Book Six (Cabal), Chapter One
“The Life of Death”
First, a quick note: People who purchase the American edition of this volume will find the first story in it to be not a story at all but “Cabal,” a more or less full-length novella. As this story (which is pretty great, incidentally) is not included in The Complete Books of Blood as published in one volume three or so years ago, I won’t be tackling it here; perhaps at some point I’ll do a Blog of Blood post-script that will include it and the subsequent novella The Hellbound Heart, the inspirations for Nightbreed and Hellraiser respectively. But for now, on with the show.
I have yet to reread the final story in this volume so I don’t want to say for sure, but I think that pound for pound this may well be the strongest volume in the series. It certainly starts off that way, as in “The Life of Death” Barker is writing at a very high, very direct, very powerful level. I really like the way he teases out the central metaphor of the story–that a woman recovering from a physically and mentally traumatic hysterectomy has, essentially, become pregnant with Death–in such a way that, for all its obviousness and potential heavy-handedness, it instead feels perfectly natural and even alluring to be drawn into. As she regains her strength, so too does the prose liven up and become hot-blooded:
She was pleased with what she saw. Her breasts were full and dark, her skin had a pleasing sheen to it, her pubic hair had regrown more lushly than ever. The scars themselves still looked and felt tender, but her eyes read their lividness as a sign of her cunt’s ambition, as though any day now her sex would grown from anus to navel (and beyond perhaps), opening her up, making her terrible.
It was paradoxical, surely, that it was only now, when the surgeons had emptied her out, that she should feel so ripe, so resplendent.
“When the surgeons had emptied her out”–so callous, so (I’d imagine, and I’m fortunate that I will never know) dead-on. And so much of our central character’s “ripening” revolves around the peculiar eroticism (already noted in “Dread”) of a woman voraciously eating. There are devourers aplenty here, as there are in nearly every story in the collection.
And this is another tale in which so many passages demand to be called out:
“I only ever saw one dead person. My grandmother. I was very young at the time…”
“I trust it was a pivotal experience.”
“I don’t think so. In fact I scarcely remember it at all. I only remember how everybody cried.”
“Ah.”
He nodded sagely.
“So selfish,” he said. “Don’t you think? Spoiling a farewell with snot and sobs.” Again he looked at her to gauge the response; again he was satisfied that she would not take offense. “We cry for ourselves, don’t we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.”
And from thanatos to eros, or more accurately to the union of the two:
He was bending over the body, whispering in its ear as he rearranged it on the tangled sheets. Then he unbuttoned himself and unveiled that bone whose inflammation was the sincerest form of flattery.
Ha! Damn. I bet he waited for MONTHS to work that into something.
But perhaps my favorite part of the story is not the insightful writing, not the sensuously bleak setting and events, not even the way it expertly toys with reader expectations as to what, exactly, is happening–it’s that line I quoted in the title of this post. “I like places where the dead are.” I’m going to try to avoid spoiling anything by making comparisons between the character who says that and the author who gave put those words in his mouth–would Barker find such a comparison apt, even flattering? beats me–but I wonder if here, in the final volume, Barker hasn’t gotten right to the point. Has he answered the question asked in “The Forbidden”? Do we tell, and listen to, these horrible stories because a part of us, knowing how our own stories will end, likes where they’re going?