Book Three, Chapter Five

“Human Remains”

NB: I wrote and attempted to post this entry yesterday, but technical difficulties with the site prevented it from going up until this morning. Sorry folks. Blame the Cornell engineering grads who run this thing. Go Big Red!

This is the first story in the collection of which I had no recollection whatsoever. When I got a few pages into it I recognized that it was included in the trade paperback collection of Barker’s Tapping the Vein, his old Marvel/Epic series of short-story adaptations (The Comic Books of Blood, in other words), which I recently flipped through, but other than that, nothin’. My guess is that’s because it’s noticeably less gruesome than most of the other stories–probably the least bloody so far (though there is one nasty moment, it’s relatively run-of-the-mill in terms of its specifics). It’s Barker’s transgressive gore that makes the biggest impression the first time around.

But my forgetfulness shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the story’s no good. It’s Barker’s take on the doppelganger and it’s another sad one, with an elegiac ending overlaid with a wry, mournful sense of humor. (It’s also one of Barker’s most explicitly gay stories at this point in his career.) And interestingly, the doomed character this time around is pretty interesting, at least as far as his profession goes–suffice it to say he’s no accountant. But he doesn’t have a very rich inner life; indeed, his surface pretty much is his life. As his will to live is sapped he lets his physical appearance go to hell without a care. His last confrontation with his destroyer reveals that it’s actually better at being human than he is, in some ways. I think that’s the real horror here: Our hero starts out worrying that he’s a failure, and by the end all doubt has been removed–but his failure runs much deeper than he’d imagined. The loss of his life, his looks, even his soul is almost no big deal compared to the loss of his ability to spend a lifetime kidding himself.

Book Three, Chapter Four

“Scape-Goats”

It’s strange to re-encounter the characters in these stories only to discover, in many cases, that they’re now younger than I am. When I first read these books, in high school, these jaded hedonists and criminals, these sexually omnivorous pleasure-seekers and self-medicators, they all seemed so much older and so much more experienced. Now I’m on the ill-fated voyage with the bitterly self-absorbed holiday-makers of “Scape-Goats,” and I find myself one year their senior. I don’t even think of them as adults anymore, because since I’m still a kid, anyone younger than me must be as well.

At least now I have some context into which I can put the 26-year-old oversexed backstabbers on the good ship “Emanuelle”–they’re rich hipsters, trust-fund kids. They’re at home enough on this yacht that they–I say “they” rather than “Barker” because this is the first story in the collection narrated beginning to end in the first person–don’t even bother explaining whose it is or where they’re from. It doesn’t really matter, though, since the point of the story is that they’re all going to end up swept away by the tide of time. Rather literally, in fact.

I think this is another very fine story, owing mostly to the way it focuses on the emotions of futility and resignation, too rarely tapped in a genre that is tailor-made to make use of them. In that way it’s the spiritual sister to “Pig Blood Blues,” right down to the animal imagery in both story and title–“Scape-Goats”‘ doomed sheep are every bit as memorable in their passivity as the pig was in its aggression.

What you really have here is four irredeemably solipsistic people–even Frankie, for all her insight into the callowness of herself and her companions, can’t seem to will herself out of it; for pete’s sake, she fucks a guy because she can’t be bothered to deny him–who are forced from being the only things in their respective worlds that matter into things that don’t matter at all. To do this Barker relies on images of some of nature’s great levelers–erosion, putrefaction, the fog, the sea, the sweep of history. The brief moments of initiative and even savagery that the characters display seem even more pointless when contrasted against these insurmountable forces. It’s only when it can’t possibly make a difference anymore that Frankie shows a flash of true feeling for another person; it’s only then that this beautiful young woman, who’s paraded her nakedness and her sex before us like they couldn’t be more inconsequential to her, becomes truly attractive; it’s only then that the loss hurts us, and becomes hard to forget.

Let’s kick things off tonight with another installment of “Meet the Horror Blogosphere”: Presenting Sylvian L.’s Killing in Style, which bills itself as “Reflections about the giallo.” That’s really what it is–a series of short, thoughtful little posts on various stylish Italian slasher films, as well as movies that inspired their asthetic, like Blow-Up. This is a heckuva find if you enjoy the genre, or just good writing on horror.

Speaking of giallo, life imitates it: True-crime blogger Steve Huff reports that Mexico City is being stalked by a serial killer who is either a woman or a female impersonator and who has murdered four elderly women this year–three of whom all had prints of the same painting, Jean-Baptisted Greuze’s “Boy in Red Waistcoat,” in their homes. It sounds like something out of a Dario Argento movie, doesn’t it? But unfortunately for the victims, who had the bad luck of being women murdered in Mexico, this particularly movie is unlikely to have a satisfying conclusion.

In other news of the real-world weird, Mickey Kaus has been reporting on a series of “mystery stench” outbreaks in D.C., L.A., and…Wales? Kaus semi-suspects bioweapon experimentation; these things do happen…

Which leads us perfectly to our first Dark But Shining link of the day: Rick Geerling’s encomium for Stephen King’s military-experiment-gone-awry horror novella The Mist. Rick points out that I love this story. Everyone should.

Next, guest-blogger Aaron Weisbrod makes with the quotability: “to me, true horror is an abandonment of all hope.” My sentiments exactly!

Fellow DBS guest-blogger (and writer of the new Western horror comic Strangeways) Matt Maxwell pens a thought-provoking essay on the thin line between horror and other genres, especially sci-fi. I’m generally someone who doesn’t much care about or for genre boundaries–I have no problem viewingEyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures, Deliverance, Lost Highway, and maybe even Casino as horror movies, though they’re each other kinds of movies as well. Maybe that’s why passages from Matt’s essay like this one threw me:

John Carpenter

Book Three, Chapter Three

“Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”

This is a comparatively unassuming story, as far as The Books of Blood go. Barker’s not scaling any notable thematic or rhetorical heights here, nor is he pushing the envelope in terms of imagery. (There’s one really nasty moment in there, and it’ll test your stomach, shall we say, but one’s not a whole lot when you consider the source.) Even the protagonist is just sort of an everysquare. The monster is novel enough, but it’s not meant to blow your mind a la “In the Hills, the Cities” or anything like that.

No, the modest pleasures of this story are basically derived from the very fact that the pleasures are so modest. This is a revenge story, pure and simple–Kill Bill with ghosts–and if that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like Barker’s take on it. The real interest lies in where Barker’s potboiler deviates from the formula. Like I said, he’s not going nuts here, but there are flourishes now and then that are worth picking apart.

