Black Fang Quote: 'The pain shot through her like a big bullet. She knew babies were meant to kick, but were they meant to scratch?' Mutated rat sperm enters a vat of tropical Lilt, impregnating the factory workers of Leytonstone, who then give birth to rats. As with much Marenghian fiction, the premise concerns a series of 'What ifs'. What if a rat became as big as a horse? And what if it, and its rat brethren, took over and ate parliament?

Marenghi: 'When I was writing this book I'd just seen the arrival of Meredith, my firstborn - and that was certainly traumatic. She wasn't expected. She knows that. In many ways, it's the first feminist horror novel, although it did manage to offend a lot of women.'

TAGLINE: The novel that puts a rat among the pigeons.

'Rats learn to drive in this book' The Independent

'With all too prescient foresight, Marenghi envisages really bad things happening in the future' Today