The Burial of the Rats

One year before Bram Stoker's penultimate work, Dracula, his short story “The Burial of the Rats” (1896) was published in Lloyd's Weekly News. The story would be collected for the first time in book format courtesy of the George Routledge and Sons 1914 hardcover Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, complete with one of Thomas Handforth's greatest illustrations. Since that date the story has appeared in hundreds of magazines, anthologies, and audio narrations. The story was adapted into a 1995 film titled Bram Stoker's Burial of the Rats by Roger Corman's film company. 

Surprisingly, despite the morbid title, “The Burial of the Rats” isn't quite a horror story. It is more of a dark, man-on-the-run flavor that would find its readership in the pages of a men's action-adventure magazine than a horror anthology. It would be 28 more years before Richard Connell Jr. set the standard for “men hunting men” in his marvelous romp "The Most Dangerous Game", but Stoker's early effort helps shape the formula. According to oldstyletales.com, predating both Stoker and Connell Jr. was the man-on-the-run thriller “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, “The Suicide Club” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling's “The Man Who Would be King”.

In Stoker's rather simple story, an unnamed British narrator wants to marry his sweetheart. However, the parents want him to spend a year apart from her, a 12-month journey that places the dejected narrator in Paris. He finds himself in a bad part of town where trash is heaped and the poverty-ridden populace squats in makeshift, unconventional housing. It is here that the narrator sees six veteran soldiers, now tattered in rags and scruffy uniforms, watching him like a hawk.

Lost, he stops to ask for directions from an old woman. She tells him of her life, and, while she talks, the narrator sees large rats swarming all over. She explains a horrible personal experience of venturing into the sewer once to retrieve a lost ring and of the rats there that would suck flesh from bones in an instant. Vaguely, the narrator then hears (or thinks?) the woman call out to the soldiers to help her kill the young traveler. In a quest to survive the night, the narrator then takes off on foot through this kingdom of rubble and trash to escape his pursuers.  

Stoker had a unique fascination with rats and used them quite often to set a type of warning that man's existence is perpetually haunted, or hunted, by a predator. Rats scurrying about is a frightening and disturbing image, but even with this appalling element, Stoker manages to eek by with a storytelling ability that is wholly steeped in an adventure. The story's second half is a furious run as the narrator attempts to escape the clutches of this maddened group of scrawny and starved ex-soldiers. The atmosphere and visual imagery of the city – this wasteland of debris and its King and Queen Squatters – is a character all to itself. For me, this is the real highlight of the book – the visual imagery of this awful place. 

You can get this story and others by Bram Stoker HERE.