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  RATMAN’S NOTEBOOKS

  Stephen Gilbert was born in Newcastle, Co. Down in 1912. He was sent to England for boarding school from age 10 to 13 and afterwards to a Scottish public school, which he left without passing any exams or obtaining a leaving certificate. He returned to Belfast, where he worked briefly as a journalist before joining his father’s tea and seed business. In 1931, just before his nineteenth birthday, Gilbert met novelist Forrest Reid, by that time in his mid-fifties. Reid’s novels reflect his lifelong fascination with boys, and he was quickly drawn to Gilbert; the two commenced a sometimes turbulent friendship that lasted until Reid’s death in 1947. Reid acted as mentor to Gilbert, who had literary aspirations, and ultimately depicted an idealized version of their relationship in the novel Brian Westby (1934).

  Gilbert’s first novel, The Landslide (1943), a fantasy involving prehistoric creatures which appear in a remote part of Ireland after being uncovered by a landslide, appeared to generally positive reviews and was dedicated to Reid. A second novel, Bombardier (1944), followed, based on Gilbert’s experiences in the Second World War. Gilbert’s third novel, Monkeyface (1948), concerns what seems to be an ape, called ‘Bimbo’, discovered in South America and brought back to Belfast, where it learns to talk. The Burnaby Experiments appeared in 1952, five years after Reid’s death, and is a thinly disguised portrayal of their relationship from Gilbert’s point of view and a belated response to Brian Westby. His final novel, Ratman’s Notebooks (1968), the story of a loner who learns he can train rats to kill, would become his most famous, being twice filmed as Willard (1971 and 2003).

  Gilbert married his wife Kathleen Stevenson in 1945; the two had four children, and Gilbert devoted most of his time from the 1950s onward to family life and his seed business. He died in Northern Ireland in 2010 at age 97.

  Kim Newman is a London-based author and movie critic. He writes regularly for Empire Magazine and contributes to The Guardian, The Times, Sight & Sound and others. He is the author of several novels, including the Anno Dracula series, and has won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and British Science Fiction Awards and been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

  By Stephen Gilbert

  The Landslide (1943)*

  Bombardier (1944)*

  Monkeyface (1948)*

  The Burnaby Experiments (1952)*

  Ratman’s Notebooks (1968)*

  * Available from Valancourt Books

  STEPHEN GILBERT

  Ratman’s Notebooks

  With a new introduction by

  KIM NEWMAN

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Richmond, Virginia

  2013

  Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert

  First published London: Michael Joseph, 1968

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1968 by The Estate of Stephen Gilbert

  Introduction © 2013 by Kim Newman

  This edition copyright © 2013

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins

  20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gilbert, Stephen, 1912-2010.

  Ratman’s Notebooks / Stephen Gilbert ; with a new introduction by Kim Newman. – First Valancourt Books edition.

  pages cm. – (20th century series)

  isbn 978-1-939140-60-9 (acid-free paper)

  1. Diaries – Fiction. 2. Revenge – Fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships – Fiction. 4. Rats – Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. 6. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

  pr6013.i3363r38 2013

  823’.912–dc23

  2013024674

  All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

  Cover by M.S. Corley

  Set in Dante MT 11/13.2

  INTRODUCTION

  Stephen Gilbert (1912-2010) published four novels between 1943 and 1952, then busied himself with other interests for the rest of his life. He was active in his family’s tea and seed shipping business, a volunteer for the Samaritans and a founder of the Northern Irish branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But he made an isolated return to fiction with this, his final novel, published in 1968.

  Ratman’s Notebooks is so unlike Gilbert’s earlier work there was once some confusion about whether he was indeed the Stephen Gilbert who had written it. The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes the book ‘has erroneously been ascribed to Northern Ireland-born writer Gilbert Alexander Ralston (1912-1999), using “Stephen Gilbert” as a pseudonym. Ralston did write under his own name the screenplay for Willard (1971), the film of the novel (he later wrote several Westerns, all under his own name; he lived in America for many years, and was active in the film industry). The two writers may have been confused because of Willard, and perhaps because Ralston also seems to have been born in County Down, Northern Ireland, in 1912.’

  Gilbert’s earlier novels were admired by a select few (including E.M. Forster, who called his 1943 debut The Landslide ‘an original and graceful work’) but scarcely troubled the best-seller lists or paperback racks. The Burnaby Experiments (1952), also republished by Valancourt, is a roman à clef about Gilbert’s friendship with the older author Forrest Reid, and touches on psychic powers (a theme which is developed here). However, Ratman’s Notebooks had the good fortune to benefit from a film rights deal . . . furthermore, Daniel Mann’s film adaptation, which calls Gilbert’s unnamed ratman ‘Willard Stiles’, was a major commercial success, which means paperback editions bearing the film’s title were widely available when I was a schoolboy. I first read it when I was too young to get into cinemas showing X certificate movies.