For example, our soon-to-be late protagonist Ronald Glass reacts with disgust bordering on the pathological when he discovers that he’s the unwitting house accountant for an enormous, illegal hardcore porn empire–it’s not just the notion that revolts him, but the fleshy, hairy, puckered bodies that constitute the goods. However, once the frame-up job hits the fan and his life is ruined because of it, he reacts unhesitatingly with wetworks-style violence. Perhaps Barker is getting at the way straight society is neurotic over sexuality but more or less at home with violence?

Once Glass is apprehended by his victims’ underworld cohorts, he’s tortured to death, but the torture scene itself is strangely glossed over, pretty much the opposite of what you’d expect from Barker. I think the depiction of torture is one of the most acutely horrifying tools at the disposal of an artist (the facts that I’m a horror buff and that Casino is my favorite Scorsese movie are not unconnected). So why does the god of splatterpunk steer clear of it? Is it because the shlubs who populate the story, even on the criminal side, are so workaday that they can’t bear the weight of typically Barkerian excess?

Then there’s the ghost-Glass’s first victim, whose crime is simply being a boor. This isn’t the first time Barker has implied that a failure to be interesting is a capital crime, and it won’t be the last; it’s interesting that the executioner here is also a drab little man, his spectral condition excepted of course.

The quest for vengeance culminates in yet another spectacularly gory assault on the sanctity of family. To be sure, the child involved makes out a whole lot better than does the one in “Rawhead Rex,” but years of therapy, if not institutionalization, are certainly in its future. This sort of behavior is (or was) generally taboo even in horror, but for Barker it appears the violation of taboo is an end in itself, even when the means are as straightforward as they are in “Confessions.”

It’s a fine little story, underlined with one last subtle embellishment–the parenthetical accusation that hangs over Glass, even in the title of the story that chronicles his attempt to avenge the besmirching of his good name. One last kick in the nuts of the too-ordinary guy. I get the sense that that’s the taboo Barker’s really gunning for.

Book Three, Chapter Two

“Rawhead Rex”

If I had to recommend one story from The Books of Blood to horror fandom in general, this would be it. Werewolf fans, Grendel fans, Frankenstein or Bigfoot or orc or troll or Jason or Alien or whatever fans–stop what you’re doing, click on that Amazon link at the end of this post, buy Books of Blood Vols. 1-3, and the second you receive it, read “Rawhead Rex” immediately. You will never find a better monster-run-amok story no matter how hard you look.

The plot is pure simplicity–in an English country village slowly being overrun by tourists, a local yokel unearths a 9-foot-tall monster that kills and eats people, especially children. This monster–Rawhead, it’s called; also the King (hence the “Rex” of the title)–proceeds to do exactly that, in abundance. That’s pretty much it. GodDAMN is it great.

The genius of the story lies in the absolute, single-minded savagery with which Barker chronicles the rampage. For example, when I said Rawhead eats children, I was not fucking around. The totality with which the concept of the family is violated in this story is breathtaking–children are yanked from parents’ arms and devoured right in front of them, they’re yanked out of the family car and vomit down the creature’s head as he bites their faces off while the parents look on, helpless. It’s unbelievably gruesome, and powerful. Church and Law offer no more protection than Family, either.

The story’s full of the sort of primal-fear, fight-or-flight-inspiring images that kicked off “The Skins of the Fathers,” with this enormous angry monster bursting down doors, smashing through windows, running down the High Street destroying everything in sight. It puts that cold fear in your gut that you’d get if you went to take out the garbage and found yourself five feet away from a grizzly bear–only worse, because when the eyes of this beast find you they’re full of a horrible self-awareness, hatred as well as hunger. Actually, they’re filled with joy. Rawhead loves what he does.

As becomes apparent, thematically speaking, as the story unfolds, Barker’s original idea for Rawhead was of a giant killer penis. As such “Rawhead Rex” is one of Barker’s most searing explorations of gender politics (one of his favorite topics to tackle through horror, thus far most explicitly in “Dread,” “The Skins of the Fathers,” “Jacqueline Ess,” and “Son of Celluloid”; the sex act, of course, is virtually omnipresent throughout the entire anthology).

And there are the usual razor-sharp prose moments, of course, my favorite being when a newly bereaved father can no longer cry: “This time the tears didn’t begin. This time there was just an anger that was almost wonderful.”

Even some of Barker’s more problematic recurring tropes are rock-solid here. Take the quiet, almost curious–indeed, almost welcoming–resignation many of his characters feel immediately before being dispatched by some hideous creature or other: I often find it if not difficult to believe then at least demanding of more explanation than Barker’s willing to give it (cf. Ricky in “Son of Celluloid,” for example), but here he ponies up a convincing argument in its favor: “[He] just stood and watched. There was nothing in him but awe. Fear was for those who still had a chance of life: he had none.” If horror is hopelessness (and I see I’m not alone in thinking that), then this is horror at its purest.

“Rawhead Rex” is probably best known for its legendarily awful movie adaptation, which is a real shame, because it would make an excellent horror movie, albeit dark as anything this side of the original Texas Chain Saw, and Rawhead would make an unforgettable monster. With his orcs (and especially) his Uruk-Hai, Peter Jackson proved that (much as he proved the filmability of Lovecraft with his Watcher in the Water). Meanwhile, Steven Bissette’s never-realized graphic-novel version trumped the one that did see print, by Steve Niles and Les Edwards. But the best version, I assure you, is in your head. Go unleash it.

Book Three, Chapter One

“Son of Celluloid”

To a certain extent this story, with its examination of Hollywood glamour, is an antecedent of Barker’s delightfully trashy La-La-Land epic Coldheart Canyon, written almost two decades later and after Barker himself had had a great deal of experience inside Tinseltown, both as a filmmaker and as a resident. (When I interviewed him before Coldheart came out I mentioned this connection, and his response was “My God, you really do know my work.”) As it lacks the depth and detail of that novel, “Son” does not really provide a particularly groundbreaking look at the dream factory–it’s no great insight that Hollywood’s pleasures are illusory, or that through the magic of the movies the beauty of the stars never fades, you know?

But in this haunted-theatre tale Barker succeeds where he exploits very specific aspects of the Hollywood illusion. Confronted with a deadly Western scenario, Barker notes the threatened characters resentment of the genre’s “forced machismo, the glorification of dirt and cheap heroism,” and its “handful of lethal lies–about the glory of America’s frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes.” Later a character is seduced by a spectral Monroe, and for anyone who’s felt a real ache of desire for an actor or actress you’ll never even meet, much less make love with, the moment’s electrically charged:

He was within a couple of yards of her when a breeze out of nowhere billowed her skirt up around her waist. She laughed, half closing her eyes, as the surf of silk rose and exposed her. She was naked underneath.

Ricky reached for her again and this time she didn’t avoid his touch. The dress billowed up a little higher and he stared, fixated, at that part of Marilyn he had never seen, the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.

