Book One, Chapter Two
“The Midnight Meat Train”
What a title this story has! (When I find titles I like, I like ’em a lot. I remember starting a thread on the Comics Journal message board back in the day asking people to list simply their favorite comics titles; I’m fond of Our Cancer Year, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, That Yellow Bastard, “I Was Killing When Killing Wasn’t Cool”…I like them wordy and off-kilter in a specific way. That’s also why I like Gang of Four song titles so much: “I Found That Essence Rare,” “At Home He’s a Tourist,” “Natural’s Not in It,” et cetera.) The Books of Blood boast a whole lot of wonderful titles–“How Spoilers Bleed”; “In the Hills, the Cities”; “Pig Blood Blues”; “The Life of Death”; “Skins of the Fathers”; “Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”–but this is a standout even among the standouts. It’s the closest to a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style guarantor that what is to follow will not end well.
This is a story of dark New York City, seedy, vulgar, evil New York City, “DROP DEAD” New York City. New York City is my favorite place on Earth, so in a way that makes this hard to relate to. I had very little independent experience of the place before Rudy Giuliani transformed it from the 10th Level of Hell into the sort of place where a guy like Mike Bloomberg stands to win a sizable chunk of the African-American vote. But a lot of the ugliness can never be gotten rid of, and that’s really what this story is about. The rot is in the foundations.
It’s also a story of race, which I must admit I never picked up on until this most recent re-reading. The references to skin tone, ethnicity, religion, and racial strife aren’t necessarily going to beat you over the head (with one notable exception), but they’re present throughout in a way that they don’t tend to be in most of Barker’s work. Some of those who end up on the titular train are described as “black bucks” or “an anemic Jewish accountant”; the hero of the piece, upon stumbling across a victim, mentally takes the time (to follow the logic of Barker’s word choice) to “decide” that the dark-skinned corpse is (was?) Puerto Rican. There are also blissed-out punk teenagers and graffiti and “opinionated brute[s] that New York bred so well.” Race and class, and among them a one-man Hurricane Katrina.
This is a story about disillusionment with the New York experiment in particular and–as becomes apparent when we meet he who motivates the Subway Butcher, that Jack the Ripper of the West 4th Street station–the American one in general. I’m curious as to whether the pre-success Barker had visited either place before writing this; with the exception of a few misplaced Britishisms, it does seem, to his credit, as though he had. Barker, I think, is both fascinated with and repelled by America (aren’t we all, though?); he writes love-letters to Hollywood and to America’s expansiveness and shoots them through with revulsion for its willful, indeed prideful ignorance and ugliness–and as this story about NYC shows, it was not a red-state-only antipathy. (There’s plenty of that too, though–Cabal/Nightbreed, anyone? Still and all, America hardly comes off looking any worse than the UK, but given the attitudes of most English artists during the era of Maggie Thatcher, that’s probably to be expected.)
I hate to make this story sound this political–I’m really only working these issues through for myself, see. Mainly it’s a tremendously gruesome and exhilarating horror story, the real tone-setter for the entire project, actually. This is the first place where Barker really tests you. The description of the bodies and what happens to them, first through some accidental post-mortem injuries, then through some quite deliberate ones; the unknowable City Father, a splatterpunk remake of the notion of the Lovecraftian monster; the fate of our hero’s mouth…it’s stomach-turning and transgressive and very scary. And there is worse to come, but this is where Barker asks you what you’re really made of.
If you can make it here, in other words, you can make it anywhere.