In 1977, everyone in the Commonwealth got rabies. Jack Ramsay released The Rage about rabies, Walter Harris released Saliva about rabies, and David Anne released Rabid (also issued as Day of the Mad Dogs by Corgi) about rabies. Canadian David Cronenberg even released a movie called Rabid, although that was about lady sex monsters with armpit penises and not about rabies at all.
Out of all of these foam-flecked creations, David Anne’s Rabid was the first, and probably the best. Seemingly taking its cues from the 1976 Public Information Films Service-produced PSA “Keep Rabies Out”, it’s written in a sort of tweedy government leaflet style. If brown corduroy was a literary genre, Rabid would be its flagship example.
Rabies anxiety gripped England in '77, possibly because, as pointed out by Jim O’Brien in his excellent article on rabies books in Pulp Horror #6, after a long period of lobbying and a public referendum, England had joined the European Economic Community (or, the Common Market) in 1973. Rabies was a problem in France and Germany, but not so much in England which was protected by the Channel and hadn’t seen an indigenous death by rabies since 1902, or domestic rabies transmitted to a human since the 1920's. But now, dirty foreigners were sharing a common market and that meant that while Merrye Olde England would get access to European goods, on the other hand rabid European foxes, dogs, and snails suddenly had access to British people.
Starting off in a swirl of EuroConfusion, Rabid begins with a British couple, John and Paula Dennings, driving to a rented French villa in their German car. Their lovely British dog, George, recently drank from a bucket of Paraquat — the carcinogenic weed killer found in every British shed and which, most recently, ended the invasion of crabs in Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs — and died. Paula and John's grief makes them susceptible to the infiltration of Asp, a “French bitch” they encounter at their rented villa, who worms her Gallic way into their hearts.
Paula insists on smuggling Asp back to the UK, violating its four month quarantine policy against foreign — particularly French — animals by hiding Asp and smuggling her on board a boat to England captained by her lover, Peter...exactly like something a French person would do! Cuckold John returns in their car on the ferry and fills out his Customs forms properly, like an Englishman should. Waiting for him at home is his new, purebred hunting dog, Troy. John and Paula are upper class toffs living in Gunn House, their oh so vewy Bwitish home in a small village, where everything is quaint, but soon its inhabitants are being found dead in various states of nibblement.
The pieces start to come together when John discovers that Asp has rabies and shoots her. Paula delivers a rousing speech about how, sure, people will die of the rabies she's brought into the country and which seems to have already spread to local rats, but they're mostly poor and ugly people, so who cares? Also, she’s pregnant with Peter’s baby.
A few pages later she discovers that she has rabies and shoots herself. John doesn’t notice because he’s off in America on a business trip. Back in England, their village is under siege from corgis, Jack Russell Terriers, and poodles, who have gone berserk and are eating their owners. The government swings into action, wresting lapdogs from the arthritic clutches of mad old men who fire shotguns at the police, rounding up the local lord’s pack of hounds and gassing them, hospitalizing dying schoolchildren who are now foaming at the mouth, and commissioning the Central Information Office to make three “Watch out for Rabies” commercials. Like this one.
It’s all very stiff-upper-lip, and the book has the tone of a forensic examination, keeping the hysteria tamped down to a dull roar. Things take a welcome swerve into the gothic when a local mob descends on the Denning household and destroys it, then waits for upper class twit, John, to return from America. They strip him naked and throw him in a basement with Troy, his beloved pet, now rabid, and David Anne chronicles in bleak and chilly fashion the night Troy spends eating his former owner alive.
Overall, it’s a nine day outbreak and the damage is limited to the south of England. But it paves the way for the Conservative government to fall and a — shiver — Marxist Unity Party to take power. The book ends with an epilogue that hints at the appearance of a new, and far more virulent, strain of rabies and how are these Marxist babies going to deal with THAT? Let's see their so-called "unity" when an English bulldog is gnawing off their faces!
Sober and compelling in its accumulation of forensic detail, Rabid didn’t prepare anyone for the utter madness of David Anne’s next, and final, book, The Folly. Taking its cues this time from James Herbert, Anne decided that compelling forensic detail was out and gory maximalism was in. And there was no better creature to harrow the British heart and strike fear into the souls of Englishmen than...the Bunny Rabbit.
These “squeaking grunting hellish creatures” emerge near Frickley Village, a quiet little hamlet in the leafy green countryside where thick-skulled cretins gather daily at The Goat and have a pint while debating what strange creatures could be devouring their sheep. Then an old couple, whose husband has paralyzed vocal cords, are awakened by “…a quiet thump-thump. Then comes the pattering across the stone floor of dozens of padded feet” and they come face-to-face with “creatures from the spawning-ground of hell.”
“His head fell forward and he felt his right ear being torn off. The pain was excruciating. He looked up at the bed where Jane lay. He could not even recognise the bloodied mess of bone, flesh and hair that lay there.
“Something was gnawing at his cheek. He could take it no longer. He knew it was the end. His mouth fell open and he tried to scream. To his shocked amazement he actually heard his own voice yelling in terror.
