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?