 First edition dust jacket cover | |
| Author | Stephen Gilbert |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1968 |
| Publisher | Michael Joseph Ltd. |
Ratman's Notebooks is a 1968 short novel by Stephen Gilbert. It features an unnamed social misfit who relates better to rats than to humans. It was the basis for the 1971 film Willard , its 1972 sequel Ben , [1] and the 2003 remake of the original film. After the release of the original film, the book was re-released and re-titled Willard.
The book is set as a series of journal entries, where the unnamed narrator goes back and forth between his life with the rats and his work, in a low-level job at a company that his father used to own. In these entries, the young man dwells on the hatred he feels for his boss, the stresses of caring for his aging mother, a nameless girl he becomes fond of and above all the families of rats which he has befriended and which he uses for company and companionship.
Eventually, the young man trains the rats to do things for him. His favorite is an Agouti Berkshire rat (normal wild rat color, only with white markings on the belly, who in the film adaptations was portrayed as a white rat) which he calls "Socrates". A rival to Socrates is "Ben", a large rat that the narrator grows to despise when it refuses to listen to him. The young man uses the rats to wreak revenge upon his boss and havoc among the local shop owners and home owners, whom he has robbed with the aid of his rats. His "ratman" robberies become a newspaper sensation in the area and the man makes quite a stash of money for himself and for the girl he is courting at work. After his mother dies, the young man inherits the house.
When Socrates is killed at the young man's workplace by his boss Mr. Jones, he is forced to use Ben in his criminal escapades. He devises a plan to have the rats kill Mr. Jones, avenging Socrates' death. He then abandons all the rats at the scene of the crime, ridding himself of that part of his life. Eventually, as his relationship with the office girl moves towards marriage, Ben and his colony return, chasing the girl out of the house and trapping the young man in the attic.
The book ends with the young man madly scribbling in his journal about the rats gnawing away at the attic door.
In 2013, Valancourt Books reprinted Ratman's Notebooks in paperback with an introduction by horror author Kim Newman.
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The fancy rat is the domesticated form of Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat, and the most common species of rat kept as a pet. The name fancy rat derives from the use of the adjective fancy for a hobby, also seen in "animal fancy", a hobby involving the appreciation, promotion, or breeding of pet or domestic animals. The offspring of wild-caught specimens, having become docile after having been bred for many generations, fall under the fancy type.
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Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a 1971 children's science fiction/fantasy book by Robert C. O'Brien, with illustrations by Zina Bernstein. The novel was published by the Los Angeles publishing house Atheneum Books.
Willard is a 2003 American psychological horror film written and directed by Glen Morgan and starring Crispin Glover, R. Lee Ermey and Laura Elena Harring. It is loosely based on the novel Ratman's Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert, as well as on the novel's first film adaptation, Willard (1971), and its sequel, Ben (1972). It was not billed as a remake by the producers, who chose instead to present it as a reworking of the themes from the original with a stronger focus on suspense.
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Gilbert Alexander Ralston was a British-American screenwriter, journalist and author. He was a television producer in the 1950s and a screenwriter in the 1960s. He created the television series The Wild Wild West and wrote scripts for Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Ben Casey, I Spy, Hawaii Five-O and Naked City. He wrote the screenplay for the 1971 movie Willard, which was based on the 1968 novel Ratman's Notebooks written by Stephen Gilbert.
Benjamin Huntington Wright was an English actor. He was best known for playing Herr Zeller in The Sound of Music. He also played numerous roles in famous films and worked as voice actor, having roles in animated films by Disney Studios.
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Elliott Harcourt Montgomery, known as Lee Montgomery, is a United States-based Canadian actor. He is best known for his role as a lonely little boy who befriends a pack of killer rats in the film Ben (1972), as Karen Black's son Davey in the cult classic Burnt Offerings, and as Sarah Jessica Parker's hunky dance partner, Jeff Malene, in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985).
Rat is a 2000 comedy film directed by Steve Barron and starring Imelda Staunton and Pete Postlethwaite. The film focuses on the transformation of a working-class man into a rat and how his family copes with the startling change. The film's scenario is partly based on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
Stephen Gilbert was a Northern Irish novelist, businessman and nuclear disarmament activist. On the strength of his early novels in the 1940s, Gilbert was accounted by E. M. Forster as "a writer of distinction", but he is chiefly remembered as the author of Ratman's Notebooks (1968) which sold over 1 million copies and was twice made into a horror film named Willard in the United States.
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