  For some reason, Willard is hard to see these days—even when it was remade in 2003, no DVD special edition of the first film appeared. Nevertheless, it gave rise to a sequel, Ben (1972), remembered for Michael Jackson’s hideous theme song, and lingered long enough in the memory and the box office record books to earn that remake. It’s certain that the film, a good enough adaptation though it shifts the action to California, boosted the profile of the book enough to make it a paperback best-seller . . .

  . . . and, because of that, horror became a mainstream publishing genre.

  To backtrack, throughout the 1960s, the thin ‘horror’ section of W.H. Smith’s contained only the annual volumes of Herbert Van Thal’s The Pan Book of Horror Stories and Dennis Wheatley’s black magic thrillers, with the occasional Penguin M.R. James reissue slipped in. A few stray best-sellers—Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist—raised the profile of the category, but no author would consider a career as a horror writer. Even Robert Bloch, a Weird Tales veteran boosted when Alfred Hitchcock filmed his Psycho, stayed in the game by categorising himself as a mystery writer.

  That all changed with two books first published in 1974, James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Carrie. The British Herbert and the American King didn’t just detour into the supernatural and horrific, as Levin and Blatty did, but stuck around, fol
lowing their first novels with similar, more ambitious horror visions. King’s books were filmed—so were some of Herbert’s, though few noticed—and the horror section swelled, with writers like Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon, V. C. Andrews, Anne Rice and Clive Barker. In the 1970s and ’80s, there was a publishing horror boom.

  And it started with Ratman’s Notebooks/Willard.

  The success of book and films made rampaging vermin a major horror theme of the 1970s and ’80s, as shown in creepy-crawly movies like Frogs, Squirm, Kingdom of the Spiders and Phase IV and books like Guy N. Smith’s Crabs novels and Shaun Hutson’s Slugs sagas. Herbert’s specific inspiration for writing The Rats was his East End childhood and a speech from Renfield in the 1931 film of Dracula, but you can bet New English Library’s inspiration for publishing The Rats was the success of Gilbert’s novel. A few other super-clever ‘rat’ stories in the ’70s play variations on the theme—TV episodes like ‘Tomorrow, the Rat’ from Doom Watch and ‘During Barty’s Party’ from Nigel Kneale’s Beasts.

  The influence of Ratman’s Notebooks on Carrie isn’t quite so blatant, but they are both entries in the sub-genre of ‘turning worm’ revenge fantasy (The Count of Monte Cristo is an ur-text). A put-upon central character suffers various slights but discovers a special ability which enables him or her to punish their tormentors, usually going power-mad and visiting terror upon the innocent as well as the guilty before being destroyed by what they’ve unleashed. In Ratman’s Notebooks, it’s intelligent rats . . . in Carrie, it’s psychic powers, but the story archetype is the same for both. A few imitative films underline the link by combining the two premises: Kiss of the Tarantula (1976) and Jennifer (1978)[1] have Carrie-like adolescent female outcasts psychically bonding with vermin (spiders and snakes) they sic on their enemies. Willard even set the fashion followed by Carrie for naming horror movies after bland-sounding protagonists . . . which explains the terror track records of Patrick, Ruby, Stanley, Julia and others.

  [1] A favourite piece of pest movie trivia—Bruce Davison, who played Willard, is married to Lisa Pelikan, who played Jennifer.

  Indeed, by putting the terror-by-animal sub-genre of horror on the map (previously, only Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’, filmed by Hitchcock, really fit the bill), Ratman’s Notebooks and Willard cleared shelf-space for the book and film of Jaws, another lasting publishing and movie phenomenon.

  Even beyond its little-noticed but paramount position in the mushroom growth of horror as a publishing category, Ratman’s Notebooks is a good little novel, certainly stronger than early Herbert and better even than early King. The unnamed narrator’s voice prefigures the alienated outcasts of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory or Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die. The details of his everyday miseries and growing kinship with the brilliantly characterised rats Socrates and Ben (the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X of rodentkind) are touching as well as amusing and eventually terrifying.

  Kim Newman

  June 18, 2013

  RATMAN’S NOTEBOOKS

  Note

  The manuscript of the journal printed on the following pages came into my hands in slightly peculiar circumstances. I was in Edinburgh on business. With me was Ralph Preston our solicitor. Ralph was staying with friends at Corstorphine and very kindly asked me to a party at their house. I had never been to this house before and didn’t know any of the family.

  After a while I found myself chatting with a rather shy, middle-aged man, who, I thought was my host. Suddenly he rushed off and came back with these notebooks. ‘Read those,’ he said, ‘and see if you’d like to publish them.’

  I tried to explain that I wasn’t a publisher, and had no influence with publishers, but he wouldn’t listen to me. ‘You could get them published very well if you liked,’ he insisted. And then, ‘At least it wouldn’t do you any harm to have a look at them.’ By this time he was beginning to sound angry.

