Book One, Chapter Six
“In the Hills, the Cities”
Hoo boy.
This story starts off similarly to “The Midnight Meat Train,” with a snapshot summary of disillusionment. The earlier story kicks off by detailing how main character Kaufman’s lifelong long-distance infatuation with New York City deteriorated so badly during his first six months of actually living there that he now sees the town he once referred to as “the Palace of Delights” as just another city, but worse–one that “bred death.” “In the Hills” begins by outlining the dissolution of a love affair, first from the point of view of Mick, who’s come to see his journalist boyfriend Judd as a humorless pedant, then of Judd, who regards Mick as a vapid prettyboy. As in “The Midnight Meat Train,” a momentary truce between the ex-beloveds is reached–in the former through the quiet beauty of a New York dawn or twilight, and in the latter through sex, where passion can express itself without words.
Maybe things won’t be so bad, then.
The story continues to draw you in, but this time through a difference from earlier stories. In both “Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” the first time Barker shifts the focal point of the narrative from the protagonist to the antagonist, he makes you aware almost immediately of the nature of the horror you’re about to confront. Right away you know that you’re in the presence of a serial killer with a sense of purpose; right away you know that you’re in the presence of a hungry, evil animal.
But when “In the Hills” makes a similar shift, what, exactly, are you hearing and seeing? A Serbian villager laughs to himself that the expression “a head in the clouds” will be made real. “Limbs” and “flanks” are being lashed together by an entire town, one of two that’s been so mobilized. There’s the potential for trouble since (we learn) the long-time organizer of this special day for one of the towns has died, leaving her inexperienced daughter in charge. But…that’s it, really.
What’s going on? Barker is coy, very coy indeed, for a very long time. He is able to rely on what the villager himself knows to be true–that what is going on is beyond rational comprehension. It defies belief, it beggars belief. By the time you grasp what was happening, you’re busy conjuring the image in your head, wrapping your brain around its immensity, when you see this, at the end of the relevant passage:
The badly knitted flank might not have caused an accident in itself, but further weakened by the frailty of the competitors it set a scene for death on an unprecedented scale.
Barker waits until the exact moment when you puzzle out what is happening before abruptly dispensing with all pretense of hope. When you finally grasp what you’re reading, it’s too late. As it is for the villagers. As it is for Judd and Mick.
This is virtuoso writing.
I’m reluctant to say much more about this story. It’s my favorite piece of writing by Barker, and one of my favorite pieces of writing by anyone, ever. The prose is so confident, so demanding of attention, awe, terror, it would be churlish (for me, impossible) not to go along with it. I actually wonder whether Barker understood just how good this was as he was writing it (it reminds me of the breathless rock fan’s questioning of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant as to what it was like in the studio when “Stairway” was being recorded); I sort of think he did, and at any rate I know he does now, since I believe he regards it as among his finest work himself. But you can get that sense from the writing, which after it turns a certain corner is as relentless as anything you will ever read. “From now on…they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.”
The concept at the story’s core is sui generis, by the way. I assure you you won’t see it coming. It may conjure echoes of The Wicker Man, but it’s as different as it is similar; it’s original and new and mind-boggling. It’s an embodiment (literally) of the horrors at the heart of Europe, the Communist and fascist death machines; I’m not the first person to point out, moreover, that Barker set this story in Serbia, just a decade or so before the rape camps were established. The piles upon piles of bodies, the literal rivers of blood–does it need to be said that this speaks not just of Europe, but of all of humanity?
The beginning of the story is perfectly executed. The end of the story is rapturous and, I think, flawless, as Mick makes literal the journey that we the readers are on, and Judd demonstrates why we would choose to merge with something larger than ourselves, even something horrible, lest we face obliteration, the fear of which drives all other fears. (The only potential chink in the story’s armor is found early on, with a bit of perhaps too-neat foreshadowing involving mice and bugs being trodden on in a field–but maybe I’ve said too much now.)
“And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength,” Barker says of the horror in the hills. “Vast and mad and deathless.” That’s “In the Hills, the Cities,” in content and in quality.