couples look for somewhere private, and life carries on much as it always has. There’s a pleasing contrast between the natural beauty of the forest and the horrors taking place beneath it. Herbert also enjoys the opportunities this setting provides for some rather uncomfortable encounters, and not every human character caught out in the woods is entirely sympathetic.

Lucas Pender is a welcome improvement on the more lightly sketched protagonist of the first novel. He’s a practical, experienced man who knows what he’s dealing with, and his personal history gives him a genuine reason to take the threat seriously. He’s not simply a convenient expert brought in to explain the problem. His family was destroyed by the previous outbreak, so the return of the rats is also a deeply personal matter. I found that made his determination more convincing, particularly when he encounters the familiar institutional reluctance to acknowledge a danger that doesn’t fit the reassuring official version of events. He’s not a particularly complicated character, but he’s someone I was happy to spend the novel with.

Herbert also makes the rats themselves more interesting. The surviving colony has developed a disturbing social structure, with different types of creature performing different roles and the grotesque, two-headed white rat occupying a position of dominance. There’s a distinctly unpleasant intelligence behind their behaviour, and the sense that they’re organised rather than simply acting on instinct makes them more threatening. The rats aren’t just multiplying and attacking anything unfortunate enough to cross their path. They’re adapting, learning and becoming increasingly difficult to contain. I enjoyed the way Herbert develops this aspect of the story, although the more elaborate biological details occasionally feel as though he’s enjoying the grotesque possibilities a little more than the science can comfortably support.

The human response is another familiar but effective part of the story. Once again, the authorities are slow to recognise the scale of the problem, and there’s a frustrating tendency to assume that the people raising the alarm are exaggerating. Pender’s experience counts for surprisingly little when set against the desire to avoid panic and embarrassment. It’s a theme Herbert explored in the first book, but it works just as well here. The danger isn’t simply that the rats are vicious and numerous. It’s that people are perfectly capable of making matters worse by refusing to accept what’s happening until the evidence is impossible to ignore.

As in The Rats, Herbert is more interested in keeping the story moving than in giving every character a detailed psychological history. There are some entertaining supporting characters, but several feel rather thin, and the occasional excursions into the private lives of people who encounter the rats can be distracting. A few of these episodes are particularly lurid, and I sometimes wondered whether they contributed much beyond providing another opportunity for Herbert to unleash his more outrageous instincts. His sense of humour can also be rather broad, especially when he’s exposing the hypocrisy or foolishness of some of the people involved. It isn’t always subtle, but there’s an unmistakable enthusiasm for the material.

The pacing is generally excellent. Herbert takes a little more time establishing the new situation than he did in The Rats, allowing the tension to build before the attacks become increasingly frequent and spectacular. Once things start to unravel, however, the novel rarely lets up. The scale of the threat grows, attempts to contain it become more desperate, and the final movement into the rats’ underground territory provides the sort of gruesome confrontation that readers will have been waiting for. There are moments when the sheer number of attacks makes the story feel episodic, but I enjoyed the escalating sense that humanity is losing control of a situation it should never have allowed to develop in the first place.

What I particularly liked was the way Herbert turns the original premise into something more ambitious without losing sight of its basic appeal. The rats remain terrifying because they’re familiar creatures made horribly unfamiliar, but the novel also explores what happens when an apparently defeated enemy is allowed to regroup. There’s a rather bleak irony in the idea that people have returned to normality simply because they’d prefer not to remember what happened. The rats, meanwhile, have been getting on with the business of survival.

I came away from Lair feeling that Herbert had delivered exactly the sort of sequel I wanted. It doesn’t quite have the startling freshness of The Rats, and the characterisation and occasional diversions could have been tighter, but the change of setting gives the story a new atmosphere and Pender makes a solid central character. The rat attacks are every bit as gruesome, the threat has become more sophisticated and the whole thing builds towards a suitably outrageous climax. It’s nasty, entertaining horror with a pleasing sense of escalation. If The Rats made you wary of the things scurrying around beneath the city, Lair will probably make you think twice about taking a peaceful walk in the woods.

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