Of course, this is Clive Barker we’re talking about here, so there’s more than meets the eye (pun intended–if you read the story you’ll get it) to that “fur divide” and to Marilyn herself. It’s one of three knockout horror images in this story–the second involving a really creative way of removing someone’s eyeballs, and the third a sudden eruption of evil out of the orifices of a picture of innocence.

The story’s structure is memorable as well–it starts telling one story, and then as if in homage to another silver-screen goddess, Janet Leigh, suddenly becomes a different story entirely. (It has a coda reminiscent of ‘Salem’s Lot, also.) I also really like the story’s heroine, Birdy–her no-bullshit demeanor (and some of the story’s dialogue as well) are precursors to Kirsty from The Hellbound Heart (aka Hellraiser), while her weight and her remora-like relationship to the Hollywood deities (she works in a movie theatre) are later echoed in Tammy from Coldheart Canyon. Ricky is well-sketched as well, a man in his mid-thirties (that’s not revealed till the end, actually) who in every respect is trying to live like a 20-year-old in perpetuity.

Not the best story in the series, then (see tomorrow for another possible claimant to that particular title), but as befits the subject matter, hey, that’s entertainment.

Book Two, Chapter Five

“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”

I think Book Two started off a little shakily, to be honest. “Dread” (though I know it has its partisans) is powerful but uneven, and “Hell’s Event” is a bit random. But boy, does this volume finish strong. “Jacqueline Ess,” “Skins of the Fathers,” and this story, a bizarre, sad, and troubling riff on Poe’s original, are each singular and strange and enormously effective horror.

As befits its semi-cover-version storyline, in which Poe’s ape-run-amok murder mystery is grafted uncomfortably and disastrously into the present day, “New Murders” is about the horror of getting old. That horror is twofold: On the one hand, main character Lewis feels that he’s outlived the usefulness of being alive, if you will–his best days are well behind him and he’s acutely aware that, in that sense, there’s really no point to sticking around.

In some ways Lewis was almost glad to be old and close to leaving the century to its own devices. Yes, the snow froze his marrow. Yes, to see a young girl with the face of a goddess uselessly stirred his desires. Yes, he felt like an observer now instead of a participator.

But it had not always been this way.

On the other hand, even as Lewis’s life thins, he is overwhelmed by a surfeit of life around him. As he investigates a brutal killing that has landed an old friend in jail, he’s constantly bombarded by an excess of experience–powerful smells, hideous faces, disconcerting sounds, painful physical trials, diquieting lusts.

It was too much. The dizziness throbbed through Lewis’ cortex. Was this death? The lights in the head, and the whine in the ears?

He closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the lovers, but unable to shut out the noise. It seemed to go on forever, invading his head. Sighs, laughter, little shrieks.

Twice during “New Murders” Lewis muses on the distinction between fiction and reality. At first he dismisses it as a concern of the young–when you’re old, he thinks, it all becomes part of the same mental landscape. But by the end of the story over-reliance on convenient fictions has led to tragedy, and his opinion changes completely–something either is, or isn’t.

Lewis, in the end, realizes he falls into the latter category.

The real horror about getting old, according to “New Murders,” is that you can no longer afford your fiction. An unfixable mistake, an unforgivable crime, an unforgettable tragedy, an unhallowed death at the end of your days can ruin all that’s come before it.

The past, their past together, was dead. This final chapter in their joint lives soured utterly everything that preceded it, so that no shared memory could be enjoyed without the pleasure being spoilt….No innocence, no history of joy could remain unstained by that fact. Silently they mourned the loss…of their own past. Lewis understood now [the] reluctance to live when there was such loss in the world.

The fiction Lewis and his friends believed superior to reality is not just vulnerable to its intrusion but ultimately hollow and lousy in and of itself. Self-blandishments and pretense are not palliative but corrupting and destructive–the central horrific figure in this story, about whom I shall say no more, is the embodiment of this notion, very, very vividly so. And as the world marches on the shattered fictions and those who harbored them are left behind.

Book Two, Chapter Four

“The Skins of the Fathers”

In many ways this story is simply a dry run for the later, more ambitious novella Cabal, which was grafted on and lent its name to the sixth and final volume of The Books of Blood here in the U.S. There as here we have an apocalyptic confrontation between the denizens of a reactionary American small town and a community of monsters more threatening by virtue of their very existence than by any physical danger they may or may not pose. There as here the proceedings function as a metaphor for humanity’s fear of that which is different, though in Cabal it’s homosexuality that’s the subtextual target whereas here it’s women, specifically women functioning independently of men. Indeed, Barker goes so far as to make this story into a reverse creation myth, revealing how man sprung from the union of woman and monster, only to enslave the former and eradicate the latter.

Cabal‘s monsters aren’t the beasts of this story–they’re more or less human, so they have personalities, they speak English, and so forth. In that way and in several others Cabal is a more rewarding work. “Skins” is simply a much more straightforward horror story, and a terrific one. Things get cranking right away in a terrifically vivid chase scene in the desert–city slicker Davidson walks a mile or so into the wasteland away from his broken-down car to solicit help from what he thinks is a passing parade of some kind, only to discover, with about a half a mile remaining between him and the members of the procession, that they aren’t even remotely human. Davidson’s split-second switchover to abject terror as one of the creatures bolts from the group and runs across the featureless desert straight for him is utterly convincing and (ahem) pungently evoked. The thought of this huge beast barreling in your direction as you make a run for a car that you have no hope of moving even if you can get inside it before this thing catches you and tears you to pieces is such a primal fear–it’s the kind of image you’d imagine preceded and gave birth to everything else in the story!

“Skins” is also a chance for Barker to show off his chops in creating uniquely Barkerian monsters. In the same way that “Jacqueline Ess” showed him flexing his gore muscles, “Skins” offers full vistas of the bizarre menagerie we’ve caught fleeting glimpses of in “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Hell’s Event”:

One was perhaps eighteen or twenty feet tall. Its skin, that hung in folds on its muscle, was a sheath of spikes, its head a cone of exposed teeth, set in scarlet gums. Another was three-winged, its triple-ended tail thrashing the dust with reptilian enthusiasm. A third and fourth were married together in a union of monstrosities the result of which was more disgusting than the sum of its parts. Through its length and breadth this symbiotic horror was locked in seeping marriage, its limbs thrust in and through wounds in its partner’s flesh. Though the tongues of its heads were wounded together it managed a cacaphonous howl.

See what I mean? Barker’s primary technique is really just to sketch a vague picture of a beast by providing a few key details, the sort of details your mind is unlikely ever to conjure without his prompting, and let you take it from there. (I was particularly dumbfounded by the beast whose head is a featureless cylinder.) It’s an effective technique, a sort of “guided” version of the CW about the best horror being left to one’s imagination. He’ll leave it to your imagination all right, but not before giving you a loaner from his own.

