Harris takes the student to the hospital and sees the grieving mother with her dead child. The girl's mother rescues her daughter's mutilated body, but not before sustaining bites as well. Meanwhile, a baby girl and her dog are killed by the giant rats, now aided by packs of smaller black rats. When he enquires as to what caused the damage, the student answers that he was attacked by a rat. Harris, a young East London art teacher, notices that one of his students has a bloodied bandage around his hand. As he is ruminating over the injustices inflicted upon him in his life, he is suddenly set upon by a pack of black rats the size of small dogs, and is devoured alive. The novel opens by introducing the reader to an alcoholic vagrant, resting in an abandoned and forgotten lock-keeper's house by a canal.
Herbert stated in later interviews that he wrote the book primarily as a pastime: "It seemed like a good idea at the time, I was as naive as that." The manuscript was typed by Herbert's wife Eileen, who sent it off after nine months to nine different publishers. Linking the film to childhood memories he had of rats in London's East End. Herbert became inspired to write The Rats in early 1972, while watching Tod Browning's Dracula specifically, after seeing the scene in which Renfield describes his recurring nightmare about hordes of rats. All three books were sold as a trilogy and were very well received by the public and horror fans. The Rats was followed by three sequels, Lair (1979), Domain (1984) and The City (1993) (the last one was a graphic novel). A 1985 adventure game for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum based on the book was published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd and produced by GXT (Five Ways Software). A film adaptation was made in 1982, called Deadly Eyes. This was Herbert's first novel and included graphic depictions of death and mutilation. The Rats (1974) is a horror novel by British writer James Herbert.
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