Book Two, Chapter One
“Dread”
When I was in college a professor illustrated the nature of Jesus’ parables with the following clue: “To solve this riddle, change one pig.” The idea is that the way to interpret the clue is contained within the clue itself.
In much the same way, “Dread” is about what it does: exploiting specific phobias. In that sense it’s a very nasty, sordid story. As gruesome as some of the earlier tales are, this is the first one that makes you think, “Jesus, am I really reading this stuff?” It’s voyeuristic and unpleasant. And depending on how you relate to the three phobias encountered, it’s scary as shit.
In my opinion it’s the first of the three phobias–a vegetarian’s pathological fear of meat–that is the most harrowing. First of all, we’ve seen Barker make comparisons between the state of being alive and being meat before, obviously, in “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” so there’s that resonance: the way carnivorousness reduces all of us to consumer or consumptible.
Secondly, I’m married to a vegetarian, and in fact have recently become one myself. (After Hurricane Katrina I really couldn’t bring myself to cause, however indirectly, an animal to suffer so that I can enjoy my double quarter-pounder. No moral judgment on meat-eaters intended at all, mind you–it’s just a personal decision, like the way I won’t stop petting my cat until she decides petting time is over.) Amy’s vegetarianism, incidentally, is directly attributable to scenes of ostentatious carnivorousness in two horror films, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (when the raptors eat the cow) and Mike Nichols’s Wolf (when Nicholson eats the deer)–I’ve already got some experience, therefore, with the connection between vegetarianism and a fear of not being a vegetarian, which is what the relevant character in the story is faced with. Inasmuch as vegetarianism in women is often connected to disordered eating and my wife is herself a recovering anorexic, that’s another direct line to the dread (you see?) experienced by the pertinent character in the story–even more so because her choice is literally one between eating meat (eventually, eating rotten meat) or starving to death.
Thirdly, and I think most insidiously, that character, Cheryl Fromm, is a popular, intelligent, gorgeous blonde college student. We’ve all known popular, intelligent, gorgeous young blondes; what Barker is exploiting is simultaneous lust for and resentment of them. Cheryl’s degradation is presented painstakingly, methodically, and explicitly. We watch her lash out in anger, sob, urinate, bathe, vomit, and ultimately give in to the needs of her body and eat the meat. (No double meaning intended there from Barker, oh I’m sure.) So there’s the “serves you right for not being my possession already, bitch” element, I’m afraid–the desire to punish people for being beautiful, or for being more than we are. It’s unpleasant, but if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s undoubtedly present.
(I also think Barker taps into the strange eroticization of women eating, which arises from the fact that act is all but taboo in today’s society. Gregg Araki made the best use of this I’ve yet seen in his film Nowhere, which boasted a scene in which a group of bulimic teenagers binge with all the wet groans and grunts of a gangbang.)
The other fears? They’re tackled well, in their way, though I admit they’re a lot less scary to me than the meat one. My pal Jason Adams appears to disagree; your mileage, as they say, may vary. For my money, the approach to Fear #2 is a little too baroque, Fear #3 a little too forced. But they both offer something truly horrific–respectively, the dissolution of a mind over the course of a couple of pages, and a really direct and nasty definition of being tortured to death. Like I said, you’ll think, “Jesus, am I really reading this stuff?”