One final thought about this story: A lot of it is unfair. The rednecks get what they deserve, for the most part, and that’s fine; the abusive husband and father too. But some of the former end up headed for an extremely slow and painful death, so gratuitously awful that even the woman around whom the whole fiasco really centered (due to her dalliance with the monsters and subsequent conception and childbirth years back) is horrified and desperate to save them, even though it’s pretty much impossible. And the latter wasn’t abusive until the monsters appeared, cuckolded him, and essentially drove him insane. And what about Lucy, the monsters’ mate, who is left unprotected by them, has her child taken by them, and is ultimately abandoned to the desert? And what about Eleanor, the pistol-packin’ mama who’s just as much a woman as anyone but condemned to suffer alongside the male rednecks because of her too-enthusiastic embrace of American machismo? And for pete’s sake what about Davidson, whose only crime was a highway breakdown and who was dragged into the final confrontation only because someone literally pointed a gun at his head? (Not, perhaps, the head the proverb refers to, but a head nonetheless.) This is perhaps the clearest illustration yet that the deadliest sin in Barker’s world is the failure to be extraordinary; is that really a mortal sin, and should such sinners be so extravagantly damned?

Book Two, Chapter Three

“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”

This story is practically lousy with insight.

Jacqueline told me lies at that first meeting….I suppose she could have told me the truth then and there, and I would have lapped it up–I believe I was utterly devoted from the beginning. But it’s difficult to remember quite how and when interest in another human being flares into something more committed, more passionate. It may be that I am inventing the impact she had on me at that first meeting, simply re-inventing history to justify my later excesses. I’m not sure.

More.

If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your enquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.

More.

It wasn’t that she was feeding on me. I want to be clear about that. She was no lamia, no succubus. What happened to me, my fall from grace with ordinary life if you like, was of my own making. She didn’t bewitch me; that’s a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. Does that make any sense? I’d lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of law, and I was tired of it. She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance. But that was my decision. Understand that. This has always been my decision.

More.

It’s not a small world, when there’s only one face in it you can bear to look upon, and that face is lost somewhere in a maelstrom. It’s not a small world when the few, vital memories of your object of affection are in danger of being trampled out by the thousands of moments that assail you every day, like children tugging at you, demanding your sole attention.

There’s a lot more where that came from in this, one of Barker’s finest short stories. I didn’t really remember just how good it was until I reread it, actually.

It starts off with a sort of traditional fable/fairy-tale structure, extraordinary things happening with minimal explanation or justification. In this way the main character’s name echoes not only that of another mysterious and captivating woman, Jackie O, but of another character whose bizarre story illustrates the absurd horrors of the human heart, Josef K.

We then switch over to the first-person “testimony” excerpted above, by that of one Oliver Vassi, Jacqueline’s doomed lover. (That’s pretty much all she has.) It’s a switchover that shouldn’t work but does, even as the POV is switched back and forth several more times. Barker makes the most of the point-counterpoint through his prose–just by way of a for instance, as our male interlocutors shower Jacqueline with worship and fear, we barely notice that her habitual internal exclamations of “My God, this can’t be,” internalized supplications to the great Pater, gradually disappear from her mental vocabulary, until in her final triumph they are nowhere to be found.

It’s a story about gender and power, and the relationship between the two. As Oliver says,

I was convinced that something in her system was awry…On reflection, of course, that seems laughably naive. To think she wouldn’t have known that she contained such a power. But it was easier for me to picture her as prey to such skill, than mistress of it. That’s a man speaking of a woman; not just me, Oliver Vassi, of her, Jacqueline Ess. We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.

Students of the superhero genre will doubtless be interested to learn that Jacqueline’s powers fall into that traditionally female domain–the fluid powers of the telekinetic. The argument often goes that such powers, along with invisibility, telepathy, intangibility and so forth, are to be seen as inferior through their constant association with femaleness. But “Jacqueline Ess” is maybe the greatest act of reclamation for telekinesis ever, and I’m not even talking about the beautiful passages in which the resting Jacqueline’s flesh ripples and flows like a lake, or when her genitals pulse and throb like a sentient flower: Simply put, this is one of the most gruesomely violent stories I’ve ever read, and that really is saying something. When Jacqueline kills somebody, you know they’ve been killed. When I first read this story back in high school, I got about a sentence into the part where Barker describes the way the taut flesh of a man’s forehead and nose splits down the center as Jacqueline mentally flays him alive before I grunted in disgust and literally put the book down. I’d never done that before and I don’t think I’ve ever done it since. Barker really pushes body horror to its limits here, in the same way that he’ll push his phanatsmagorical bestiary/physiology to its limits in the next story.

There are many other moments to savor–the humor (Jacqueline’s patronizing shrink is named Dr. Blandish), the sex (telekinetically enhanced and super, super hot), the turns of phrase (the gorgeous iambic pentameter of “my fall from grace with ordinary life,” echoing “In the Hills, the Cities”‘s concluding “He interrupted neither with his name”), the bracingly direct graffiti shrine to Jacqueline, the Klaus Nomi-esque pimp she enslaves toward the story’s end, the punning use of “Her Will” in the title, and especially the last paragraphs, as transcendent as those of “In the Hills,” in my opinion. A greatest hit, without question.

Would that it were not so, but Where the Monsters Go has been experiencing technical difficulties out the wazoo lately. From erroneous dates to spam links to refusing to accept pings to maybe even dropping included sites off the list, it’s been giving me agita. Unfortunately, all these problems are the fault of blo.gs, which ever since Yahoo took it over has been sort of like a catastrophic dirigible accident. All I can advise users of the list or owners of the sites listed therein to do for now is be patient, and email me if your site gets dropped or you run into a similarly major problem. Thank you kindly.

At the risk of this feature becoming “ADDTF’s Dark But Shining Watch,” there’s a lot of good stuff going on over Chez Costello/Geerling/Melrose these days.

First, ther’s Sam Costello’s review of Uzumaki, one of the two best horror comics I’ve ever read (and one of the best comics of any kind I’ve ever read, for that matter). I think this is pretty close to essential reading for horror fans.

Second, here’s guest-blogger Aaron Weisbrod’s assertion that zombies aren’t scary. As someone who’s been scared by at least four zombie movies, I don’t know what I can say besides “nuh-uh.” But Aaron doesn’t do much to back up his assertion–he doesn’t even go so far as to say why, or even if, he’s never been scared by them. Mostly he focuses on how zombies are a surefire route to lousy storytelling in the hands of lazy writers. Well, yeah, but what isn’t? The comment thread is full of interesting and impassioned rebuttals; by all means read and make your own decision.

