Book Five (In the Flesh), Chapter Four

“Babel’s Children”

The least like a horror story in the whole anthology, “Babel’s Children”‘s deadpan handling of a completely absurd and bizarre situation reflects Barker’s roots in magic realism. After all, The Books of Blood are lousy with characters who, perhaps after some initial reticence, leap into acceptance of the extraordinary as easily as hopping across a puddle to keep their feet from getting wet. You can remove the horrific element of the extraordinary and still come up with a story that’s resolutely Barkerian, albeit one that shows Barker’s non-horror roots more clearly than the blood-soaked ones.

Another of those roots is undoubtedly Kafka, as this story is about an absurdity at the heart of human existence on Planet Earth in the time Barker lived there. The notion being explored is that the colossal structures of government, economics, religion, philosophy, military power, and so forth have all been erected on a completely nonsensical foundation. It’s sort of like “Hell’s Event” without the Hell–who needs an infernal opponent in a race to decide arbitrarily the fate of humanity when we can simply race against ourselves?

Is this great political science, even of the satirical variety? I don’t know. They cynics among us usually say that thinking it’s all random and meaningless (and please note I don’t believe the two are synonymous) exculpates the very real people whose very real decisions keep other very real people in penury and misery; the determined laborers for the greater good among us would agree, and further argue that it exculpates us from not taking it upon ourselves to fix things. But horror is about hopelessness, and even a non-horror Barker story like this one must remain true to that spirit; the absurdity cannot be challenged or defeated. The scary part is that what’s true in Barker World might well be true in our own.

One final note: Ever since reading Barker’s description of sex as a means by which he gets characters to do things they normally wouldn’t–a logistical mechanism, in other words, to get the protagonists past the point where the audience of the movie would be yelling “don’t go in there!” at the screen–I’ve been paying special attention to other things he uses in a similar fashion; lately, professional ambitions (usually of the frustrated variety) seem to do the trick. In this story Barker gives himself the most can’t-miss device in this vein imaginable–he simply declares, from the very start of the story, that his main character’s a thrill-seeker, a woman who insists to the point of perversity on taking the road less travelled. The gag is that in an absurd universe, all roads lead to exactly the same place: nowhere. The second gag is that “nowhere” is another word for Utopia, but whether we’ll ever arrive there Barker pointedly refuses to say.

First things first: I’ve posted links to all my reviews of the stories in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in one handy spot. Click and (hopefully) enjoy.

Next, Black Hole, Charles Burns’s horror-comic masterpiece, is out, and there are reviews and profiles here there and everywhere. Courtesy of Tom Spurgeon comes this Philadelphia Inquirer profile of Burns and his work (registration required; try username 123@counting.com and password 123ABC), in which Art Spiegelman brings the yuks:

“He’s not at all the kind of guy who’s walking around saying: ‘I can’t wait to cut somebody’s throat,’ ” says Art Spiegelman, creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic Maus. “But the times we’ve stayed over his house, I’ve made sure to double-bolt the door.”

Next, courtesy of comics critic Paul Gravett’s new website comes this overview of Burns’s work, with particular emphasis on body horror and (naturally) Black Hole.

And courtesy of I don’t know who comes this mildly critical New York Press review of Black Hole, which astutely compares it to Dan Clowes’s also excellent, if far more impenetrable, study of sexualized horror, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron.

This book is the real deal, fright fans.

Speaking of neat books, I liked the sound of The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time (reviewed by Rod Lott at Bookgasm). If you’ve ever thought it’d be cool to have “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Call of Cthulu,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Great God Pan,” “The Lottery,” “Dracula’s Guest” and so forth all collected in one place, it sounds like you could do a lot worse than to buy this anthology.

On the “old news” beat, All Too Flat maestro Ken Bromberg sends word of a zombie attack on the American Idol auditions at UT Austin this past August. I watch American Idol regularly so I will not indulge in the metaphorical Idol-fan bashing that could be done here; I leave that to you the reader.

Moving to the movies, Bill Sherman takes a look at David Cronenberg’s The Brood; among other things, he points out the thematic links between Cronenberg’s work and Clive Barker’s. He’s a man after my own heart.

Also at the movies, Carl Swift at The Black Lagoon examines The Blair Witch Project. I’ve noticed that this movie–the scariest film I’ve ever seen, incidentally–seems to be undergoing a well-deserved and long-overdue critical rehabilitation of late, which is a very very good thing indeed for lovers of great horror; it’s far too important a film to be relegated to insignificance. (For example, more than almost any other film, it prepped American imaginations for the J-horror movement, I think.)

Finally, fantasy smackdown! Philip Pullman of His Dark Materials fame has taken aim at C.S. Lewis’s beloved Narnia series (in the Observer, as quoted by the BBC, courtesy of CinemaEye, courtesy of Bookgasm–phew!) on the eve of the live-action film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, calling them “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice.” I don’t really get the racist angle–isn’t that canard usually reserved for Tolkien?–and I’ve never read Pullman so I don’t have much of a dog in this race, but I must admit I’m far a big fan of Lewis’s fantasy series. This may be because I first read it as a lapsarian grown-up rather than a kid with all the devoutness that childhood usually entails, but I think, regardless, that a) it would always have paled in comparison to Tolkien’s work and my love thereof; b) its attempts to shoehorn its entire plot and world into Christian allegory leads to hamfisted and unforgivable storytelling lapses, most notably the fate of Susan in The Last Battle. Feh. And on a semi-related note, I don’t really remember the huge epic battle sequences that the filmmakers seem to have discovered in TLtWatW if the trailers are any indication, do you? Hmm, I wonder if they may have drawn inspiration from any other recent successful fantasy films…

Book Five (In the Flesh), Chapter Three

“The Madonna”

This story is the feminine yin to “Rawhead Rex”‘s masculine yang, as literally as is possible: While Rawhead represents everything unstoppable and monstrous about masculinity–the evil men suspect they contain, basically–the Madonna, her handmaidens, and her children represents everything alien and horrifyingly fecund about femininity–the evil men suspect women contain.