  So I took the books, sat down in a corner, and began to read. I found them easy to read. The handwriting is small, neat and extremely legible. Though the entries are undated there is a space between each, indicating where one day ends and another begins. In places there seem to be considerable gaps in time.

  After I had been reading for about an hour I noticed that the party was breaking up. I looked about for the person who had handed me the notebooks, but he wasn’t there, and to this day I have been unable to find out any more about him. I don’t think he can have been Ratman himself, but he may be the author of the note, written on a loose sheet of paper, which I found stuck between the pages of the last notebook.

  My host turned out to be someone quite different from my shy, middle-aged friend. He has been very kind and helpful. But he hasn’t been able to bring me any nearer to a solution of the mystery.

  Mother says there are rats in the rockery.

  ‘You’ll have to do something about them,’ she says, ‘or they’ll over-run the whole place.’

  It’s all very well her talking. I’m at business all day. I don’t know what she thinks I can do about it. I’m afraid of rats. I don’t mind admitting it. What was she doing up there anyhow? She’s hardly been in the back garden since Father died. It annoys her to see how neglected it’s got.

  Saturday afternoon, so I thought I’d better investigate.

  The rockery is at the very top of the garden. When Father was alive it was a sort of show place—very pretty, rare flowers. All that sort of thing. He used to bring along his gardening friends to show it them. There was a pool in the centre of the rockery, and he meant to put a fountain in the centre of the pool. He was working at it shortly before he died. In those days we kept a full-time gardener. But Father always looked after the rockery himself.

  I hadn’t been in the back garden for ages. The state of it quite shocked me. Not that I’ll do anything. I’m only surprised Mother got as far as the rockery. There are brambles right across the path. In one place there’s even a tree, quite a sizeable tree, growing out of the very middle of the path. It just shows. Mother’s as tough as old nails really, or can be when she chooses.

  After Father died we couldn’t afford a gardener. I suppose we should have sold the house and moved somewhere smaller, but neither Mother nor I liked the idea. Mother wrote to Uncle in Canada and told him how badly-off we were. Uncle’s a bachelor, and supposed to have money. But he didn’t even reply. So we paid off the gardener and stayed on, hoping for better times. Uncle can’t last forever. I keep the front garden looking fairly decent. The back’s gone wild.

  For the first few summers it was rather attractive that way, with the flowers fighting it out among themselves and rambler roses sprawling all over the place. In winter it got a horrible derelict look and I didn’t go there much. After four years or so most of the flowers had gone, even in summer, though there were still a good many roses of one kind or another and various flowering shrubs.

  I think it must have been about the third year after Father’s death, one very wet night, that the pool in the rockery overflowed. The water ran down the whole length of the garden and under the back door into the yard of the house. Fortunately there’s a drain in the middle of the yard and the water got away without doing much damage. I stayed at home next morning to clear up. I found the outlet of the pool had got blocked with dead leaves and rubbish. I cleared it easily enough, but I didn’t want more trouble. So I cut off the water and let the pool run dry.

  It was after eleven when I arrived at the office, and Mr. Jones gave off at me for being late. I tried to explain what had happened, but he just said, ‘Remember you’re only an ordinary employee here.’ I’ve remembered it ever since, though I’m quite sure most of the ordinary employees would have got away with it without a word. He gets at me because he doesn’t like remembering that Father was once his boss and that he started as little more than a working man. Now h
e’s sole proprietor.

  That was seven years ago, the pool overflowing and me getting into a row with Mr. Jones. Things haven’t improved any at the office in the meantime, but I do my job as well as I can and try not to annoy him.

  I didn’t expect to see any rats straight off, and I didn’t. I had brought an old waterproof with me. I spread this out on the long grass and lay down to watch. The sun was shining. I like this time of year, half-spring, half-summer. I’d just had my lunch. I felt warm, comfortable and a bit drowsy. I let myself fall asleep. After all I had the whole week-end before me. It didn’t matter which particular moment I watched the rats. They would either appear or not appear.

  I don’t think I slept very long. Maybe half-an-hour. Maybe only five minutes. It doesn’t matter. When I awoke they were there—a father rat, a mother rat, and a whole family of young ones. At least that’s what I suppose. I don’t really know which was the father and which the mother, but there were two big rats and about eleven little ones. My first feeling was a mixture of fear and disgust. What if the whole place was alive with them and I should suddenly find another family running over me? Perhaps they would attack me. I have heard that a cornered rat will fight. I have heard of babies being bitten by rats. I didn’t feel safe. I waited for a moment or two thinking what I should do. Then I stood up suddenly, meaning to run at full speed down to the house. But the moment I was on my feet I felt more sure of myself. I decided not to run, till I should see what the rats would do.