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.