Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter One
“The Inhuman Condition”
Here’s another one I didn’t remember–I guess we’re moving into uncharted territory, memory-wise. Again, this one isn’t terribly gory or brutal. It is weird, in terms of its horrific logistics: Though you don’t know it at first, this is a story about spells, and I very much doubt you’ve come across this method of enchantment before. You can sense the pleasure Barker derived from coming up with something truly novel throughout this collection, and in this case you get the sense that that pleasure is almost enough in itself to sustain the entire story.
“Inhuman” contains (as you might expect from the title) some memorable additions to Barker’s bestiary, but I found the humans involved much more compelling. The heroes of the story are a group of petty criminals who assault the homeless when they’re not committing burglaries, but Barker coaxes out from them genuine feelings of friendship and even of love that lesser writers would gloss over among this type of thug, insisting instead that societal ills or innate evil keep them on their path. Barker seems to say that they do this because they’re friends, even if they’d never articulate it that way themselves. Take this passage, which takes place when Karney (the main character) reveals to his cohort Brendan the supernatural origin of their friend Catso’s demise:
Karney caught sight of a telltale fullness at the edge of Brendan’s eyes. [Brendan’s] anger was camouflage–barely adequate–for a grief he had no mechanism to prevent. In Brendan’s present mood neither fear nor argument would convince him of the truth.
This is also one of the rare stories where things turn out okay for the main character–indeed, his station in life has the potential to markedly improve, though what we know of his nemesis throughout the rest of the story indicates that the newfound knowledge he has might come at quite a price. The execution’s a little pat–I think this is one of the rare places where Barker’s prose fails him: “He came to the mysteries on the page’s of Pope’s forbidden book as to an oasis. Drinking deeply, he looked forward with rare exhilaration to the pilgrimage ahead.”…I don’t know, just strikes me as a bit hokey–but I like the notion; it presages the conclusions of many of Barker’s later novels, in which hope emerges from horror a lot more regularly than it does here.