“It was the first manly sound he had made in two years. But it did not matter. A few minutes later he was dead. Carrion for the creatures of hell.”
Guy Corling, son of these bunny snacks, arrives and demands answers of Sir Mark, the local lord with a “sneering, callous face.” But Guy doesn’t come to this face-fight unarmed. He has an “I’m humping your wife” face…because he is! Within minutes of Sir Mark leaving Guy alone with Lady Anne, the two young lovers are engaged in delirious sex that coins a new metaphor for lovemaking:
“And then they climbed that mountain.”
Next item on the lethal lagomorph's luncheon is Audrey Barrett who, ironically, dreams of going to London and working in the Playboy Club as a Bunny. But before she goes she has a farewell shag in the forest, where her helpless lover is dragged off by the rabbits and then Audrey is nibbled into a coma.
The only thing that can stop these bunnies is gin! Which Paul Measures, drunk salesman, showers all over their fuzzy little heads in a great stream of vomit when they attack him. In what can only be described as an ironic twist, he then stumbles into the path of Lady Anne's mini and dies anyway. Guy leads a band of hardy yeomen into the woods, armed with shotguns, stout hearts, and strong language, but the bunnies get the drop on them, and as they run for the car, wounded, pursued by a band of killer rabbits, Victor screams like a Frenchman:
“We’re not going to make it!” Victor yelled. “We’ve had it!”
“The hell we have! We’ll fight them!” Guy shouted, stopping in his tracks.
There was no time to reload their guns and so they held the twelve-bores by the barrels, ready to use them as clubs.
The first animals were on them. Victor raised his gun and swung it viciously at about five of them.
“You bastards,” Guy heard him mutter as the gun butt hit fur, flesh, and bones. “You filthy, dirty bastards.”
The bunnies are “stunned” by this strong language, but one of these furry bastards leaps at Guy who pulls out his Bowie knife, relishing the encounter because he’s “been trained in face-to-face combat in the Army.”
“I’m not that easy,” he roared.
He and the bunny rabbit go mano-a-mano, until the filthy bastard kicks Guy in the stomach in a cheap shot. Guy reciprocates by stabbing the bunny in its stomach several times, then throws its limp corpse to the rabbit army, who eat it.
Now it’s time for answers, and Guy finds them in a confrontation with Sir Mark. Once, after returning from squalid France, he brought back foul Gallic germs which caused a myxomatosis outbreak on one of Sir Mark's rabbit farms. Immediately, he hired Dr. Webber and set him up in a secret laboratory located in the architectural folly on his country estate, tasking him to create a virus that will kill all rabbits and rats. “What a service to mankind,” he crows. “No more rats. No more rabbits.”
Indeed.
By the time Guy finally fights his way to Dr. Webber he discovers that science has, once again, gotten out of hand, as it always does, and for some reason Dr. Webber has bred a race of vicious rat-rabbits. Interestingly, Dr. Webber really doesn’t know why these rat-rabbits he created have mutated and begun rampaging through the countryside. In fact, he doesn’t even know why he made them in the first place. When Guy confronts him about their existence he goes into a petulant sulk.
“‘Please get it through your head that I did not deliberately create a meat-eating mutant monster. I don’t know why it’s turned out as it has. Now I suppose I’ll never know,’ Webber said, slumping down in despair on a box.”
But, like most mad scientists, being totally erratic is Dr. Webber’s most defining personality trait and soon he abducts Lady Anne as a hostage to ensure that Guy stays out of his way. Thoughtfully, he informs Guy in a note that Lady Anne is being kept in a cage right next to the largest rat-rabbits he has and she’ll be thoroughly nibbled if Guy interferes with his experiments. But with the British constabulary at his side, Guy storms the folly and the rat-rabbits pale in comparison to the various freaks of science in jars they discover and a “test tube monster” which is a half human-half orangutan creature created through IVF. Dr. Webber is dispatched and Sir Mark comes to a disgusting end as he’s dosed with myxomatosis and dissolves into a pile of pustulent boils.
Lady Anne is rescued but can’t remember anything about the past month. Audrey Barrett survives and winds up moving to London, but not to become a Playboy Bunny. Instead, she's locked up in a psychiatric hospital where she talks about killer rabbits to anyone who’ll listen. And Guy achieves the dream of every man in the Seventies, and becomes a television news anchor.
Oh, and the rabbits? Every single one of them for 20 miles around Frickley Village are rounded up and shot. Even the cute ones carrying baskets full of painted eggs.
The inside back flap of The Folly bears David Anne's bio, giving us a glimpse of the man behind these bestselling books and a clue as to why he was so obsessed with animals of death.
David Anne was born in London in 1930 and educated at Ampleforth, Yorkshire, and served his National Service in the RAF. He left London in 1964 to live in a typical Hampshire thatched cottage where he is now surrounded by hordes of wild ducks, chickens, pigeons, and dogs. He runs a Pine furniture business in Stockbridge and is an expert on guns.
He never wrote another book. One can only assume that either his expertise on guns — or his nerve — failed and the hordes of ducks, chickens, pigeons, and dogs surrounding his thatched cottage finally got him.
RIP, David Anne.