As he does in “Jacqueline Ess,” Barker associates monstrous femininity with fluidity: Jacqueline’s body roiled like a sea, while the Madonna’s amorphous form makes its home in a humid, sweating abandoned public pool and sauna complex, its children cavorting in the waters. There’s something about water that clearly strikes Barker as frightening to men–even in a story like “Scape-Goats,” where the water triumphs over everyone, it’s ultimately a woman who’s able really to accept the pull of the tide. And you’d probably be hard pressed to count how many times male characters “drown” in the eyes and bodies of their female beloved throughout these stories. So when “The Madonna”‘s male protagonist–one of Barker’s struggling professionals, whose frustration has thus far seen him make pacts with gangsters and rape his own girlfriend rather than admit defeat either in his career or his love life–becomes female, is it any surprise that his acceptance of this fact is directly accompanied by an embrace of death through drowning?

And yet, the transformed man’s girlfriend (not as estranged one would think, or hope) is the one who voices the most explicit rejection of his newfound status.

“I saw…,” she said. Her voice was guttural; thick with barely suppressed abhorrence. “Am I going mad?”

“No.”

“Then what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” he replied simply. “Is it so terrible?”

“Vile,” she said. “Revolting. I don’t want to look at you. You hear me? I don’t want to see.“

He didn’t attempt to argue. She didn’t want to know him, and that was her prerogative.

What to make of this exchange? I mean, if your significant other woke up next to you one morning with a different set of primary and secondary sex characteristics, this would probably be your reaction too, but this is Barker World we’re talking about, where the acceptance of the extraordinary is a commonplace. What are we being told here? What is it about her that makes her reject her man’s womanhood, with far more vehemence than she rejected him for forcing himself on her two nights before? Is it a coincidence that Barker sets this scene in the bathroom, where she’s turned on the shower and let the water run, but simply sat outside, head in hands, without stepping inside to immerse herself?

Book Five (In the Flesh), Chapter Two

“The Forbidden”

This story is the basis for the 1992 film Candyman, written and directed by Bernard Rose and easily one of the finest Barker adaptations to see the light of film. What’s kind of amazing is how much of the movie is new: the American setting, the race-hate angle, the ethnicity of both the slum residents and the Candyman himself, the wrong-man plotline, even the “we dare you to say his name five times!” thing–none of these elements appeared in the original short story. Granted, analogues for many of the film’s novel points can be found in the story itself: class for race, pure urban-legend perpetuation for the name-in-the-mirror bit (I actually think I prefer the book’s strategy; it’s purer, if less catch-phrase memorable)–but it’s still a rare delight to see an adaptation that changes so much work so well.

I find the story to be another of Barker’s best, in no small part because there’s almost no way to figure out where you’re going to end up from where you begin. When the villain appears it’s out of left field and extremely abrupt, and with only a handful of pages to go till the end of the story. It’s a great way to mimic how the protagonist, university graffiti researcher Helen, must feel–suddenly swept away by the irrational, helplessly hurtling toward an unexpected and unimaginable fate.

Much of the story’s strength comes by way of contrast: the seedy, falling-apart-at-the-seams ghetto versus Helen and her boyfriend Trevor’s posh post-grad dinner parties, Helen’s guileless inquisitiveness versus the residents’ nearly pathological reticence, the laughing rationality of faculty b.s. sessions versus the lyrical madness of the Candyman’s lethal seducer’s speech. Another source of strength is the structure, which has an awful lot in common with the one to follow, “The Madonna”: a dedicated professional hungry for success and trapped in a comfortably dysfunctional relationship stumbles across an exemplar of urban decay that houses a secret beast which transcends the squalor of its surroundings even as it destroy those who come in contact with it. Once again, it’s worth noting how relatable Barker’s main characters are becoming: the desire to do something worthwhile coupled with the sinking feeling that you’re shit out of luck is something we’ve all experienced, right? Barker uses that desire as a key for his characters to unlock doors that under normal circumstances they would never dare open. (He’s described his use of sexual desire in this way as well.) And once again, if death’s behind that door, Barker insists that it’s worth it. Are you convinced that he’s right?

Book Five (In the Flesh), Chapter One

“In the Flesh”

As I read through this book it strikes me as being the most archetypically Barkerian, especially in relation to his later, novel-length works. The real accessibility of myth, the link between sexuality and transformation, the exploration of forbidden realms–much more so than the straight-up cruelty of, say, “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Dread,” this is the territory Barker will spend much of his later career in.

