“Thanks so much for sending THE RATS OF NEW YORK my way! I love an animal adventure story and appreciated the ambitiousness of the outline. Unfortunately, I found the writing style a bit difficult to connect with, as well as some pacing issues in the first half. I also would have liked to see less exposition and more dialogue between the rats.” “Thanks for sharing this charming story with me! The premise is really fun, and I was rooting for Matilda. But ultimately I wasn’t totally won over by the execution this time, so I don’t think I’m the right editorial champion.” “Thanks for sending along THE RATS OF NEW YORK. It’s a fun concept, but ultimately with middle grade being such a tough category right now, we have to be selective in what we take on. I’m sorry to say I’m going to pass.” “Thanks for sharing THE RATS OF NEW YORK with me. It’s an interesting premise, but the writing sounded a bit old fashioned to me. I’m sorry to say I don’t think I am the right editor for it.” “What a neat premise but sadly anthropomorphic novels are not my cup of tea. Many thanks for thinking of me!”
Sigh.
Of the editors who responded to the submission my agent sent out, these are the replies I got. It feels so close, but once again, I’m left empty-handed.
What I crave right now is an audience.
I’m sitting on two completed horror novels that have been making the rounds at different publishers for years, one even getting as far as the acquisitions committee before it was shut down. And then I have my middle grade horror novel, inspired by Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and The Mouse and His Child, both favorites of mine when I was a kid.
When I started writing The Rats of New York, a tale about different rat communities who have to depart from Coney Island in order to find food, I found it difficult to come up with a good enough premise for the rats to leave. Rats are notorious for not wanting to leave their favorite haunts. It takes something devastating, an environmental disaster, before they pack up and leave their homes. I’d read an article about housing developments going up at Coney Island and that was my original idea, but it didn’t work for the scope I wanted. I envisioned The Rats of New York as a modern-day version of The Gangs of New York, but with rat gangs! Fun! But I needed all rat communities to be disturbed and thrown into chaos, not just the Coney Island rats. Then the pandemic happened, which changed the behavior of humans, and that in turn affected New York’s rats.
A rat can only survive on humans’ garbage, and in New York, we’ve got trash. It’s a rat smorgasbord, and just one restaurant’s garbage can feed colonies of rats for generations. But during Covid in 2020 through 2021, most restaurants were shut down, and we were stuck in lockdown with people working and attending school from home. With the rats’ usual sources of garbage shut down, the NYC rodents became even more feral, making bold raids on street corners during the day or cannibalizing their own just to survive. Bobby Corrigan, a rodentologist, told NBC News in 2020, “These rats are fighting with one another; now the adults are killing the young in the nest and cannibalizing the pups.”
New York’s rats were having their own Gangs of New York moment, and I finally had the right circumstances to launch the middle grade chapter book I envisioned. From there, I spent my time during Covid lockdown writing a 44,000-word manuscript of Rats of New York. It was a fun process. I went to Coney Island and kneeled down to take photos from a rat’s point of view of the settings I was writing about. Then I went to Madame Tussauds wax museum in Times Square, another setting in Rats of New York, to do the same. Now I just want to see the book out in the world, and since it’s the outlier to the other horror I write and my sister is creating the illustrations, I’ve decided to go the indie route with this title, planning an October release date.
To get myself back in Rats of New York mode, I booked a tour on Violator that I’ve seen pop up in media: Garbage and Rats in New York City Walking Tour. I know quite a bit since reading Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan and other books for research, but it’s different walking around Lower Manhattan and observing live rat holes and the rat poison bait stations located outside. Some are your basic model that look like a small black briefcase left on a sidewalk, but I also learned about fancier versions that are disguised as rocks in front of prime eateries. The trick is these bait stations have to be constantly maintained, which is no small feat as rats are constantly adapting. They grow resilient to the poison so it no longer works, and if the bait station isn’t maintained, they move into it, turning the structure into rat condos.
The rats we see in New York aren’t a native species; they’re known as brown rats or Norway rats and were brought to the city when the Dutch anchored here in 1624; the critters crawled off the ships using the docking ropes and found New York a utopia of trash. They were staying. Now any cruise ship or boat docking at New York harbors has to use rat guards on the ropes, to keep rats from entering or exiting the city, though not too many want to leave.
People think the city is dirty now, but it was even more filthy and disease ridden until about the 1900s. When the Dutch came, they shoved all garbage into the East River, creating so much waste that it actually added to Manhattan’s landmass by as much as 25 percent. That means Battery Park City, Tribeca, the Financial District, the Lower East Side, Alphabet City, and Chinatown are almost entirely made up of garbage. No wonder the rats love it down there so much.
Before the streets of Manhattan were tended to by professional cleaners called White Wings, most people couldn’t see the cobblestones because they were covered by trash and feces (both human and animal). Hogs ran wild to help with the garbage, and the streets smelled with bloated animal carcasses left to rot. The city was ruled by Tammany Hall at the time, a government party known for its corruption, and the thick brown sludge that covered everything in the streets was known as “Tammany pudding.”
My favorite part of the tour was seeing the rat crack in Theater Alley, where there’s about a four-inch crack between two New York buildings. It’s too small to put any traps in, and the rats thrive there. You look through the crack, and you can see rats jumping around like it’s Disneyland. The next time friends or family come to visit me in New York, I’m putting that on the itinerary. To me, rats are the mascot of the city because they’re scrappy and almost impossible to eradicate. We even got a rat czar to oversee New York’s dirty little secret, and they’ve utterly failed.
The more I learn about New York’s rats, the more affection I have for them. They’ve survived poison campaigns, urban renewal, pandemics, and centuries of people trying to get rid of them. They’re adaptable, stubborn, and impossible to discourage. Maybe that’s another reason I keep returning to this story. After years of rejection, The Rats of New York has become a little ratlike itself. It just refuses to die.