Customer Reviews
Slightly lacking in rats - By: Sue Lewendon, 17 Jul 2008 
I read this straight after reading The Rats & Lair & am wondering why there is such a lack of ratsin this book? I mean to say that they're there but notin such an abundance. This book seems to follow the human characters more. I would class this as a completely separate book rather than a second sequel.
It tells the story of London after the bombs have been dropped & humans have nearly been wiped out. Some manage to survive undergroundin a shelter that the government has built & the rats don't show their faces for quite a while. It's only when the shelter becomes flooded that the rats manage to getin & create pure havoc & mayhem.
The people who manage to survive the ratsin the shelter make it back upto the destroyed London, & find that rats are the least of their problems. They encounter other people who are changed into hunters of humans for the simple pleasure of torturing.
It's a stonking read towards the end & the climax is awesome, it's just that the first part of the book takes a while to get interesting. You don't have to read the first 2 booksin the series to understand what's going onin this one. It manages to stand on it's own feet & can hold it's head up high as far as I'm concerned.
One of my most favourite books! - By: Gemma, 28 Mar 2008 
I haven't read the other booksin the trilogy, & this was gathering dust on my bookshelf & decided to start reading it one evening... several hours later I was still glued to the book &in the days to come I was reading this every spare minute I had!
I'm a fan of apocalyptic things & so this really drew me in. From the descriptions at the start from various people as the nuclear bomb goes off, to the main characters running from the fall out this booked had me hooked until the end.
I'd highly recommend this book to anyone, especially post-apocalyptic fans!
Disapointing - By: Peadar Mcfadden, 03 Sep 2007 
Not as good as the rats, this book is interesting for the first half then gets a bit bogged down, the book seems to delve too much on the characters & you just find yourself reading & not quite following what is going on, basically couldnt wait to finish the book. The Rats kept you reading, Lair was OK, Domain just had you saying "when is it going to end"
The Rats � Part 3 - By: dogbarkssome, 25 Jul 2005 The Rats was a fearsomely successful debut, so much so that even after several other novels Herbert felt compelled to go back & write a sequel, but Lair suffered from a 'seen it all before' law of diminishing returns -in true Hollywood sequel fashion the action may have been bigger but it certainly wasn't better.
Thankfully with Domain, Herbert's 3rd Rats novel, the author has come up with a new angle to work with - nuclear holocaust. The novel starts at a breathtaking pace & barely lets up - 5 nuclear bombs fall on London, & its an immediate battle for survival as the population struggles to get underground & away from the fallout. Totally unprepared, most of the inhabitants are killed, with London almost completely destroyed. The novel follows the fate of typical Herbert loner hero Culver, & government employee Dealey, who knows the location of a secret underground survival shelter but having been blindedin the nuclear blast needs Culver's help to get there. Meanwhile, the long dormant mutant rats seize their chance to emerge from hiding & start feeding on human flesh again...
The addition of the nuclear holocaust material massively expands the scope of this novel, as even without the rats the cast face diverse threats from disease, floods, fire, rabid dogs & lawless gangs who roam the wasteland of a devastated London. The destroyed capitol makes for some startling imagery, with Domain containing the best descriptive writing Herbert has yet produced. Herbert gradually brings together a varied cast, with the novel peakingin an extended mid-book action sequence when their temporary bolthole is flooded, then attacked by rats. Aside from the books obvious hero it's difficult to tell who will survive, as the band is slowly whittled down by adversity, with death at every turn. Non-stop tension & action coupled with some startling imagery makes Domain not only the best of the Rats trilogy (though Herbert would later revisit the setting of Domain for his graphic novel The City), but Herbert's best book up to that point.
Horrible - By: No_Poet, 01 Jan 2004 As a fan of James Herbert I have noticed that the same formula runs through all his novels; intense wordiness; English characters who, to my complete frustration, talk like Americans; the dark, tormented hero who peforms all the derring-do & commands fearful respect while the other characters talk about how deep he is behind his back; the tacked-on love interest; the ultra-violent gore scenes.
Most of Herbert's books have featured storylines, ideas & locations that were enthralling enough to keep me reading to the endin spite of these flaws. This particular book is not one of them.
Domain is the second sequel to The Rats & I'm afraid the law of diminishing returns has worked its magic. I'm nearly 400 pages into this book & I am now only reading it because I've run out of new reading material.
Two entirely separate, irreconcilable storylines - a nuclear holocaust & the attack of giant killer rats - collide like a train crash, & the result is a hugely overlong storm of horror. There is so much violence, so much despair, on every single page of this book that there have been several points where I almost gave up on it. Imagine the most terrible moments of "The Fog" & "Sepulchre" (I believe this is also called "Neath") & times this by five, then repeat this several hundred times, drain all the enjoyment out of it & you have Domain.
Herbert really demonstrates his true loathing of mankind by hitting the British survivors with every kind of disaster, each one leaping on the back of the previous ones. At one point the survivors are fleeing a rapidly-flooding area which is on fire & exploding while rats drop down from above or attack from beneath the water; the characters are also choking on smoke &in almost total darkness while this happens!
There is no humour AT ALLin this book. Herbert needs to lighten up. The few one-liners only occur during scenes of extraordinary malice. Every new discovery brings fresh terror for the humans, EVERY hope becomes despair. (Herbert has even introduced a disease which appears to be pneumonic plague, even though the humans are already struggling with the rats, the environment & each other!) And the rats are always there, completely intruding on what might otherwise have been a gripping, if confused, storyline.
Domain is far, far beyond the sensibilities of delicate readers. Every form of atrocity is accomplished or hinted at. Massacres, rotting bodies, charred bodies, people burning or being eaten alive are describedin intimate detail until you literally become immune. "I don't care any more" is not the attitude society should be forced into.
Make no mistake. This book is only for die-hard horror fans who enjoy banned films & snuff pictures. It's not likely Herbert fans will like this one at all, & I passionately urge those readers with depressive tendencies to steer well clear.