The title story of the collection introduces us to the first of Barker’s many cities on the edge of forever. The irony is that the bulk of the story takes place in a prison. Most horror authors would milk the setting for claustrophobia; Barker’s not most horror authors, obviously, and instead opts to make expanse and emptiness the source of this story’s uncanny unpleasantness. Naturally he makes physical transformation the passport to this particular city, and since he’s still getting his sea legs with the dream-city concept you can tell these grotesque metamorphoses (an extremely appropriate choice of word, I assure you) are where he’s really enjoying himself here.

He’s having fun writing this story, and it makes it a lot of fun to read–so much so that we’ll forgive him the O.-Henry-by-way-of-The-Outer-Limits ending, as a matter of fact. I mean, heck, the story even has a callback! (See the above quote–if The Books of Blood were The Dark Side of the Moon, this would be “Breathe (Reprise).”) The characters are well-drawn and likable, even (this is a relative rarity for Barker, who’s priorities usually lie elsewhere) relatable, the scenario is absorbing, and the fate of all involved is horrible, but unique. As is so often the case with The Books of Blood, the uniqueness is paramount, even to the damned.

Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter Five

“The Age of Desire”

28 Days Later but not contagious and with rape-murder instead of plain murder–that’s probably the easiest way to describe this story. You horror connoisseurs out there will also deduce that it’s similar to David Cronenberg’s Shivers, which can pretty much be described as 28 Days Later, just as contagious, with plain rape instead of plain murder. “The Age of Desire” preceded 28 Days (and even presaged its use of monkeys) and followed Shivers by what, almost a decade, and it fits in nicely between them. It’s one of Barker’s strongest short stories, no question.

Clearly the fact that the sex-crazed condition of the story’s “monster”-slash-protagonist isn’t contagious sets “Desire” apart from both its filmic counterparts. Curiously, Barker toys with the potentially millennialist implications of his scientists’ aphrodisiac-on-steroids throughout the story–hence the title, just by way of a for instance–only to deflate them almost (almost–you have to pay careful attention to the story’s climax to see why just “almost”) completely by the story’s end. “I’m dying of terminal joy,” thinks the afflicted. The sensual overload of his condition is unsustainable; that Barker can’t quite bring himself to destroy the world with it may make this something you’d never expect out of the author–a cautionary tale about immersion in the physical at the expense of the mental.

That’s usually Cronenberg’s territory; both artists are preoccupied with the dominion of the body over the mind, but the Canadian’s a lot more frightened of it than the Englishman, who usually all but embraces the transformative possibilities of acknowledging that biology is in fact destiny. It’s only in accepting this, Barker seems to argue, do we stand a chance of ever gaining control of that destiny. On the other hand, “The Age of Desire” warns us that the mind cannot be overthrown completely without dire consequences. “The dream of Casanova” is really just a tarted-up nightmare.

Here is a listing of each of the Blog of Blood entries, to be updated continuously as the series progresses.

Introduction

Book One

Chapter One: “The Book of Blood”

Chapter Two: “The Midnight Meat Train”

Chapter Three: “The Yattering and Jack”

Chapter Four: “Pig Blood Blues”

Chapter Five: “Sex, Death and Starshine”

Chapter Six: “In the Hills, the Cities”

Book Two

Chapter One: “Dread”

Chapter Two: “Hell’s Event”

Chapter Three: “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”

Chapter Four: “The Skins of the Fathers”

Chapter Five: “New Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Book Three

Chapter One: “Son of Celluloid”

Chapter Two: “Rawhead Rex”

Chapter Three: “Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”

Chapter Four: “Scape-Goats”

Chapter Five: “Human Remains”

Book Four (The Inhuman Condition)

Chapter One: “The Inhuman Condition

Chapter Two: “The Body Politic”

Chapter Three: “Revelations”

Chapter Four: “Down, Satan!”

Chapter Five: “The Age of Desire”

Book Five (In the Flesh)

Chapter One: “In the Flesh”

Chapter Two: “The Forbidden”

Chapter Three: “The Madonna”

Chapter Four: “Babel’s Children”

Book Six (Cabal)

Chapter One: “The Life of Death”

Chapter Two: “How Spoilers Bleed”

Chapter Three: “Twilight at the Towers”

Chapter Four: “The Last Illusion”

Chapter Five: “The Book of Blood (A Postscript): On Jerusalem Street”

Conclusion

Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter Four

“Down, Satan!”

The emphasis in this particular short story is definitely on the “short” half of the equation–it’s a grand total of six pages long! That makes it quite an anomaly in The Books of Blood, which stories tend to be of semi-novella length. This one’s written more like a really fucked-up fable or parable: Titan of industry Gregorius wearies of his search for God and decides the Devil might be more accessible; he therefore spends his fortune constructing what amounts to the Tower of Babel for depravity in order to lure Satan out of hiding, only to be consumed and transformed into a veritably Satanic figure himself by his labors.

It’s a funny little tale–springing Mussolini’s pet architect from an insane asylum so he can oversee design the palace of horrors is one of its clever touches. But it’s a weird story too. You can see where Barker could have teased this thing out into a bona fide story through its resonances with previous tales: the mind-boggling ambition of Gregorius’ dwelling echoes that of the villagers in “In the Hills, the Cities,” while the amoral rich man himself is reminiscent of the ill-fated Trump type in “Jacqueline Ess.” So why did Barker keep this one so short and shorn of realism? Beats me, really. In a weird way the tone presages that of his later children’s books, The Thief of Always and the Abarat series. I guess this is kind of a children’s story for grown-ups. Very grown-ups.

Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter Three

“Revelations”

Another story I didn’t remember at all, and (not coincidentally, I’m guessing) another story that’s very, very low on gore–the lowest so far, I believe.

This is the first time Barker betrays his roots as a playwright–man, is this thing stagy. The story centers on three couples: an evangelist and his wife, heading toward a blow-up; the evangelist’s assistant and the eccentric daughter of the owner of the motel where the traveling preacher is staying, radiating instant heat; and the ghosts of a murderer and her slain husband, back at the motel where she killed him thirty years ago for one last shot at reconciliation. It’d make a heckuva one-act.

It’s actually easier to picture the story as acted out on stage, with lighting tricks used to give a spectral feel to the ghosts in their ’50s get-up, than it is to immerse yourself in its world the way you do with a normal Barker story. I sorta wish I’d reread it in college and had the presence of mind to adapt it for the stage myself. Personally I think some work would have to be done to beef up some of the characters, who feel much more stock than Barker’s usually do–would you be surprised to hear that the preacher is emotionally and physically abusive, that his wife is a pill-popper, and that the slain husband has only one thing on his mind? And it’s barely horror at all, ghosts and bullet wounds aside. But Barker would return to the fields of bodice-ripping romance far more fruitfully in the future–Galilee, to a certain extent Coldheart Canyon–so there’s some fun to be had in this amateur production before the curtain’s rung down.

Let’s kick things off today with The Best Horror Comic Of All Time (TM): Tom Spurgeon links to The Book Standard’s interview with Charles Burns, writer-artist of the absolutely stunning graphic novel about a sexually transmitted mutation in ’70s Seattle teens, Black Hole, which comes out today! Among other topics, Burns answers the question “Why horror?”

I know that I could have told the story just totally straight. I mean, I could have told a similar story. But I wanted to have something that kind of pushed it to an extreme. So I worked with the idea of how, in adolescence, you

Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter Two

“The Body Politic”

This story reads sort of like what you’d get if Clive Barker were the frontman in a Stephen King cover band. As such, it’s probably the most apples-to-apples comparison you can get between Barker’s short stories and King’s. Fans of King’s short story collections Night Shift and Skeleton Key (and boy am I ever one! As I always say, King’s at his best when he’s under 100 pages or over 1,000) know that one of his favorite devices is the run-of-the-mill thing that suddenly goes killer: trucks, rats, mold, a laundry machine, fog, a wind-up monkey, a mirror, etc. Often these things achieve a murderous sentience and threaten apocalypse through sheer force of numbers alone. And that’s exactly what you have here: It’s Maximum Overdrive with human hands instead of vehicles and appliances.

With the experiment controlled for the villain variable, noteworthy differences emerge. The most prominent, obviously, is the tone. King writes everymen; sure, when he’s writing ’em, every man is more likely to be a writer from New England than in our own, but it’s basically a John Cougar Mellencamp world, with all the just-folks dialogue and idiomatic expressions that entails. Barker couldn’t be less interested in that sort of writing; nearly all of his characters, regardless of their station in life, think in lyrical, dreamily self-absorbed snippets of philosophy.

Another prominent divergence is in the conclusion. King’s short stories tend to have endings where even if he doesn’t come right out and say where things will head after the final sentence, you’ve got a clear picture–either back to the status quo or, more likely, slowly onward toward apocalypse. (I remember marveling at just how many of his short stories end in the worst way possible.) Barker’s a lot less concerned with endings–this one twists and turns from one possibility to another before ending up going a different route entirely. Indeed, many of his novels all but eschew the concept of an ending entirely–Imajica, Coldheart Canyon, and I believe Weaveworld (it’s been a while) have their climaxes followed up by another 50-100 pages that are much more than just a wrap-up or epilogue, but like an entirely new arc for the novel. “The Body Politic” is actually closer to a King ending than you usually get from Barker’s work, but it’s still notable how random and unpredictable both it and what might follow from it are.

Finally, there’s the Evil Thing itself. King’s Evil Things are almost always external in nature–everyday items, threats from space, supernatural horrors. When Barker did his King-style story, he made the Evil Thing a part of the human body. The enslavement of the mind to the needs of the body is a prominent theme in Barker’s work, in evidence in a variety of different ways everywhere from “Dread” to Book Four‘s “Age of Desire.” Here Barker makes literalizes this theme as much as possible, and the results are genuinely frightening. (I’m sure I’m not the only person who spent a few seconds mimicking what it would be like if my hands had a life of their own, only to quickly freak out over how creepy it felt and stop!) And, of course, very very gory–this entire story is pretty much a catalog of self-mutilation, and while the damage done to the bodies involved isn’t as spectacular or inventive as Barker’s capable of due to the logistics involved, it’s actually all the more horrifying for its very ease of imaginability.

And I think the quote I chose as a title for this post is a key one, too–yes, the killer hands are symbolic of all the body-horror issues Barker’s always poking at–but yes, they’re also plain old killer hands. So much of the joy of horror stems from the simple pleasure of coming up with really scary monsters that do really scary things. I think in all these verbose blogathons going on there’s a risk of losing sight of that–mainstream critics of horror movies, for example, seem to see losing sight of that as a point of pride; pick any review of any zombie movie and you’ll see what I mean–but Barker refuses to let that terrible delight go. King at his best is the same way–take his novella “The Mist,” from Skeleton Crew, which he says he wrote simply for the thrill of creating big monsters with giant tentacles that eat people. There’s an awful lot to be said for pure monsters, because they’re scary.

