Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter Two
“The Body Politic”
This story reads sort of like what you’d get if Clive Barker were the frontman in a Stephen King cover band. As such, it’s probably the most apples-to-apples comparison you can get between Barker’s short stories and King’s. Fans of King’s short story collections Night Shift and Skeleton Key (and boy am I ever one! As I always say, King’s at his best when he’s under 100 pages or over 1,000) know that one of his favorite devices is the run-of-the-mill thing that suddenly goes killer: trucks, rats, mold, a laundry machine, fog, a wind-up monkey, a mirror, etc. Often these things achieve a murderous sentience and threaten apocalypse through sheer force of numbers alone. And that’s exactly what you have here: It’s Maximum Overdrive with human hands instead of vehicles and appliances.
With the experiment controlled for the villain variable, noteworthy differences emerge. The most prominent, obviously, is the tone. King writes everymen; sure, when he’s writing ’em, every man is more likely to be a writer from New England than in our own, but it’s basically a John Cougar Mellencamp world, with all the just-folks dialogue and idiomatic expressions that entails. Barker couldn’t be less interested in that sort of writing; nearly all of his characters, regardless of their station in life, think in lyrical, dreamily self-absorbed snippets of philosophy.
Another prominent divergence is in the conclusion. King’s short stories tend to have endings where even if he doesn’t come right out and say where things will head after the final sentence, you’ve got a clear picture–either back to the status quo or, more likely, slowly onward toward apocalypse. (I remember marveling at just how many of his short stories end in the worst way possible.) Barker’s a lot less concerned with endings–this one twists and turns from one possibility to another before ending up going a different route entirely. Indeed, many of his novels all but eschew the concept of an ending entirely–Imajica, Coldheart Canyon, and I believe Weaveworld (it’s been a while) have their climaxes followed up by another 50-100 pages that are much more than just a wrap-up or epilogue, but like an entirely new arc for the novel. “The Body Politic” is actually closer to a King ending than you usually get from Barker’s work, but it’s still notable how random and unpredictable both it and what might follow from it are.
Finally, there’s the Evil Thing itself. King’s Evil Things are almost always external in nature–everyday items, threats from space, supernatural horrors. When Barker did his King-style story, he made the Evil Thing a part of the human body. The enslavement of the mind to the needs of the body is a prominent theme in Barker’s work, in evidence in a variety of different ways everywhere from “Dread” to Book Four‘s “Age of Desire.” Here Barker makes literalizes this theme as much as possible, and the results are genuinely frightening. (I’m sure I’m not the only person who spent a few seconds mimicking what it would be like if my hands had a life of their own, only to quickly freak out over how creepy it felt and stop!) And, of course, very very gory–this entire story is pretty much a catalog of self-mutilation, and while the damage done to the bodies involved isn’t as spectacular or inventive as Barker’s capable of due to the logistics involved, it’s actually all the more horrifying for its very ease of imaginability.
And I think the quote I chose as a title for this post is a key one, too–yes, the killer hands are symbolic of all the body-horror issues Barker’s always poking at–but yes, they’re also plain old killer hands. So much of the joy of horror stems from the simple pleasure of coming up with really scary monsters that do really scary things. I think in all these verbose blogathons going on there’s a risk of losing sight of that–mainstream critics of horror movies, for example, seem to see losing sight of that as a point of pride; pick any review of any zombie movie and you’ll see what I mean–but Barker refuses to let that terrible delight go. King at his best is the same way–take his novella “The Mist,” from Skeleton Crew, which he says he wrote simply for the thrill of creating big monsters with giant tentacles that eat people. There’s an awful lot to be said for pure monsters, because they’re scary.
All in all, King fans can consider this one their Clive Barker gateway drug. Unpleasant side-effects guaranteed or your money back.