Others was published by Macmillan in 1999. Nicholas Dismas is a private investigator in Brighton who was born with severe physical deformities — a twisted spine, a shortened leg, a face that frightens strangers. When a young woman hires him to find her baby, who was taken from her after birth and declared dead, Dismas uncovers a clinic where severely deformed infants are being secretly removed from their mothers and kept alive in hidden wards — warehoused out of sight, their existence erased.
The novel was Herbert’s most personal work. He was deeply interested in the social treatment of physical difference, and Others used the horror genre to ask what it means to be considered “other” — to be the thing that society hides, the person whose existence is too disturbing for the comfortable world to acknowledge.
The Social Horror
Others is Herbert’s most explicitly social novel — a horror story that is ultimately about the treatment of disability and difference. The hidden clinic, with its warehoused deformed children, is a metaphor for the ways society conceals what it cannot accommodate. Herbert’s sympathy with Dismas — and through him, with anyone whose body marks them as “other” — gives the novel its moral force.
Collecting Others
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1999): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Very good: $8–$20
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Others considered controversial? The novel’s depiction of physical deformity provoked discomfort among some readers and critics. Herbert portrays characters with severe disabilities as both sympathetic and terrifying — a combination that some felt exploited real people’s conditions for horror effects. Others defended the book as a compassionate exploration of how society marginalises those who look different.