The Rats is the literary equivalent of a 1970s horror B-movie. It’s gruesome, it’s disgusting, it’s shallow, and if you are into that sort of thing, it’s a lot of fun.

The story, which takes place in London, finds a young English schoolteacher combatting a plague of unusually large, unusually aggressive black rats that are overrunning the poorer parts of London. The rats have developed a taste for human flesh, apparently, and realize that they have the advantage of numbers over their human prey. Carnage ensues.

There are plenty of flaws in this novel. The protagonist is, perhaps, the least interesting protagonist in any enjoyable novel I’ve ever read. He’s a schoolteacher, he has a girlfriend, he’s basically a decent guy…after having read the whole novel, I can say without exaggeration that those are the only things I know about him. Oh, and his name is Harris.

Actually, the best parts of the novel – the most entertaining, at least – are the little vignettes that go in between the main story chapters, each featuring a minor character whose entire destiny is to be eaten by rats, or to watch others be eaten by rats. These sections are skillfully crafted, usually featuring characters who – while far from three-dimensional – are, at least, interesting enough that you want to read on to find out just how they meet their ends. (The answer is always Rats).

There are some really great set pieces in the story: Rats overrun an elementary school, a movie theater, a zoo — at one point rats attack and kill every passenger on a train on the London Underground. It is ridiculous, it’s ludicrous, but it’s so entertaining and so committed to its over-the-top gross-out act that you just can’t stop reading.

Herbert’s writing is adequate to the task at hand. The writing is almost technical, so spare and unsurprising is the language. Reading the novel, you get the sense that the author might have started off with an “adjective bank” of words he was willing to use to describe the rats, and chose never to employ words that weren’t in the bank. The rats are evil, their eyes gaze coolly at their victims or maliciously at them, their bodies are enormous, etc. This is less of a problem than it might have been, though, because let’s face it: We all already know rats are repulsive. Herbert’s working with perhaps the one subject that doesn’t need much description to generate a gut reaction in the reader. The succinct, repettitive descriptions suffice. Anything much more, in fact, might have been overkill.

You could read The Rats, if you wanted to, as social commentary on the English government’s neglect of its poorer citizens. The rats are able to thrive in poor areas because no one has really taken the task of cleaning them up very seriously. The author makes a point of noting that residents often have to wait as long as a week to have their garbage collected, and in some places buildings that were damaged by bombing in WWII have still not been repaired or cleared. As I searched around the Internet after reading the book, I find that some people have in fact chosen to understand it in just this way. I don’t quite buy it, for a bunch of reasons, first among which is the identity of the rats’ victims. If this book were commentary on the indifference of the government and the elite to the plight of the poor, you’d expect that those elites would eventually receive some sort of comeuppance. In fact, though, the only people who ever get eaten by rats in this novel are the poor and working class folks who live in the neglected areas.

Another problem with understanding The Rats as social commentary is that if you want to give it credit for having something to say on social issues, you have also to consider the message it sends about women. Because if you want to read the novel as more than a fun, empty gross-out horror novel, then there is simply no way around the fact that the book has a problem when it comes to its female characters. Every woman in the story is an empty vessel: there to be rescued, to be a sex object, to have plot points explained to her, to shriek in horror, to be eaten. One of the minor characters is a woman who has destroyed her life through her constant pursuit of sex with an endless succession of partners. The novel relates her backstory, lets us see her decades later as a homeless drunk, and then she is gruesomely eaten. This is by far the most fully fleshed-out woman in the novel.

So let’s ignore the social commentary nonsense, and let’s accept that Herbert was – at least at this stage in his career (The Rats is his first novel) – an advertising executive with a talent for thinking of scary, disgusting things. If you can enjoy the novel on that level – if you have enjoyed those cheesy, gross old horror movies that were produced by the truckload in the 70s and 80s – then you’ll have fun with The Rats. Just don’t think about it too carefully.