Book Three, Chapter One
“Son of Celluloid”
To a certain extent this story, with its examination of Hollywood glamour, is an antecedent of Barker’s delightfully trashy La-La-Land epic Coldheart Canyon, written almost two decades later and after Barker himself had had a great deal of experience inside Tinseltown, both as a filmmaker and as a resident. (When I interviewed him before Coldheart came out I mentioned this connection, and his response was “My God, you really do know my work.”) As it lacks the depth and detail of that novel, “Son” does not really provide a particularly groundbreaking look at the dream factory–it’s no great insight that Hollywood’s pleasures are illusory, or that through the magic of the movies the beauty of the stars never fades, you know?
But in this haunted-theatre tale Barker succeeds where he exploits very specific aspects of the Hollywood illusion. Confronted with a deadly Western scenario, Barker notes the threatened characters resentment of the genre’s “forced machismo, the glorification of dirt and cheap heroism,” and its “handful of lethal lies–about the glory of America’s frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes.” Later a character is seduced by a spectral Monroe, and for anyone who’s felt a real ache of desire for an actor or actress you’ll never even meet, much less make love with, the moment’s electrically charged:
He was within a couple of yards of her when a breeze out of nowhere billowed her skirt up around her waist. She laughed, half closing her eyes, as the surf of silk rose and exposed her. She was naked underneath.
Ricky reached for her again and this time she didn’t avoid his touch. The dress billowed up a little higher and he stared, fixated, at that part of Marilyn he had never seen, the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.
Of course, this is Clive Barker we’re talking about here, so there’s more than meets the eye (pun intended–if you read the story you’ll get it) to that “fur divide” and to Marilyn herself. It’s one of three knockout horror images in this story–the second involving a really creative way of removing someone’s eyeballs, and the third a sudden eruption of evil out of the orifices of a picture of innocence.
The story’s structure is memorable as well–it starts telling one story, and then as if in homage to another silver-screen goddess, Janet Leigh, suddenly becomes a different story entirely. (It has a coda reminiscent of ‘Salem’s Lot, also.) I also really like the story’s heroine, Birdy–her no-bullshit demeanor (and some of the story’s dialogue as well) are precursors to Kirsty from The Hellbound Heart (aka Hellraiser), while her weight and her remora-like relationship to the Hollywood deities (she works in a movie theatre) are later echoed in Tammy from Coldheart Canyon. Ricky is well-sketched as well, a man in his mid-thirties (that’s not revealed till the end, actually) who in every respect is trying to live like a 20-year-old in perpetuity.
Not the best story in the series, then (see tomorrow for another possible claimant to that particular title), but as befits the subject matter, hey, that’s entertainment.