'That's where I learned to write,' he said. Growing up in Whitechapel, which was damaged by bombing during the second world war, Herbert attended a local Catholic school and earned a scholarship to St Aloysius' college in Highgate, north London.Īs a boy, Herbert was inspired by the American comic book Casey Ruggles, which he found on the market stalls in Petticoat Lane. His parents sold fruit and veg from stalls at Brick Lane and Bethnal Green.

He was born in the East End of London, the third son of Herbert Herbert and his wife, Kitty. In 2010 he was made an OBE and received the Grand Master award at the World Horror Convention. He was published in 34 languages, including Russian and Chinese. Herbert's 23 novels have sold 54m copies worldwide. These novels of catastrophe were compared by Stephen King to the music of the Sex Pistols: 'If The Rats, with its scenes of gruesome horror and its blasted East End landscape, is not a literary version of Anarchy in the UK, what is?' But just as a host of brutal horror novels was unleashed in bookshops in the wake of Herbert's success, its progenitor changed tack and took his readers into other fearful territories, while the paperback horror genre collapsed under the weight of Rats rip-offs and sub-Herbert savagery.

The gruesome and depraved events seem all the more horrific for taking place in rural, respectable England. Innocent villagers and schoolchildren turn psychotic under the influence of a mysterious fog, and torture and murder each other. The Fog (1975) continued his uncompromisingly explicit, visceral exploration of horror. Soon afterwards, a baby is killed and partly eaten before her mother can rescue the mutilated body. The Rats opens with a tramp being devoured alive. Herbert's early novels were literary nasties. The rat remained but eventually it was the name of Herbert, who has died aged 69, that dominated the cover. Edition after edition came out and changes were subtly made. Behind its cover star, the title was printed in bold, red type. Copies of the book – produced cheaply in paperback with a vicious-looking rodent on the cover, its jaws open and eyes bloodshot – flew off the shelves, the initial print run of 100,000 selling out in three weeks. When James Herbert published his first novel, The Rats (1974), at the age of 30, it was an immediate bestseller.

The City by James Herbert