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.