All in all, King fans can consider this one their Clive Barker gateway drug. Unpleasant side-effects guaranteed or your money back.

Book Four (The Inhuman Condition), Chapter One

“The Inhuman Condition”

Here’s another one I didn’t remember–I guess we’re moving into uncharted territory, memory-wise. Again, this one isn’t terribly gory or brutal. It is weird, in terms of its horrific logistics: Though you don’t know it at first, this is a story about spells, and I very much doubt you’ve come across this method of enchantment before. You can sense the pleasure Barker derived from coming up with something truly novel throughout this collection, and in this case you get the sense that that pleasure is almost enough in itself to sustain the entire story.

“Inhuman” contains (as you might expect from the title) some memorable additions to Barker’s bestiary, but I found the humans involved much more compelling. The heroes of the story are a group of petty criminals who assault the homeless when they’re not committing burglaries, but Barker coaxes out from them genuine feelings of friendship and even of love that lesser writers would gloss over among this type of thug, insisting instead that societal ills or innate evil keep them on their path. Barker seems to say that they do this because they’re friends, even if they’d never articulate it that way themselves. Take this passage, which takes place when Karney (the main character) reveals to his cohort Brendan the supernatural origin of their friend Catso’s demise:

Karney caught sight of a telltale fullness at the edge of Brendan’s eyes. [Brendan’s] anger was camouflage–barely adequate–for a grief he had no mechanism to prevent. In Brendan’s present mood neither fear nor argument would convince him of the truth.

This is also one of the rare stories where things turn out okay for the main character–indeed, his station in life has the potential to markedly improve, though what we know of his nemesis throughout the rest of the story indicates that the newfound knowledge he has might come at quite a price. The execution’s a little pat–I think this is one of the rare places where Barker’s prose fails him: “He came to the mysteries on the page’s of Pope’s forbidden book as to an oasis. Drinking deeply, he looked forward with rare exhilaration to the pilgrimage ahead.”…I don’t know, just strikes me as a bit hokey–but I like the notion; it presages the conclusions of many of Barker’s later novels, in which hope emerges from horror a lot more regularly than it does here.

Book Three, Chapter Five

“Human Remains”

NB: I wrote and attempted to post this entry yesterday, but technical difficulties with the site prevented it from going up until this morning. Sorry folks. Blame the Cornell engineering grads who run this thing. Go Big Red!

This is the first story in the collection of which I had no recollection whatsoever. When I got a few pages into it I recognized that it was included in the trade paperback collection of Barker’s Tapping the Vein, his old Marvel/Epic series of short-story adaptations (The Comic Books of Blood, in other words), which I recently flipped through, but other than that, nothin’. My guess is that’s because it’s noticeably less gruesome than most of the other stories–probably the least bloody so far (though there is one nasty moment, it’s relatively run-of-the-mill in terms of its specifics). It’s Barker’s transgressive gore that makes the biggest impression the first time around.

But my forgetfulness shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the story’s no good. It’s Barker’s take on the doppelganger and it’s another sad one, with an elegiac ending overlaid with a wry, mournful sense of humor. (It’s also one of Barker’s most explicitly gay stories at this point in his career.) And interestingly, the doomed character this time around is pretty interesting, at least as far as his profession goes–suffice it to say he’s no accountant. But he doesn’t have a very rich inner life; indeed, his surface pretty much is his life. As his will to live is sapped he lets his physical appearance go to hell without a care. His last confrontation with his destroyer reveals that it’s actually better at being human than he is, in some ways. I think that’s the real horror here: Our hero starts out worrying that he’s a failure, and by the end all doubt has been removed–but his failure runs much deeper than he’d imagined. The loss of his life, his looks, even his soul is almost no big deal compared to the loss of his ability to spend a lifetime kidding himself.

Book Three, Chapter Four

“Scape-Goats”

It’s strange to re-encounter the characters in these stories only to discover, in many cases, that they’re now younger than I am. When I first read these books, in high school, these jaded hedonists and criminals, these sexually omnivorous pleasure-seekers and self-medicators, they all seemed so much older and so much more experienced. Now I’m on the ill-fated voyage with the bitterly self-absorbed holiday-makers of “Scape-Goats,” and I find myself one year their senior. I don’t even think of them as adults anymore, because since I’m still a kid, anyone younger than me must be as well.

At least now I have some context into which I can put the 26-year-old oversexed backstabbers on the good ship “Emanuelle”–they’re rich hipsters, trust-fund kids. They’re at home enough on this yacht that they–I say “they” rather than “Barker” because this is the first story in the collection narrated beginning to end in the first person–don’t even bother explaining whose it is or where they’re from. It doesn’t really matter, though, since the point of the story is that they’re all going to end up swept away by the tide of time. Rather literally, in fact.

I think this is another very fine story, owing mostly to the way it focuses on the emotions of futility and resignation, too rarely tapped in a genre that is tailor-made to make use of them. In that way it’s the spiritual sister to “Pig Blood Blues,” right down to the animal imagery in both story and title–“Scape-Goats”‘ doomed sheep are every bit as memorable in their passivity as the pig was in its aggression.

