Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter Three
“Revelations”
Another story I didn’t remember at all, and (not coincidentally, I’m guessing) another story that’s very, very low on gore–the lowest so far, I believe.
This is the first time Barker betrays his roots as a playwright–man, is this thing stagy. The story centers on three couples: an evangelist and his wife, heading toward a blow-up; the evangelist’s assistant and the eccentric daughter of the owner of the motel where the traveling preacher is staying, radiating instant heat; and the ghosts of a murderer and her slain husband, back at the motel where she killed him thirty years ago for one last shot at reconciliation. It’d make a heckuva one-act.
It’s actually easier to picture the story as acted out on stage, with lighting tricks used to give a spectral feel to the ghosts in their ’50s get-up, than it is to immerse yourself in its world the way you do with a normal Barker story. I sorta wish I’d reread it in college and had the presence of mind to adapt it for the stage myself. Personally I think some work would have to be done to beef up some of the characters, who feel much more stock than Barker’s usually do–would you be surprised to hear that the preacher is emotionally and physically abusive, that his wife is a pill-popper, and that the slain husband has only one thing on his mind? And it’s barely horror at all, ghosts and bullet wounds aside. But Barker would return to the fields of bodice-ripping romance far more fruitfully in the future–Galilee, to a certain extent Coldheart Canyon–so there’s some fun to be had in this amateur production before the curtain’s rung down.