The Rat King

My uncle recommended a fantastic work of teen fiction called Rotters by Daniel Kraus. This is a book about a teenage boy whose mother has died and he is reunited with the father he has never met. His father inducts the young boy into an ancient and secret society of grave robbers.

It was through this book I learned a rat king is not just an invention for children’s ballet but an actual thing. A horrifyingly disgusting thing.

At one point in the novel, father and son are digging up a grave when they come upon a nest of rats, which turns out to be a rat king. According to Wikipedia, a rat king is a collection of rats whose tails are bound together, through injury, excrement, or foreign substance, or all three. There is a famous rat king preserved in a museum in Hamelin, where they appear to have had more than one rat problem if one gives any credence to the legends of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.