What you really have here is four irredeemably solipsistic people–even Frankie, for all her insight into the callowness of herself and her companions, can’t seem to will herself out of it; for pete’s sake, she fucks a guy because she can’t be bothered to deny him–who are forced from being the only things in their respective worlds that matter into things that don’t matter at all. To do this Barker relies on images of some of nature’s great levelers–erosion, putrefaction, the fog, the sea, the sweep of history. The brief moments of initiative and even savagery that the characters display seem even more pointless when contrasted against these insurmountable forces. It’s only when it can’t possibly make a difference anymore that Frankie shows a flash of true feeling for another person; it’s only then that this beautiful young woman, who’s paraded her nakedness and her sex before us like they couldn’t be more inconsequential to her, becomes truly attractive; it’s only then that the loss hurts us, and becomes hard to forget.

Let’s kick things off tonight with another installment of “Meet the Horror Blogosphere”: Presenting Sylvian L.’s Killing in Style, which bills itself as “Reflections about the giallo.” That’s really what it is–a series of short, thoughtful little posts on various stylish Italian slasher films, as well as movies that inspired their asthetic, like Blow-Up. This is a heckuva find if you enjoy the genre, or just good writing on horror.

Speaking of giallo, life imitates it: True-crime blogger Steve Huff reports that Mexico City is being stalked by a serial killer who is either a woman or a female impersonator and who has murdered four elderly women this year–three of whom all had prints of the same painting, Jean-Baptisted Greuze’s “Boy in Red Waistcoat,” in their homes. It sounds like something out of a Dario Argento movie, doesn’t it? But unfortunately for the victims, who had the bad luck of being women murdered in Mexico, this particularly movie is unlikely to have a satisfying conclusion.

In other news of the real-world weird, Mickey Kaus has been reporting on a series of “mystery stench” outbreaks in D.C., L.A., and…Wales? Kaus semi-suspects bioweapon experimentation; these things do happen…

Which leads us perfectly to our first Dark But Shining link of the day: Rick Geerling’s encomium for Stephen King’s military-experiment-gone-awry horror novella The Mist. Rick points out that I love this story. Everyone should.

Next, guest-blogger Aaron Weisbrod makes with the quotability: “to me, true horror is an abandonment of all hope.” My sentiments exactly!

Fellow DBS guest-blogger (and writer of the new Western horror comic Strangeways) Matt Maxwell pens a thought-provoking essay on the thin line between horror and other genres, especially sci-fi. I’m generally someone who doesn’t much care about or for genre boundaries–I have no problem viewingEyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures, Deliverance, Lost Highway, and maybe even Casino as horror movies, though they’re each other kinds of movies as well. Maybe that’s why passages from Matt’s essay like this one threw me:

John Carpenter

Book Three, Chapter Three

“Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”

This is a comparatively unassuming story, as far as The Books of Blood go. Barker’s not scaling any notable thematic or rhetorical heights here, nor is he pushing the envelope in terms of imagery. (There’s one really nasty moment in there, and it’ll test your stomach, shall we say, but one’s not a whole lot when you consider the source.) Even the protagonist is just sort of an everysquare. The monster is novel enough, but it’s not meant to blow your mind a la “In the Hills, the Cities” or anything like that.

No, the modest pleasures of this story are basically derived from the very fact that the pleasures are so modest. This is a revenge story, pure and simple–Kill Bill with ghosts–and if that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like Barker’s take on it. The real interest lies in where Barker’s potboiler deviates from the formula. Like I said, he’s not going nuts here, but there are flourishes now and then that are worth picking apart.

For example, our soon-to-be late protagonist Ronald Glass reacts with disgust bordering on the pathological when he discovers that he’s the unwitting house accountant for an enormous, illegal hardcore porn empire–it’s not just the notion that revolts him, but the fleshy, hairy, puckered bodies that constitute the goods. However, once the frame-up job hits the fan and his life is ruined because of it, he reacts unhesitatingly with wetworks-style violence. Perhaps Barker is getting at the way straight society is neurotic over sexuality but more or less at home with violence?

Once Glass is apprehended by his victims’ underworld cohorts, he’s tortured to death, but the torture scene itself is strangely glossed over, pretty much the opposite of what you’d expect from Barker. I think the depiction of torture is one of the most acutely horrifying tools at the disposal of an artist (the facts that I’m a horror buff and that Casino is my favorite Scorsese movie are not unconnected). So why does the god of splatterpunk steer clear of it? Is it because the shlubs who populate the story, even on the criminal side, are so workaday that they can’t bear the weight of typically Barkerian excess?

Then there’s the ghost-Glass’s first victim, whose crime is simply being a boor. This isn’t the first time Barker has implied that a failure to be interesting is a capital crime, and it won’t be the last; it’s interesting that the executioner here is also a drab little man, his spectral condition excepted of course.

The quest for vengeance culminates in yet another spectacularly gory assault on the sanctity of family. To be sure, the child involved makes out a whole lot better than does the one in “Rawhead Rex,” but years of therapy, if not institutionalization, are certainly in its future. This sort of behavior is (or was) generally taboo even in horror, but for Barker it appears the violation of taboo is an end in itself, even when the means are as straightforward as they are in “Confessions.”

