Book One, Chapter One
“The Book of Blood”
I like this story because it feels like a beginning.
And I stole that opening technique from the story itself, which begins with a simple statement of fact, or what passes for fact in Clive Barker’s world: “The dead have highways.”
Right from the start he’s setting this all up as a journey–a frightening one, sure, since your travel-companions-to-be are, well, dead; but a sorely tempting one, because that’s a highway you’ve never travelled before, is it not?
I also like this story because it revolves around the premise that certain stories need to be told. That’s why tragedy befalls our handsome, callow young lead, Simon McNeal–the dead have things they want to say, or more precisely things they want heard, a fact Simon chooses to ignore even as he purports, fraudulently, to speak for them. When they finally do get their chance to testify, the release is physical, explosive, and extremely violent. You can’t note that you’re reading part one of a thirty-round assault on the foundations of horror fiction by a then-30-year-old Liverpudlian playwright and not feel that there’s an element of autobiography in there. (That the conceit of the story is that those dead men’s tales constitute the remainder of the anthology appears to bear that theory out.)
And I like the story for the sex. Not that there is any, beyond a little male masturbation, which I assure you is very little indeed for Barker at this (or any) stage in his career. But Barker does such a fine job of conjuring an image of a painfully desirable young man, laying (and lying) in an empty upstairs room in just his underwear while a (presumably middle-aged, though it’s never made clear) expert in the paranormal sits in the kitchen below, fiddling with a wedding ring that’s outlived the man who put it on her finger, psyching herself into believing she’s found success in the form of the fraud above her, and wanting this kid so badly she can practically taste it. It’s really very sexy. (When the violence is done, by the way, I feel it’s done sensually, certainly with more delicacy than many of the subsequent stories, though even in the most brutal there’s a sensual element that can’t be denied, or in many cases resisted.)
So the groundwork has been laid here–the body horror, the sex, the need to see and to share, the instaneously blown mind (about which much more in the weeks to come, I’m sure). These are all themes that wind back and forth fugue-like throughout the subsequent 29 tales. Like I said, this one feels like a beginning. “Read and learn,” Barker exhorts at the story’s end. Okay then.