K.M Peyton and Nick Sharman

This week I rediscovered K.M Peyton's Flambards. It was among the many elderly Puffins I've snaffled from second hand and charity shops over recent years. I read my Mam's copy in 1979, when we both used to watch the Yorkshire Television adaptation of all four books in the series.

This time the book took up a long train journey and I loved it all over again. We're in the years before WW1 and it's an orphan story, with 12 year old Cristina being sent to live at crumbling Flambards, with a monstrous uncle and two cousins - one brutish and one sensitive and obsessed with messing about with proto-aeroplanes. There's lots about hunting and riding and horses and I guess these were the things that gave me a mild aversion to going back into Peyton's books. But she writes about these things so beautifully. The fate of Christina's first horse Sweetbriar is extremely dramatic and involving. The girl's horror at the idea of these creatures being fed to the dogs once they've lost their usefulness is something I found had stuck with me for thirty years.

Nick Sharman's "The Cats" was my Hallowe'en read. I've been saving up a pile of these "Animals Attack" books for a while. They're all "...in the tradition of James Herberts' The Rats''and were published shortly after his bloodthirsty and episodic classic. (I do! I really think it's a modern classic!) The Cats is pretty poor on many levels. Like many lesser horror novels of its period it skimps where it should fill in some background stuff on the characters. What makes Stephen King and (sometimes) James Herbert great is their willingness to sketch in a living backstory for characters that they're going to kill off five pages later. I used to love that as a kid, and still do now - the way they make these doomed cameos so vivid.

There are a few sparks of life in Sharman's book - the bullied kid who sort-of becomes infused by the malign will of the cats and leads them on their killing spree. The american politico who tries to make peace - too late - with his son, who turns out to be responsible for the plague that has turned all of the cats in London kill-crazy. There are even some marvellously Sweeney-like moments:

""Listen to me, for God's sake. I've had enough of this big, important MP crap. I'm not interested in you or your damn influence. I am interested in the three hundred people lying dead in the morgue this evening on account of the cats. I need to see your son and I'm going to see him,' his teeth clenched together in a grimace that frightened Dempsey, 'even if I have to punch your stupid head in to do it. GET ME?""

It belongs to a genre that the fanzine 'Paperback Fanatic' and the blog, 'Groovy Age of Horror' reminded me about some time last year. It's a very Seventies thing. Very Jaws, very Rats. Natures wreaking revenge, and so on. Only the tiniest hint of the supernatural. A hint of polyester about it all.

Anyone else still read these? Anyone still read K.M Peyton..?