It’s a fine little story, underlined with one last subtle embellishment–the parenthetical accusation that hangs over Glass, even in the title of the story that chronicles his attempt to avenge the besmirching of his good name. One last kick in the nuts of the too-ordinary guy. I get the sense that that’s the taboo Barker’s really gunning for.

Book Three, Chapter Two

“Rawhead Rex”

If I had to recommend one story from The Books of Blood to horror fandom in general, this would be it. Werewolf fans, Grendel fans, Frankenstein or Bigfoot or orc or troll or Jason or Alien or whatever fans–stop what you’re doing, click on that Amazon link at the end of this post, buy Books of Blood Vols. 1-3, and the second you receive it, read “Rawhead Rex” immediately. You will never find a better monster-run-amok story no matter how hard you look.

The plot is pure simplicity–in an English country village slowly being overrun by tourists, a local yokel unearths a 9-foot-tall monster that kills and eats people, especially children. This monster–Rawhead, it’s called; also the King (hence the “Rex” of the title)–proceeds to do exactly that, in abundance. That’s pretty much it. GodDAMN is it great.

The genius of the story lies in the absolute, single-minded savagery with which Barker chronicles the rampage. For example, when I said Rawhead eats children, I was not fucking around. The totality with which the concept of the family is violated in this story is breathtaking–children are yanked from parents’ arms and devoured right in front of them, they’re yanked out of the family car and vomit down the creature’s head as he bites their faces off while the parents look on, helpless. It’s unbelievably gruesome, and powerful. Church and Law offer no more protection than Family, either.

The story’s full of the sort of primal-fear, fight-or-flight-inspiring images that kicked off “The Skins of the Fathers,” with this enormous angry monster bursting down doors, smashing through windows, running down the High Street destroying everything in sight. It puts that cold fear in your gut that you’d get if you went to take out the garbage and found yourself five feet away from a grizzly bear–only worse, because when the eyes of this beast find you they’re full of a horrible self-awareness, hatred as well as hunger. Actually, they’re filled with joy. Rawhead loves what he does.

As becomes apparent, thematically speaking, as the story unfolds, Barker’s original idea for Rawhead was of a giant killer penis. As such “Rawhead Rex” is one of Barker’s most searing explorations of gender politics (one of his favorite topics to tackle through horror, thus far most explicitly in “Dread,” “The Skins of the Fathers,” “Jacqueline Ess,” and “Son of Celluloid”; the sex act, of course, is virtually omnipresent throughout the entire anthology).

And there are the usual razor-sharp prose moments, of course, my favorite being when a newly bereaved father can no longer cry: “This time the tears didn’t begin. This time there was just an anger that was almost wonderful.”

Even some of Barker’s more problematic recurring tropes are rock-solid here. Take the quiet, almost curious–indeed, almost welcoming–resignation many of his characters feel immediately before being dispatched by some hideous creature or other: I often find it if not difficult to believe then at least demanding of more explanation than Barker’s willing to give it (cf. Ricky in “Son of Celluloid,” for example), but here he ponies up a convincing argument in its favor: “[He] just stood and watched. There was nothing in him but awe. Fear was for those who still had a chance of life: he had none.” If horror is hopelessness (and I see I’m not alone in thinking that), then this is horror at its purest.

“Rawhead Rex” is probably best known for its legendarily awful movie adaptation, which is a real shame, because it would make an excellent horror movie, albeit dark as anything this side of the original Texas Chain Saw, and Rawhead would make an unforgettable monster. With his orcs (and especially) his Uruk-Hai, Peter Jackson proved that (much as he proved the filmability of Lovecraft with his Watcher in the Water). Meanwhile, Steven Bissette’s never-realized graphic-novel version trumped the one that did see print, by Steve Niles and Les Edwards. But the best version, I assure you, is in your head. Go unleash it.

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.

Book Two, Chapter Five

“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”

I think Book Two started off a little shakily, to be honest. “Dread” (though I know it has its partisans) is powerful but uneven, and “Hell’s Event” is a bit random. But boy, does this volume finish strong. “Jacqueline Ess,” “Skins of the Fathers,” and this story, a bizarre, sad, and troubling riff on Poe’s original, are each singular and strange and enormously effective horror.

As befits its semi-cover-version storyline, in which Poe’s ape-run-amok murder mystery is grafted uncomfortably and disastrously into the present day, “New Murders” is about the horror of getting old. That horror is twofold: On the one hand, main character Lewis feels that he’s outlived the usefulness of being alive, if you will–his best days are well behind him and he’s acutely aware that, in that sense, there’s really no point to sticking around.

In some ways Lewis was almost glad to be old and close to leaving the century to its own devices. Yes, the snow froze his marrow. Yes, to see a young girl with the face of a goddess uselessly stirred his desires. Yes, he felt like an observer now instead of a participator.

But it had not always been this way.

On the other hand, even as Lewis’s life thins, he is overwhelmed by a surfeit of life around him. As he investigates a brutal killing that has landed an old friend in jail, he’s constantly bombarded by an excess of experience–powerful smells, hideous faces, disconcerting sounds, painful physical trials, diquieting lusts.

It was too much. The dizziness throbbed through Lewis’ cortex. Was this death? The lights in the head, and the whine in the ears?

He closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the lovers, but unable to shut out the noise. It seemed to go on forever, invading his head. Sighs, laughter, little shrieks.

