Overhearing two workers talking about him having to be put down Fluke decides to escape and ends up roaming the streets of London. How? And why? Mercifully the answers evaded me if they hadn’t, if they had come roaring through at that point, I think I should have become insane. I had existed before as a man and somehow I had become trapped inside an animal’s body. My head felt as if it would explode with the new knowledge. But it is during this period that Fluke begins to have dreams or memories of a previous life as a human as a husband and a father.

Fluke’s experience with his first owners doesn’t work out and he finds himself back in a dog’s home where he feels unloved and becomes a bit of a troublemaker by howling and snarling a lot and tormenting some of the other dogs. The taste of human skin is particularly delightful but the noise and smells of a London street take some getting used to, especially the huge metal monsters that race about at incredible speeds. As Fluke is adopted by his new owner we get to see the world from Fluke’s point of view. His first memories are of the warmth and comfort of his mother and siblings and also of being handled by humans. The novel begins with Fluke being born, or reborn, as a dog.

I also felt like reading something a little less highbrow than a lot of my current reading so it ticked all the boxes. I originally read this nearly thirty years ago and I vaguely remember not liking it as much as his other books but I felt like including it in my reading for the ‘1977 Club’ as I wondered what I’d make of it today. Fluke is one of the more untypical books by Herbert as it is the story of a dog from the dog’s viewpoint-well, the dog is actually a man that’s been reincarnated as a dog. Although he became famous with the ‘Rat’ books (there were two sequels to Rats- The Lair and Domain) and other gory horror books he didn’t totally restrict himself to this sub-genre although most of his books would be classed as horror some were more supernatural stories, ghost stories or thrillers. I read a fair amount of his books that had been published at the time, including Fluke. I got in to Herbert’s books, along with other horror and gothic writers, when I was in my teens in the 1980s. James Herbert is a famous British horror writer his first novel Rats quickly became a bestseller, as did many of his subsequent books.

Fluke by James Herbert