I finally got around to reading Clive Barker’s out-of-the-blue return to proper horror, Mister B. Gone, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. In some ways it seems intended to be a return to the in-your-face splatterpunk of his earliest work: the violence, the grotesquerie, and the overall maliciousness and heinousness of the titular demon’s behavior are all pushed to a level Barker hasn’t approached in some time. It also feels like an angrier book than he’s written since maybe Cabal, its first-person confessional set-up enabling it to literally berate and threaten the reader, and its big last-chapter revelation evincing a young man’s hostility to conventional religious and moral authority. And while it is indeed the umpteenth paean to the power of storytelling and the magic of reading that you’ve come across, there’s also a hearty dose of ambivalence, even dread, regarding the overall effect of literature on humanity that serves as a welcome leavening agent for such stories’ usual self-congratulatory feel.
But that same first-person conceit–the demon, Jakabok “Mister B.” Botch, has been magically transformed into the very book you hold and keeps interrupting his story in an attempt to get you to burn the book and end his suffering–continuously undercuts the effect Barker’s going for. Mister B. begins the story as a kid, so his misadventures feel a little too jolly to mesh with the savagery of the gory setpieces. The same is true of his flowery prose; one wishes Barker would get out of his own way and be a little more economical at times, letting the extravagance of his imagination do the work for itself. B. also proves to be a lousy judge of what aspects of his own story are most interesting: Most of his worst misdeeds are simply alluded to, glossed over in too-brief recaps of his centuries-long reign of terror. Worse, the most interesting aspect of his life, his slowly building love for his demonic buddy, mentor, and traveling companion Quitoon, is asserted after the fact rather than developed organically through an in-depth recounting of their behavior together.
Perhaps the best way to look at Mister B. Gone is a throat-clearing exercise for the very busy Barker. After all, before its impending publication was announced, he’d never even mentioned working on it before, being in the midst of his young-adult fantasy series Abarat, his massive “death of Pinhead” opus The Scarlet Gospels, various film and television and painting projects, and perhaps the early planning stages of long-overdue sequels to past books like Galilee and The Great and Secret Show & Everville. The feeling that this is a book he had to get out of his system before he could proceed is a fun one to bask in, even if the book itself isn’t as powerful as perhaps it was inside his head.