Everybody is a book of blood;

–Clive Barker, Books of Blood

2003 was a very good year for me, in horrorblogging terms. That was the year I did Where the Monsters Go, the big October-long horrorblogging marathon thing that began with the posting of my senior essay on horror from Yale University and ended with a thirteen-day marathon-within-a-marathon starring reviews of my thirteen (and then some) favorite horror films. (Click on the preceding link, or sniff around the sidebar at your left, and you’ll be on your way.) At the time I was mostly a comics blogger and a far more casual horror film watcher than I had been, which was what made the horror blogathon so challenging and so rewarding. See, I’d come to feel that, through a sort of benign neglect, I had started growing away from horror.

Needless to say, that feeling didn’t survive the month.

Back then, as best I could tell at the time, there were no dedicated, year-round horror blogs. (That’s another thing that made “Where the Monsters Go” v1 so challenging and so rewarding.) Today, of course, things have changed. Just take a look at that old blogathon’s namesake horrorblog aggregator. October horrorblogging sprees are delightfully plentiful this year as well–be sure to check out Dark But Shining’s list of ’em; Dark But Shining itself is doing its own as well, and as a matter of fact I’ll be participating in it before the month is out.

Okay, fine. I get to this point in this post, and now what? What’s the point of this ramble? (Other than to brag that, to paraphrase Al Columbia, I was horrorblogging when horrorblogging wasn’t cool?) The answer I’m stuck with is “none, really.” And yet I think that that is the point. When I started typing on October 1st, 2003, I really had no idea where I’d end up. I mean, I knew I’d be posting many of the papers on horror I’d written in college, and I had vague plans for a culminating movie-watching marathon, but beyond that, I was wandering. Seeing where the days and the month and the horror took me.

And that reminds me of my earliest experiences with the work of Clive Barker. It’s no secret he’s my favorite horror creator, but what might be a secret is that I was a comparatively late bloomer in that regard, and with horror in general. As a child I loved Godzilla and the Universal monster stable; as an early adolescent I devoured Stephen King; I’d seen The Lost Boys and some of Kubrick’s more unpleasant works; but in the autumn of my junior year of high school my experience with unabashed Horror Films was nonexistent. One night, though, I was flipping through the channels before bed (like as not looking for either a half-decent video or a skin flick) when I came across the opening credits of the movie Nightbreed. I’d heard about this film from friends who were already big-time Barker devotees, but had never seen it, or Hellraiser, or anything like it. No slasher flicks, no zombie movies, no gore, no splatter, nothing. So when I landed on this channel, playing this movie, I can’t begin to tell you how my heart pounded. I knew full well that what this movie stood to contain could, well, horrify me–frighten, terrify, nauseate, traumatize.

But I watched it anyway. And I loved it.

And that was that, really. By the time Christmas passed I’d asked for and either received or acquired myself with gift certificates the Barker books, the ones that came most highly recommended by my horror-fan friends: the Books of Blood. Here in America they’re called Books of Blood Volume One, Volume Two, Volume Three, The Inhuman Condition, In the Flesh, and Cabal. I plowed through them. I remember reading them on the train down to visit my then-girlfriend now-wife in Delaware, Massive Attack playing in my headphones. They opened an entirely new vista of imagerey and ideas before me, a huge one. This had happened once or twice before then (with The Hobbit in first grade and perhaps The Dark Knight Returns in sixth), and maybe once since (with Jimmy Corrigan in my senior year of college), and since I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience at some point, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s wonderful. It’s a world to wander in, is what it is.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read the complete Books of Blood. I’ve read and reread several of the stories (esp. in Volume One) often enough to have them nearly memorized, but from start to finish? Not since the winter of, what was it anyway, 1995? Over ten years, I think. Well then, Sean, consider the next 30 days your tenth anniversary present.

Welcome to Blog of Blood, my month-long Books of Blood blogging marathon. Every day I will read and comment upon one of the 30 short stories in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood: The Complete Edition, the lovely and massive hardcover omnibus collection released by what is apparently the now-defunct Stealth Press in 2001. (The novella “Cabal,” which was collected in and lent its name to the final American volume, was not in the original batch and therefore not in the collection, but we’ll see, we’ll see.)

I honestly have no idea what I’m going to think or write or say about any of the stories. I’ve done very little blogging on prose fiction over the years, and even less concentrated marathon-style blogging on same. Plus, part of me really wants those of you who haven’t already read these stories not to have the thrill of discovery sapped out of it by giving away major spoilers, so I tentatively plan to avoid doing that as much as possible (though I’m not making any promises–caveat lector), giving me even less to rely on in terms of easy material. The stories themselves, of course, are about as far from easy material as it gets, especially for someone on whom they’ve had such an impact. It runs deep, and it runs wide.

So my plan, of course, is just to wander through it. Wander with me, won’t you?

Book One, Chapter One

“The Book of Blood”

I like this story because it feels like a beginning.

And I stole that opening technique from the story itself, which begins with a simple statement of fact, or what passes for fact in Clive Barker’s world: “The dead have highways.”

Right from the start he’s setting this all up as a journey–a frightening one, sure, since your travel-companions-to-be are, well, dead; but a sorely tempting one, because that’s a highway you’ve never travelled before, is it not?

I also like this story because it revolves around the premise that certain stories need to be told. That’s why tragedy befalls our handsome, callow young lead, Simon McNeal–the dead have things they want to say, or more precisely things they want heard, a fact Simon chooses to ignore even as he purports, fraudulently, to speak for them. When they finally do get their chance to testify, the release is physical, explosive, and extremely violent. You can’t note that you’re reading part one of a thirty-round assault on the foundations of horror fiction by a then-30-year-old Liverpudlian playwright and not feel that there’s an element of autobiography in there. (That the conceit of the story is that those dead men’s tales constitute the remainder of the anthology appears to bear that theory out.)

And I like the story for the sex. Not that there is any, beyond a little male masturbation, which I assure you is very little indeed for Barker at this (or any) stage in his career. But Barker does such a fine job of conjuring an image of a painfully desirable young man, laying (and lying) in an empty upstairs room in just his underwear while a (presumably middle-aged, though it’s never made clear) expert in the paranormal sits in the kitchen below, fiddling with a wedding ring that’s outlived the man who put it on her finger, psyching herself into believing she’s found success in the form of the fraud above her, and wanting this kid so badly she can practically taste it. It’s really very sexy. (When the violence is done, by the way, I feel it’s done sensually, certainly with more delicacy than many of the subsequent stories, though even in the most brutal there’s a sensual element that can’t be denied, or in many cases resisted.)

So the groundwork has been laid here–the body horror, the sex, the need to see and to share, the instaneously blown mind (about which much more in the weeks to come, I’m sure). These are all themes that wind back and forth fugue-like throughout the subsequent 29 tales. Like I said, this one feels like a beginning. “Read and learn,” Barker exhorts at the story’s end. Okay then.