Third, here’s links to all their October horror-fest posts so far. Go nuts!

Moving on, Phoebe Gloeckner, one of the Greatest Living Cartoonists (and a big-time Uzumaki fan, btw), has been blogging again. This would be unalloyed good news were it not for the fact that in the September 17th entry (if there’s a permalink I can’t find it, so just scroll down) she reveals that she was alternately condescended to and excoriated during an appearance on NPR, by the show’s conservative and “liberal” co-hosts alike. Having your harrowing portrayal of childhood sexual abuse called “pornographic” by bluenosed nitwit Michael Medved is one thing, but he wasn’t alone, apparently. Now that’s scary.

On a more traditionally monstrous note, today’s installment of “Meet the Horror Blogosphere” brings us to the aptly named Giant Monster Blog. Who could say no to a blog whose subhead reads “My thoughts on everything from Angilas to Zigra?” If you dig the Kong or the kaiju, you should make this one a regular stop.

Clive Barker to collaborate with Frank Quitely? It could happen, if Barker has his way–Jonathan Encarnacion’s interview with Quitely, the best artist in genre comics today, at Silver Bullet Comics reveals that Barker is a big fan and has made an offer to collaborate on something, anything. Oh please oh please oh please. (Hat tip to Jim Dougan for the link.)

Finally, One Louder links to the video for “Give Me Every Little Thing,” a terrific P-Funk-meets-Pet-Shop-Boys track by the fun DFA-produced dance outfit The Juan Maclean. It’s kind of like a visual mash-up between 2001, Midnight Cowboy, and ’70s smut. NSFW, but delightful in nearly every other way. And while you’re at the Waverly Films directorial group’s site, be sure to check out the video for Jason Forrest’s “Steppin’ Off”, which is the most note-perfect recreation of ’70s arena-rock faux-Tolkienisms since Spinal Tap‘s “Stonehenge” sequence–or The Song Remains the Same for that matter…

Book Two, Chapter Two

“Hell’s Event”

You don’t read too many horror stories about track and field competitions, do you?

This story’s a tough one to really groove on, if you ask me. The conceit is just a little too, I don’t know, frivolous? I really hate to do this and I’ve tried to avoid it in my discussions of the stories so far, but I think I’ve got to just tell you what the plot is for you to understand what I mean. So, SPOILER WARNING…

Hell secretly enters a demon in a charity half-marathon in London. If a human wins, democracy will reign for another 100 years (“another”?–ed. Hey, it’s Barker’s optimistic assessment of the 20th century, not mine!). If the demon wins, the world will end.

Okay. So that’s what that is. Like I said, it’s a tough one. But still, there are pleasures to be found here.

1) This is the second of Barker’s stories to deal with the rules by which Hell is obliged to abide (the other being “The Yattering and Jack”). Considering how chaotic Barker’s Earth is, it’s curious his Hell is bound to follow regulations just like any other competitor. “We stand for order, you know,” says Hell’s human summoner in this story. “Not chaos. That’s just heavenly propaganda.” Obviously, for those familiar with Barker’s work in general, this theme is taken up once again, though far less lightly, in Hellraiser and Hellbound.

2) This is also the second of Barker’s stories to deal with issues of race (the other being “The Midnight Meat Train”). Tellingly, as in the earlier story, the character who most explicitly voices bigoted sentiments is a monster who subsequently goes down to defeat. But things were certainly set up before then, from the second we learn that the heroic protagonist Joel Jones is black and Hell’s contestant is posing as a white South African. I was also struck by the way Barker notes that racists view black people as not just less human, but also more human, than themselves.

3) There are just a lot of really great Barker horror moments–what happens to Jones’s manager when he sneaks one last look back at the thing coming out of the portal to Hell; the way one of the demons transforms its face from that of a human into what Barker describes as “a fan of knives” before arriving at its final insectoid form; the gleefully gruesomely described fate of Jones himself, making literal use out of the fact that he’s been voted by the tabloids as “the best loved black face in England”; and the fate of Hell’s human agent when the race is over, one that presages the bodies-past-their-limits imagery of the (superior) story that follows this one. (Tune in tomorrow!)

4) Though we are with both Jones and his manager Cameron only briefly as compared to similar protagonists in other stories, they’re both made pretty damn likable in a pretty short period of time. Perhaps it’s because so much of their respective narratives involve physical striving–Joel in his race, Cameron on his bicycle. Our desire to see them succeed is almost sympathetically physical.

5) It’s quiet, but you can hear a common Barker theme being played there at the end, as the knowing children in the crowd of spectators lead their horrified parents away–some people’s minds are as able to accommodate the unnatural as they are anything else.

Book Two, Chapter One

“Dread”

When I was in college a professor illustrated the nature of Jesus’ parables with the following clue: “To solve this riddle, change one pig.” The idea is that the way to interpret the clue is contained within the clue itself.

In much the same way, “Dread” is about what it does: exploiting specific phobias. In that sense it’s a very nasty, sordid story. As gruesome as some of the earlier tales are, this is the first one that makes you think, “Jesus, am I really reading this stuff?” It’s voyeuristic and unpleasant. And depending on how you relate to the three phobias encountered, it’s scary as shit.

In my opinion it’s the first of the three phobias–a vegetarian’s pathological fear of meat–that is the most harrowing. First of all, we’ve seen Barker make comparisons between the state of being alive and being meat before, obviously, in “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” so there’s that resonance: the way carnivorousness reduces all of us to consumer or consumptible.

Secondly, I’m married to a vegetarian, and in fact have recently become one myself. (After Hurricane Katrina I really couldn’t bring myself to cause, however indirectly, an animal to suffer so that I can enjoy my double quarter-pounder. No moral judgment on meat-eaters intended at all, mind you–it’s just a personal decision, like the way I won’t stop petting my cat until she decides petting time is over.) Amy’s vegetarianism, incidentally, is directly attributable to scenes of ostentatious carnivorousness in two horror films, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (when the raptors eat the cow) and Mike Nichols’s Wolf (when Nicholson eats the deer)–I’ve already got some experience, therefore, with the connection between vegetarianism and a fear of not being a vegetarian, which is what the relevant character in the story is faced with. Inasmuch as vegetarianism in women is often connected to disordered eating and my wife is herself a recovering anorexic, that’s another direct line to the dread (you see?) experienced by the pertinent character in the story–even more so because her choice is literally one between eating meat (eventually, eating rotten meat) or starving to death.

