Book Two, Chapter Four
“The Skins of the Fathers”
In many ways this story is simply a dry run for the later, more ambitious novella Cabal, which was grafted on and lent its name to the sixth and final volume of The Books of Blood here in the U.S. There as here we have an apocalyptic confrontation between the denizens of a reactionary American small town and a community of monsters more threatening by virtue of their very existence than by any physical danger they may or may not pose. There as here the proceedings function as a metaphor for humanity’s fear of that which is different, though in Cabal it’s homosexuality that’s the subtextual target whereas here it’s women, specifically women functioning independently of men. Indeed, Barker goes so far as to make this story into a reverse creation myth, revealing how man sprung from the union of woman and monster, only to enslave the former and eradicate the latter.
Cabal‘s monsters aren’t the beasts of this story–they’re more or less human, so they have personalities, they speak English, and so forth. In that way and in several others Cabal is a more rewarding work. “Skins” is simply a much more straightforward horror story, and a terrific one. Things get cranking right away in a terrifically vivid chase scene in the desert–city slicker Davidson walks a mile or so into the wasteland away from his broken-down car to solicit help from what he thinks is a passing parade of some kind, only to discover, with about a half a mile remaining between him and the members of the procession, that they aren’t even remotely human. Davidson’s split-second switchover to abject terror as one of the creatures bolts from the group and runs across the featureless desert straight for him is utterly convincing and (ahem) pungently evoked. The thought of this huge beast barreling in your direction as you make a run for a car that you have no hope of moving even if you can get inside it before this thing catches you and tears you to pieces is such a primal fear–it’s the kind of image you’d imagine preceded and gave birth to everything else in the story!
“Skins” is also a chance for Barker to show off his chops in creating uniquely Barkerian monsters. In the same way that “Jacqueline Ess” showed him flexing his gore muscles, “Skins” offers full vistas of the bizarre menagerie we’ve caught fleeting glimpses of in “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Hell’s Event”:
One was perhaps eighteen or twenty feet tall. Its skin, that hung in folds on its muscle, was a sheath of spikes, its head a cone of exposed teeth, set in scarlet gums. Another was three-winged, its triple-ended tail thrashing the dust with reptilian enthusiasm. A third and fourth were married together in a union of monstrosities the result of which was more disgusting than the sum of its parts. Through its length and breadth this symbiotic horror was locked in seeping marriage, its limbs thrust in and through wounds in its partner’s flesh. Though the tongues of its heads were wounded together it managed a cacaphonous howl.
See what I mean? Barker’s primary technique is really just to sketch a vague picture of a beast by providing a few key details, the sort of details your mind is unlikely ever to conjure without his prompting, and let you take it from there. (I was particularly dumbfounded by the beast whose head is a featureless cylinder.) It’s an effective technique, a sort of “guided” version of the CW about the best horror being left to one’s imagination. He’ll leave it to your imagination all right, but not before giving you a loaner from his own.
One final thought about this story: A lot of it is unfair. The rednecks get what they deserve, for the most part, and that’s fine; the abusive husband and father too. But some of the former end up headed for an extremely slow and painful death, so gratuitously awful that even the woman around whom the whole fiasco really centered (due to her dalliance with the monsters and subsequent conception and childbirth years back) is horrified and desperate to save them, even though it’s pretty much impossible. And the latter wasn’t abusive until the monsters appeared, cuckolded him, and essentially drove him insane. And what about Lucy, the monsters’ mate, who is left unprotected by them, has her child taken by them, and is ultimately abandoned to the desert? And what about Eleanor, the pistol-packin’ mama who’s just as much a woman as anyone but condemned to suffer alongside the male rednecks because of her too-enthusiastic embrace of American machismo? And for pete’s sake what about Davidson, whose only crime was a highway breakdown and who was dragged into the final confrontation only because someone literally pointed a gun at his head? (Not, perhaps, the head the proverb refers to, but a head nonetheless.) This is perhaps the clearest illustration yet that the deadliest sin in Barker’s world is the failure to be extraordinary; is that really a mortal sin, and should such sinners be so extravagantly damned?