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The Cats

Novel by Nick Sharman.

Scott Grønmark, the man behind the Nick Sharman pseudonym, gives us John Inglis, an American who is working in London on cats for biological warfare purposes. His research has not reached fruition, but is coming close. And while visiting the professor who unwittingly put him on the right track, he discovers that the one thing he needs to make everything work is excessive heat. Unfortunately for most of the city, London is experiencing a heatwave and the cats have turned nasty. A freak power cut and a young assistant who panics and overturns a cage put the wheels in motion for an invasion of intelligent and dangerous felines who are quite happy to team up and attack anybody they can find.

Like Guy Smith's Night of the Crabs, with which this has a lot in common, The Cats is a blatant rip-off of James Herbert's seminal The Rats. This one even sounds the same. Both are 160-page clones for NEL (who also published Herbert's book) which admit their source with "In the Tradition of The Rats" proudly blazoned across the cover. This is the closer of the two to Herbert's original, with its cause in rogue science and its location in London. But Grønmark knows full well that he's cloning another book and he does his job well. He gives a story that's never cluttered even with a couple of subplots, and the read is accordingly smooth. Working for Hamlyn and NEL at a feverish pace (three books in 1980), the Guy Smith comparisons are easy to follow. If he had kept it up for a few years, he might have lasted as long as Smith and with an equally large body of work behind him. That he slowed down and vastly lessened his output is a shame for splatter fans everywhere.


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