Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Four
“The Last Illusion”
From a very successful blending of genres to a, well, less successful one. “The Last Illusion” is the story upon which Barker’s final directorial effort, Lord of Illusions, was based. Lots of changes were made in the adaptation–I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember it involved a cult leader with some sort of mask and a Euro Satanist guy who looked like a member of KMFDM. That I haven’t seen it in years probably says something about my feelings toward the underlying story, since (I don’t know if you’ve noticed) I’m a pretty huge Clive Barker fan and could reasonably be expected to have the whole movie memorized.
Part of the problem here is the main character, Harry D’Amour, a down-on-his-luck private dick who’s come to specialize, much to his own chagrin, in cases involving the supernatural. D’Amour was intended to be the star of an entire series of adventures, but then, it was black-widow killer Julia who was intended to be the franchise monster of Hellraiser, not Pinhead; characters take on lives of their own, and the impact and length of those lives are dependent on the audience. (Barker, perhaps in order to rectify this discrepancy, has implied that D’Amour will be involved in the destruction of Pinhead in some future short story/novella, by the way.) He’s a likable enough guy, especially because so much of his life has been determined by his greatest failure–he lost a client to Hell, or as Barker calls it, the Gulfs–but this isn’t exactly new territory for private-eye fiction; “forget it, Harry–it’s the Gulfs,” you know what I mean? (It also doesn’t help that he was played in the movie by Scott Bakula, who to me looks much less suited to be a leading man than he is the guy who holds up the tube of anti-fungal ointment in an athlete’s foot medication commerical.)
But the real problem–the reason why not just “The Last Illusion” but also “Hell’s Event” just don’t work as well as the rest of Barker’s Books of Blood tales–is that the monsters, the demons and their summoners, are fundamentally square. Rather than representing freedom, ecstasy, transformation, transcendence, they’ve got the same venal motives as corrupt government officials or Mafia capos who find their monthly payoff short by a couple grand. They’ve got nothing to offer but punishment for transgression, rather than a reward for it. Barker reworks his concept of Hell considerably in Hellraiser and the novella upon which it’s based, The Hellbound Heart–in those stories, Hell offers pain and pleasure, indivisible, too much for the human mind to handle but still, perhaps, worth a peek. As articulated in The Books of Blood, though, Barker’s then-vision of Hell and its denizens works much better when the joke’s on them, as it is in “The Yattering and Jack,” where Hell’s pettiness and adherence to rules is played for laughs. Make it serious, though, and no amount of creatively bizarre demons (there are plenty here) or inventive ways to dispatch them (plenty again) can distract you from the fact that when you’re reading a Clive Barker story, you wanna be able to root for the beasts–or at least find them more interesting than their victims. Oh well.