Thirdly, and I think most insidiously, that character, Cheryl Fromm, is a popular, intelligent, gorgeous blonde college student. We’ve all known popular, intelligent, gorgeous young blondes; what Barker is exploiting is simultaneous lust for and resentment of them. Cheryl’s degradation is presented painstakingly, methodically, and explicitly. We watch her lash out in anger, sob, urinate, bathe, vomit, and ultimately give in to the needs of her body and eat the meat. (No double meaning intended there from Barker, oh I’m sure.) So there’s the “serves you right for not being my possession already, bitch” element, I’m afraid–the desire to punish people for being beautiful, or for being more than we are. It’s unpleasant, but if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s undoubtedly present.

(I also think Barker taps into the strange eroticization of women eating, which arises from the fact that act is all but taboo in today’s society. Gregg Araki made the best use of this I’ve yet seen in his film Nowhere, which boasted a scene in which a group of bulimic teenagers binge with all the wet groans and grunts of a gangbang.)

The other fears? They’re tackled well, in their way, though I admit they’re a lot less scary to me than the meat one. My pal Jason Adams appears to disagree; your mileage, as they say, may vary. For my money, the approach to Fear #2 is a little too baroque, Fear #3 a little too forced. But they both offer something truly horrific–respectively, the dissolution of a mind over the course of a couple of pages, and a really direct and nasty definition of being tortured to death. Like I said, you’ll think, “Jesus, am I really reading this stuff?”

Book One, Chapter Six

“In the Hills, the Cities”

Hoo boy.

This story starts off similarly to “The Midnight Meat Train,” with a snapshot summary of disillusionment. The earlier story kicks off by detailing how main character Kaufman’s lifelong long-distance infatuation with New York City deteriorated so badly during his first six months of actually living there that he now sees the town he once referred to as “the Palace of Delights” as just another city, but worse–one that “bred death.” “In the Hills” begins by outlining the dissolution of a love affair, first from the point of view of Mick, who’s come to see his journalist boyfriend Judd as a humorless pedant, then of Judd, who regards Mick as a vapid prettyboy. As in “The Midnight Meat Train,” a momentary truce between the ex-beloveds is reached–in the former through the quiet beauty of a New York dawn or twilight, and in the latter through sex, where passion can express itself without words.

Maybe things won’t be so bad, then.

The story continues to draw you in, but this time through a difference from earlier stories. In both “Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” the first time Barker shifts the focal point of the narrative from the protagonist to the antagonist, he makes you aware almost immediately of the nature of the horror you’re about to confront. Right away you know that you’re in the presence of a serial killer with a sense of purpose; right away you know that you’re in the presence of a hungry, evil animal.

But when “In the Hills” makes a similar shift, what, exactly, are you hearing and seeing? A Serbian villager laughs to himself that the expression “a head in the clouds” will be made real. “Limbs” and “flanks” are being lashed together by an entire town, one of two that’s been so mobilized. There’s the potential for trouble since (we learn) the long-time organizer of this special day for one of the towns has died, leaving her inexperienced daughter in charge. But…that’s it, really.

What’s going on? Barker is coy, very coy indeed, for a very long time. He is able to rely on what the villager himself knows to be true–that what is going on is beyond rational comprehension. It defies belief, it beggars belief. By the time you grasp what was happening, you’re busy conjuring the image in your head, wrapping your brain around its immensity, when you see this, at the end of the relevant passage:

The badly knitted flank might not have caused an accident in itself, but further weakened by the frailty of the competitors it set a scene for death on an unprecedented scale.

Barker waits until the exact moment when you puzzle out what is happening before abruptly dispensing with all pretense of hope. When you finally grasp what you’re reading, it’s too late. As it is for the villagers. As it is for Judd and Mick.

This is virtuoso writing.

I’m reluctant to say much more about this story. It’s my favorite piece of writing by Barker, and one of my favorite pieces of writing by anyone, ever. The prose is so confident, so demanding of attention, awe, terror, it would be churlish (for me, impossible) not to go along with it. I actually wonder whether Barker understood just how good this was as he was writing it (it reminds me of the breathless rock fan’s questioning of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant as to what it was like in the studio when “Stairway” was being recorded); I sort of think he did, and at any rate I know he does now, since I believe he regards it as among his finest work himself. But you can get that sense from the writing, which after it turns a certain corner is as relentless as anything you will ever read. “From now on…they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.”

The concept at the story’s core is sui generis, by the way. I assure you you won’t see it coming. It may conjure echoes of The Wicker Man, but it’s as different as it is similar; it’s original and new and mind-boggling. It’s an embodiment (literally) of the horrors at the heart of Europe, the Communist and fascist death machines; I’m not the first person to point out, moreover, that Barker set this story in Serbia, just a decade or so before the rape camps were established. The piles upon piles of bodies, the literal rivers of blood–does it need to be said that this speaks not just of Europe, but of all of humanity?

The beginning of the story is perfectly executed. The end of the story is rapturous and, I think, flawless, as Mick makes literal the journey that we the readers are on, and Judd demonstrates why we would choose to merge with something larger than ourselves, even something horrible, lest we face obliteration, the fear of which drives all other fears. (The only potential chink in the story’s armor is found early on, with a bit of perhaps too-neat foreshadowing involving mice and bugs being trodden on in a field–but maybe I’ve said too much now.)

“And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength,” Barker says of the horror in the hills. “Vast and mad and deathless.” That’s “In the Hills, the Cities,” in content and in quality.

Book One, Chapter Five

“Sex, Death and Starshine”

When I think of Books of Blood Volume One, I tend to forget that this story is in it. Even when I turn the page and, hey, there it is, it takes me a while before I can remember what happens in it. Compare that to “The Midnight Meat Train” or “Pig Blood Blues” or “In the Hills, the Cities,” the conclusions of all of which I practically have committed to memory.

Perhaps it’s because this story is very different from all of those, in a way that dovetails less with my concerns and preoccupations as a horror reader than they do. It’s far less fatalistic, I think. Which is odd, because if anything the characters involved, a troupe of theatre people putting up a production of The Twelfth Night with a soap star playing the female lead, deserve their fates less than the characters in the other stories; moreover, it’s tougher to square what we presume to be the motivation of the monsters here with their eventual actions. They seem not just cruel or even capricious, but contradictory.

But the unevenness of the story works for it in a certain sense. The idea here is that theatre people–Barker himself was one before he turned his attentions from script-writing to prose–the really great and dedicated ones at least, operate in a world of their own, where their art is both cause and effect, means and end, alpha and omega. Their actions and the consequences thereof, Barker appears to say, shouldn’t make sense to us, any more than a cat could understand that when her master disappears for an hour he’s actually gotten in the car and driven to the grocery store to pick up hummus and baby carrots. I’m not wholly convinced that it makes for effective storytelling, but there are certainly moments and images that linger all the more because it’s difficult to wrap your head around them. There’s a bit of business with footlights that’s like a collision of grand guignol with comedia dell’arte with the theatre of the absurd. “The mask he wore was neither comic nor tragic,” says Barker at another point of another character, “it was blood and laughter together.”

