Book Three, Chapter Five
“Human Remains”
NB: I wrote and attempted to post this entry yesterday, but technical difficulties with the site prevented it from going up until this morning. Sorry folks. Blame the Cornell engineering grads who run this thing. Go Big Red!
This is the first story in the collection of which I had no recollection whatsoever. When I got a few pages into it I recognized that it was included in the trade paperback collection of Barker’s Tapping the Vein, his old Marvel/Epic series of short-story adaptations (The Comic Books of Blood, in other words), which I recently flipped through, but other than that, nothin’. My guess is that’s because it’s noticeably less gruesome than most of the other stories–probably the least bloody so far (though there is one nasty moment, it’s relatively run-of-the-mill in terms of its specifics). It’s Barker’s transgressive gore that makes the biggest impression the first time around.
But my forgetfulness shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the story’s no good. It’s Barker’s take on the doppelganger and it’s another sad one, with an elegiac ending overlaid with a wry, mournful sense of humor. (It’s also one of Barker’s most explicitly gay stories at this point in his career.) And interestingly, the doomed character this time around is pretty interesting, at least as far as his profession goes–suffice it to say he’s no accountant. But he doesn’t have a very rich inner life; indeed, his surface pretty much is his life. As his will to live is sapped he lets his physical appearance go to hell without a care. His last confrontation with his destroyer reveals that it’s actually better at being human than he is, in some ways. I think that’s the real horror here: Our hero starts out worrying that he’s a failure, and by the end all doubt has been removed–but his failure runs much deeper than he’d imagined. The loss of his life, his looks, even his soul is almost no big deal compared to the loss of his ability to spend a lifetime kidding himself.