Twice during “New Murders” Lewis muses on the distinction between fiction and reality. At first he dismisses it as a concern of the young–when you’re old, he thinks, it all becomes part of the same mental landscape. But by the end of the story over-reliance on convenient fictions has led to tragedy, and his opinion changes completely–something either is, or isn’t.

Lewis, in the end, realizes he falls into the latter category.

The real horror about getting old, according to “New Murders,” is that you can no longer afford your fiction. An unfixable mistake, an unforgivable crime, an unforgettable tragedy, an unhallowed death at the end of your days can ruin all that’s come before it.

The past, their past together, was dead. This final chapter in their joint lives soured utterly everything that preceded it, so that no shared memory could be enjoyed without the pleasure being spoilt….No innocence, no history of joy could remain unstained by that fact. Silently they mourned the loss…of their own past. Lewis understood now [the] reluctance to live when there was such loss in the world.

The fiction Lewis and his friends believed superior to reality is not just vulnerable to its intrusion but ultimately hollow and lousy in and of itself. Self-blandishments and pretense are not palliative but corrupting and destructive–the central horrific figure in this story, about whom I shall say no more, is the embodiment of this notion, very, very vividly so. And as the world marches on the shattered fictions and those who harbored them are left behind.

Book Two, Chapter Four

“The Skins of the Fathers”

In many ways this story is simply a dry run for the later, more ambitious novella Cabal, which was grafted on and lent its name to the sixth and final volume of The Books of Blood here in the U.S. There as here we have an apocalyptic confrontation between the denizens of a reactionary American small town and a community of monsters more threatening by virtue of their very existence than by any physical danger they may or may not pose. There as here the proceedings function as a metaphor for humanity’s fear of that which is different, though in Cabal it’s homosexuality that’s the subtextual target whereas here it’s women, specifically women functioning independently of men. Indeed, Barker goes so far as to make this story into a reverse creation myth, revealing how man sprung from the union of woman and monster, only to enslave the former and eradicate the latter.

Cabal‘s monsters aren’t the beasts of this story–they’re more or less human, so they have personalities, they speak English, and so forth. In that way and in several others Cabal is a more rewarding work. “Skins” is simply a much more straightforward horror story, and a terrific one. Things get cranking right away in a terrifically vivid chase scene in the desert–city slicker Davidson walks a mile or so into the wasteland away from his broken-down car to solicit help from what he thinks is a passing parade of some kind, only to discover, with about a half a mile remaining between him and the members of the procession, that they aren’t even remotely human. Davidson’s split-second switchover to abject terror as one of the creatures bolts from the group and runs across the featureless desert straight for him is utterly convincing and (ahem) pungently evoked. The thought of this huge beast barreling in your direction as you make a run for a car that you have no hope of moving even if you can get inside it before this thing catches you and tears you to pieces is such a primal fear–it’s the kind of image you’d imagine preceded and gave birth to everything else in the story!

“Skins” is also a chance for Barker to show off his chops in creating uniquely Barkerian monsters. In the same way that “Jacqueline Ess” showed him flexing his gore muscles, “Skins” offers full vistas of the bizarre menagerie we’ve caught fleeting glimpses of in “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Hell’s Event”:

One was perhaps eighteen or twenty feet tall. Its skin, that hung in folds on its muscle, was a sheath of spikes, its head a cone of exposed teeth, set in scarlet gums. Another was three-winged, its triple-ended tail thrashing the dust with reptilian enthusiasm. A third and fourth were married together in a union of monstrosities the result of which was more disgusting than the sum of its parts. Through its length and breadth this symbiotic horror was locked in seeping marriage, its limbs thrust in and through wounds in its partner’s flesh. Though the tongues of its heads were wounded together it managed a cacaphonous howl.

See what I mean? Barker’s primary technique is really just to sketch a vague picture of a beast by providing a few key details, the sort of details your mind is unlikely ever to conjure without his prompting, and let you take it from there. (I was particularly dumbfounded by the beast whose head is a featureless cylinder.) It’s an effective technique, a sort of “guided” version of the CW about the best horror being left to one’s imagination. He’ll leave it to your imagination all right, but not before giving you a loaner from his own.

One final thought about this story: A lot of it is unfair. The rednecks get what they deserve, for the most part, and that’s fine; the abusive husband and father too. But some of the former end up headed for an extremely slow and painful death, so gratuitously awful that even the woman around whom the whole fiasco really centered (due to her dalliance with the monsters and subsequent conception and childbirth years back) is horrified and desperate to save them, even though it’s pretty much impossible. And the latter wasn’t abusive until the monsters appeared, cuckolded him, and essentially drove him insane. And what about Lucy, the monsters’ mate, who is left unprotected by them, has her child taken by them, and is ultimately abandoned to the desert? And what about Eleanor, the pistol-packin’ mama who’s just as much a woman as anyone but condemned to suffer alongside the male rednecks because of her too-enthusiastic embrace of American machismo? And for pete’s sake what about Davidson, whose only crime was a highway breakdown and who was dragged into the final confrontation only because someone literally pointed a gun at his head? (Not, perhaps, the head the proverb refers to, but a head nonetheless.) This is perhaps the clearest illustration yet that the deadliest sin in Barker’s world is the failure to be extraordinary; is that really a mortal sin, and should such sinners be so extravagantly damned?