One final word: Lots of sex in this one! I remember thinking it was really hot stuff when I was in high school. His depictions of beautiful, sexual women and heterosexual liasons generally are certainly steamy enough to explain how he passed as straight for so many years, at least to the general public. And really, you’ve got to hand it to any author who takes the time to puzzle out the advantages and disadvantages of being fellated by a reanimated corpse.

Let’s get right into it…

The indefatigable Bill Sherman keeps on walking the post-Lost creepy hourlong drama beat. This time up, he looks at Night Stalker, comparing it to the original Stalker in both its TV movie and weekly series incarnations.

Pete Mesling’s Fearfodder is definitely a new favorite site of mine. He unearthed a couple of interesting links recently. First, he reminds me to remind all of you that Giant Magazine, the delightful pop-culture publication for which I review graphic novels, recently came up with its Scariest Movies of All Time list, which can be found online via The Guardian. Pete, I assure you The Shining made the top 15…

Second, Pete links to this interview with Clive Barker at Barker’s official fan site, Revelations. The usual talk of sequels to previous publishing projects and plans for upcoming movies abounds. Horror fans might also be interested in hearing Barker’s feelings on getting back in front of horror fandom, from which he’s been away for a while, at several upcoming horror cons.

Also on the Barker beat, Bloody Disgusting has some updates on the current status of Barker film projects The Plague and The Midnight Meat Train.

I don’t know why I never made this connection before, but Kevin Melrose at Dark But Shining makes a strong case for the central scene of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as (though he doesn’t use the phrase himself) a monumental horror-image. That’s exactly what it is–surely it influenced my appreciation of such images even if I never picked up on it until now.

Des at the brilliantly titled Without Me You’re Only You is writing up one of his favorite horror movies every day all month. Fun stuff so far–just click over and keep scrolling.

Finally, just something I stumbled across while flipping through a magazine: Shadow of the Colossus, a video game that revolves around the awesomely intimidating nature of monsters that are really, really, really big. Take the vertiginous sensation of being dwarfed by skyscrapers or big sky country, add in the idea that the thing that’s dwarfing you is alive, and I think you’ll get a sense of why this is the sort of creature I really find exhilarating in a primal way. (It’s sort of like the flip side of the way my beloved sea monsters exploit depth.) Worth thinking about in advance of tomorrow’s Blog of Blood installment…

Book One, Chapter Four

“Pig Blood Blues”

This is one of the saddest tales in the series. Sadness is an emotion that horror should probably exploit with more regularity and force, because horror by its nature is about loss and weakness and futility. (One of the most horrific scenes in any movie I’ve ever seen is when Joe Pesci’s character in Casino is forced to watch as his brother is beaten to a pulp with baseball bats, then thrown into his grave while he’s still breathing. It’s also one of the saddest scenes I’ve ever seen–Pesci’s Nicky Santoro sobbing, mournfully muttering his brother’s name over and over again.) Throw in madness–real up-is-down black-is-white what-the-fuck madness–and you’ve got this story in a nutshell. Each of the characters seems to have arrived at the end of the road, resigned to a life that’s a lot less than they wanted it to be. When the horror happens, they desperately try to avoid it, but you never get the sense that they think it’s anything less than inevitable. “He even began to understand Lacey’s lassitude, his inability to fight the powers that overtook him,” writes Barker of his main character, bitter ex-cop and shop teacher Redman. “Mama, they fed me to the pig. Not Mama, help me, save me. Just: they gave me to the pig.”

And god help me, I never made the connection between the pig who lives in the story’s reformatory’s farm and the fact that Redman is himself a “pig” until this read-through. Can you believe that? It’s not like it’s subtly laid out, either. The pig is an interesting symbol in art–it represents a predatory greed, but also slaughterability. “This is the state of the beast,” as Barker puts it. “To eat and be eaten.” The cop who wants to save one last victim, for whatever (sexual? parental? more noble, or less?) reason–which is he, ulimately? Or does it matter? Does shit just happen, has it always happened, will it always happen? It seems like throwing the word “Blues” in the title is just a delicious way for Barker to deflate the capital-I Import of his prose, but aren’t we really singing these blues all the time?

Book One, Chapter Three

“The Yattering and Jack”

And now for something completely different.

This story is horror-comedy, believe it or not. While many of Barker’s stories have their funny moments–“What would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?” is the line from one of them upon which author Ramsey Campbell seizes in his introduction to Volume One–few are as through-and-through lighthearted as this one. Which is not to say it’s all Evil Dead 2, though; try to imagine that film with its predecessor’s tree-rape sequence grafted in and you’ll get a feel for some of this one’s darker moments. Nothing quite that untoward, but someone is driven insane, and since our protagonist (Jack), who loves her, knew full well this could happen, it’s a wrenching thought. “That was hard,” as Barker puts it. “That was almost unforgiveable.”

Almost. Barker extends quite a mercy in this one, one of the few he ever extends, when during the climactic confrontation between the two titular characters–a poltergeist-like minor demon and a more-than-meets-the-eye gherkin importer–Jack’s daughter smiles at her father, despite the fact that she on some level is aware that he’s put his daughters at grave risk for both their sanity and their lives. “Whatever was at issue here, she loved him.” Tender, all the more so because it’s probably undeserved, or at least underdeserved.

The comic business is a real larf in this one, provided you don’t mind animal mutilation played for laughs–three cats, a tankful of guppies, and a Christmas turkey meet unfortunate ends. The fate of the turkey, and of the Christmas tree itself, are antecedents of the wackily improvisatory calypso possession scene in Beetlejuice, tinged here though with menace that makes the laughter come through gritted teeth. And there are funny moments with the prose, too: Whenever the Yattering thinks of his masters, Beelzebub and the other Powers of Hell, he reflexively adds a parenthetical “(long may they hold court, long may they shit light on the heads of the damned).”

Underneath it all there’s a common Barker theme (albeit one that’s usually played much more seriously): that some folks are perfectly able to live outside the rules. It’s a Hell of a message. Pun (as is the case with the whole story) intended.

The Carnival is really crowded today. But then, it’s October now, so it would be…

First things first: This Dark But Shining post is your one-stop-shopping destination for all the big October/Halloween blogathons that are going on around the Internet. Dark But Shining’s own 31-day “My Favorite Monsters” postfest, by DBS member Rick Geerling, begins here.

DBS also has a little contest goin’, in which those of you who are visually inclined stand to win some truly terrific horror manga. Since the only book they’re offering that I’ve already read is Junji Ito’s masterful Uzumaki, I sure do wish I knew my way around Photoshop.

