In Popular Culture
The rat king appears in novels such as The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot, Ratking by Michael Dibdin, Peeps by Scott Westerfeld, The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray by Chris Wooding, Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle, Luther: The Calling by Neil Cross, The War for the Lot by Sterling E. Lanier, and The Rats by James Herbert. A rat king portentously appears in a sub-section of the same name in E. Annie Proulx's fictional work Accordion Crimes. Rat kings inspired the title character in The Wyrm King, the finale of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi's Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles series. A rat king is prominent in James Tiptree, Jr.'s novelette The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats, originally published in New Dimensions 6, 1976.
In The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett, Keith skeptically notes that the filth associated with supposedly tying the young rats together at a young age is not found in a rat's nest, and suspects that a rat king is created as a sort of project by a rat catcher himself. At the end of the novel, Terry Pratchett leaves an Author's Note, in which he states: "How they come into existence is a mysteryI am indebted to Dr Jack Cohen for a more modern and depressing one, which is that down the ages some cruel and inventive people have had altogether too much time on their hands."
In Alan Moore's and Ian Gibson's comic book series The Ballad of Halo Jones, the Rat King was a weapon of war, a super-intelligent collective of five rats with entwined tails who were able to communicate via a computer terminal.
E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King features a "Mouse King" (Mausekönig) with multiple heads, seemingly inspired by the multiple-bodied rat king, which are typically not retained in productions of the Tchaikovsky ballet The Nutcracker, based on the novella.
A seven-rat "King Rat" appears in Lars Von Trier's movie Epidemic, and the general concept of the "King Rat" is discussed in the movie.
Dutch writer Harry Mulisch's book Bericht aan de Rattenkoning (1966) (trans. Message to the Rat King) mentions the phenomenon as a metaphor for the 'old' (pre-1940) social structure and more specifically, the new queen (Beatrix) and her husband, Claus.
Read more about this topic: Rat King (folklore)
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