Dominic Sandbrook says that ‘Rats’, Herbert’s first novel, is really an allegory of urban decay in late 70s Britain. ‘The Dark’, published in 1980, when Mrs Thatcher had only just begun telling the nation to pull its collective socks up or it would jolly well get a Smacked Bottom and be sent to bed Without Any Dinner, seems by contrast an eruption of pent-up energies. Hehehe, you imagine Herbert chuckling to himself, now I can let myself go. I’ll start with a grisly mass suicide. Then we’ll have three horrific things happening a year later in the same street, on the same night. Then I’ll electrocute 600 football hooligans. Then - what the heck - I’ll add a few zombies to the mix. Not just any zombies though. These’ll be sewer zombies, who crawl from the tunnels at sundown to wreak havoc on the streets of London. Badabing, badaboom: watch those royalty cheques roll in! We try our best, we reviewers, to find something fresh and original and unique in every book. But it’s not necessarily a criticism of ‘The Dark’ to say that it’s like everything else James Herbert has written, except more so. A singularity of Herbert; a quintessence of Herbert; Herbert to the max. He just puts his foot on that ol’ pedal and roars off down Adrenalin Avenue. At its heart are two elderly gentlemen from Poland, Mr Kulek and Mr Pryszlak. Mr Kulek is good, Mr Pryszlak is bad. Mr Pryszlak is also dead. He’s managed to transform himself into a big dark cloud, which floats around the place feeding off evil thoughts and making people perform wicked, unspeakable acts. Mr Kulek represents the forces of light. I am sure there is the potential here for a very funny joke about opposing Poles, but Herbert presumably felt this wasn’t the time or place. While our distinguished Polish gents fight it out like yin and yang, Holmes and Moriarty, Optimus Prime and Megatron, paranormal investigator Chris Bishop is either saving Mr Kulek’s daughter from sewer zombies, or running away as fast as his little legs can carry him. Smart move. It’s not that the Dark is dangerous in itself: when it wafts over the virtuous, all they’re aware of is a nasty pong. The problem comes when it reaches the brutal and malevolent, whose appetites it releases to horrifying effect. Do you dislike your wife? The Dark will make you kill her. Do you peer at young women through their bedroom windows? The Dark will turn you into a rapist. I expect Sandbrook will tell us in his next book that this is all to do with selling off council houses.