Speaking of horrorblogging marathons, Steven at Corpse Eaters has kicked off his comprehensive examination of the Friday the 13th series, and even though I have yet to see a single one of those flicks, I like reading what he has to say about them so far.

And were you aware that I may have been doing some marathon horrorblogging of my own? Scroll down this very site and see!

Jason at Infocult links to another hilariously reimagined film trailer–from the series that brought you The Shining as a feel-good comedy and West Side Story as a fast-zombie flick comes Titanic as an American J-horror riff. Fricking great.

The other day I mentioned that I was fixing to do a series of “meet the horror blogosphere” posts stemming from some of the sites I’ve discovered in my quest for fresh links to feed into Where the Monsters Go. I don’t think I’ve got the time to do dedicated posts to that effect, but let’s throw a few into the mix right now, shall we?

Fearfodder is a horror news blog with a clean, non-“ooh how scary” look, equally clean grammar and spelling, and a whole lotta opinionated news links. Here, Fearfodder blogger Matt links to an article in Scotland on Sunday in which Wicker Man director Robyn Hardy expresses his dismay with Neil LaBute’s upcoming American remake. Among the bits of news I’d not heard anywhere else are that 1) The new version will involve killer bees in some fashion; 2) the pagan community (now run by Ellen Burstyn) will be matriarchal; 3) Hardy and original Wicker Man villain Christopher Lee are planning a new film about Scottish paganism called May Day. Hmm.

Also on Fearfodder, a title too good not to pass along: From Ringwraiths to Cenobites. It’s from a post about the upcoming documentary Ringers, about the fan culture surrounding The Lord of the Rings, which apparently features your friend and mine Mr. Clive Barker. Considering how influential the look of the Cenobites has been on everything from Dark City to Darth Maul, and how influential the look of the Ringwraiths is becoming (we all love Dave McKean, but if he sincerely the Dementors in the last Harry Potter movie are derived from his designs, he’s got another think coming), the confluence was a welcome one.

Continuing our blogospheric tour, welcome to The Black Lagoon, a beautifully designed blogspot site (!) featuring lengthy and considered reviews of tons of horror classics. If you can forgive them for perpetuating the inexplicable hardcore-horror-fan CW that the Dawn of the Dead remake was soulless Hollywood action-horror hackwork, there’s much to be read and admired there.

Bill Sherman continues his series of posts on how the networks have all been saying “Let’s get Lost” this season with a review of Invasion. Along similar lines, Kevin Melrose at Dark But Shining tries to figure out what exactly is so fishy about the underwater-monster series Surface.

This is not horror-related at all, really, and I’m breaking my embargo to do this, but I don’t think anyone will care. People, DO WHAT ERIC REYNOLDS SAYS and order Michael Kupperman’s absolutely hysterical Tales Designed to Thrizzle. This humor comic is an absolute classic in the making, I’m telling you. I mean, look at this cover:

That’s comedy!

Finally, this is why I love the Internet: This morning I open my inbox and I find an email linking to a ton of downloadable, Halloween-themed mp3s. The source? Sub Rosa, an invite-only, clothing-optional, underground stoneworking studio-slash-slow-food restaurant in Dundee, Oregon. Ladies and gentlemen, is the world not a pretty fine place? (Thanks to Sub Rosa proprietors Mike and Linda for the link!)

Book One, Chapter Two

“The Midnight Meat Train”

What a title this story has! (When I find titles I like, I like ’em a lot. I remember starting a thread on the Comics Journal message board back in the day asking people to list simply their favorite comics titles; I’m fond of Our Cancer Year, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, That Yellow Bastard, “I Was Killing When Killing Wasn’t Cool”…I like them wordy and off-kilter in a specific way. That’s also why I like Gang of Four song titles so much: “I Found That Essence Rare,” “At Home He’s a Tourist,” “Natural’s Not in It,” et cetera.) The Books of Blood boast a whole lot of wonderful titles–“How Spoilers Bleed”; “In the Hills, the Cities”; “Pig Blood Blues”; “The Life of Death”; “Skins of the Fathers”; “Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”–but this is a standout even among the standouts. It’s the closest to a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style guarantor that what is to follow will not end well.

This is a story of dark New York City, seedy, vulgar, evil New York City, “DROP DEAD” New York City. New York City is my favorite place on Earth, so in a way that makes this hard to relate to. I had very little independent experience of the place before Rudy Giuliani transformed it from the 10th Level of Hell into the sort of place where a guy like Mike Bloomberg stands to win a sizable chunk of the African-American vote. But a lot of the ugliness can never be gotten rid of, and that’s really what this story is about. The rot is in the foundations.

It’s also a story of race, which I must admit I never picked up on until this most recent re-reading. The references to skin tone, ethnicity, religion, and racial strife aren’t necessarily going to beat you over the head (with one notable exception), but they’re present throughout in a way that they don’t tend to be in most of Barker’s work. Some of those who end up on the titular train are described as “black bucks” or “an anemic Jewish accountant”; the hero of the piece, upon stumbling across a victim, mentally takes the time (to follow the logic of Barker’s word choice) to “decide” that the dark-skinned corpse is (was?) Puerto Rican. There are also blissed-out punk teenagers and graffiti and “opinionated brute[s] that New York bred so well.” Race and class, and among them a one-man Hurricane Katrina.

This is a story about disillusionment with the New York experiment in particular and–as becomes apparent when we meet he who motivates the Subway Butcher, that Jack the Ripper of the West 4th Street station–the American one in general. I’m curious as to whether the pre-success Barker had visited either place before writing this; with the exception of a few misplaced Britishisms, it does seem, to his credit, as though he had. Barker, I think, is both fascinated with and repelled by America (aren’t we all, though?); he writes love-letters to Hollywood and to America’s expansiveness and shoots them through with revulsion for its willful, indeed prideful ignorance and ugliness–and as this story about NYC shows, it was not a red-state-only antipathy. (There’s plenty of that too, though–Cabal/Nightbreed, anyone? Still and all, America hardly comes off looking any worse than the UK, but given the attitudes of most English artists during the era of Maggie Thatcher, that’s probably to be expected.)

I hate to make this story sound this political–I’m really only working these issues through for myself, see. Mainly it’s a tremendously gruesome and exhilarating horror story, the real tone-setter for the entire project, actually. This is the first place where Barker really tests you. The description of the bodies and what happens to them, first through some accidental post-mortem injuries, then through some quite deliberate ones; the unknowable City Father, a splatterpunk remake of the notion of the Lovecraftian monster; the fate of our hero’s mouth…it’s stomach-turning and transgressive and very scary. And there is worse to come, but this is where Barker asks you what you’re really made of.

If you can make it here, in other words, you can make it anywhere.