Domain

Background

Herbert's Rats trilogy was based in part on his own experiences in growing up among the Blitz-damaged areas of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, east London, which were a haven for rats, and as a young adult he saw Todd Browning's 1931 Dracula, where the rat-infestation scene made a great impact on him; he was later to claim that he conceived the idea after watching it.

Plot

The book is divided into three sections: 'Advent', 'Aftermath' and 'Domain'.

A prologue describes rats living underground, listening to the nuclear attack—thought to have been a culmination of Middle Eastern geopolitical tensions—that devastates London. 'Advent' starts above ground. The book's protagonist, ex-pilot Mike Culver, attempts to escape with other people, but encounters Alex Dealey, a civil servant who has been temporarily blinded by the blasts. Dealey explains to Culver that he can save his life, if he follows directions. Culver manages to get them to the Chancery Lane bunker, but has to ignore all the people left above who will soon get caught in the fallout.

In the bunker, Culver meets Kate, and they develop feelings for each other. The second section, 'Aftermath', begins with a group of men from the bunker going above ground on a foraging mission. They eventually find their way to the main government bunker on the Thames Embankment, only to discover that the rats have already killed its inhabitants, including senior members of the government. Culver's party, now reduced in number, discover the rat nest, and the centre of which, directing the other rats, was a two-headed, sentient queen. She had given birth and the foetuses were similar to a human embryo.

The book ends with Culver, Dealey and the survivors being rescued by helicopter. They discover that it was China that launched the attack and was subsequently flattened; more people escaped London than was expected and while martial law now reigned a coalition government was about to be formed and society rebuilt.

However, there is an epilogue which describes the rats still underground in London, implying that they are planning to regroup and possibly spread.

Themes and analysis

It is the third and last of Herbert's Rats trilogy, beginning in 1974 with The Rats, and followed five years later by Lair. Herbert noted that in Domain, the "horror continued—it was never truly beaten. Just as a real-life horror and evil are a continuum." However, in the last of the trilogy the nuclear holocaust is as much an influence on the story as the rats themselves, or as Herbert put it, "the rats are just an added ingredient, to give the book an extra dimension". Winter—writing soon after Domain's publication—saw this as indicating Herbert's "ever-growing ambition". Campbell has argued that the dystopian landscape is the book's major nexus, and makes Domain one of Herbert's "bleakest books, relieved only by irony and the occasional sense of the nightmarishly absurd". Campbell has also described the book as "only nominally a novel about the rats", and that its main message is a warning of the potential future.

Critics have noted that Herbert's early novels were often rooted in contemporaneous social politics. In The Fog, for example, the real enemy is not the escaped gas, or science, but the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the "great, faceless they". and, likewise, in Domain, the rats—by now even closer, descriptively, to humanity—represent the British establishment under Margaret Thatcher. Herbert compared his position to that of condemning the government that sends soldiers to war, while sympathising with the soldier himself. Herbert later expanded on this philosophy in his Authorised Biography, explaining that, while The Rats was "a critique of our governing bodies, who have successfully allowed our inner cities to rot", Domain not only validated that hypothesis but suggested that members of the governing bodies that created and allowed the creatures to exist would one day be devoured by their own creation. The critic Douglas E. Winter has suggested the rats can also be seen as symbolic of London's urban decay. The rats are not a natural phenomena, their mutation having been triggered by nuclear testing off Papua New Guinea.

Stylistically, the literary critic Ramsey Campbell has suggested that Domain is exemplar of Herbert's ability to write intimate scenes which are as horrific as some of the broader set pieces. For example, he compares the mass destruction in the opening scenes of The Fog to Domains "drowning man dragged back from the relief of death to the devastated world". In a similar vein, Herbert told the writer Neil Gaiman that he "love[d] to do the big blockbuster type" such as Domain, as an opportunity for "all hell break[ing] loose, murder, mayhem, the whole bit", as well as the opportunity for intimate vignettes—in Domain, "especially bleak"—against the backdrop of broad events. These vignettes—sometimes almost short stories in themselves—highlight the hopelessness of the individual's situation: a greedy garage owner who delays finding shelter in order to collect his takings; a prostitute in the Park Lane Hilton who gets fused to a windowpane; a woman who fights off a rapist in the Royal Festival Hall; a deranged woman who props her decaying family up at the breakfast table and puts mouldy cornflakes before them; the insurance agent who suffocates in his shelter. In the longer term, however, Domain also suggests that humanity can still overcome the worst that is thrown at it. Although the rats are suggested to be no worse than mankind itself―indeed, Herbert's mankind has been called "essentially human animals"—sufficient goodness remains in the former to value. This, argues Michael A. Morrison, demonstrates Domain's "conservative, essentially Christian theology, based on original sin and universal guilt". Yet no one, he argues, is innocent in Domain; the survivors are aware that they must bear the collective responsibility of mankind for the war, however they might blame governments. This is epitomized by Culver, who at one point goes mad, having

Publication

Domain was first published by the New English Library in 1984 priced at £8.95 (equivalent to £29 in 2025). This was followed the following year with a print run of 400,000 books at £2.50 (equivalent to £8 in 2025). The first US edition came out the same year, retailing at $3.50 (equivalent to $11 in 2025), published by New American Library. The first foreign language edition was in German, published by Heyne in 1987, and selling for DM9.80 (equivalent to DM9 in 2021). Domain was released in an abridged version as an audio tape for the blind in 1987, read by Christopher Lee.

The original US edition lacks several of Herbert's vignettes (Campbell speculates that they may have been "too uncomfortable" for the editor). As a result, some of them have been published there as discrete stories. One—the deranged woman serving breakfast—was published in Graham Masterton's Scare Care in 1989, with proceeds going to charities dealing with child abuse. Another, "Morris and Mog"—the story of the man who suffocates in his fallout shelter—was published in the anthology Masques II edited by J. N. Williamson in 1987.