Book Two, Chapter Three

“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”

This story is practically lousy with insight.

Jacqueline told me lies at that first meeting….I suppose she could have told me the truth then and there, and I would have lapped it up–I believe I was utterly devoted from the beginning. But it’s difficult to remember quite how and when interest in another human being flares into something more committed, more passionate. It may be that I am inventing the impact she had on me at that first meeting, simply re-inventing history to justify my later excesses. I’m not sure.

More.

If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your enquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.

More.

It wasn’t that she was feeding on me. I want to be clear about that. She was no lamia, no succubus. What happened to me, my fall from grace with ordinary life if you like, was of my own making. She didn’t bewitch me; that’s a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. Does that make any sense? I’d lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of law, and I was tired of it. She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance. But that was my decision. Understand that. This has always been my decision.

More.

It’s not a small world, when there’s only one face in it you can bear to look upon, and that face is lost somewhere in a maelstrom. It’s not a small world when the few, vital memories of your object of affection are in danger of being trampled out by the thousands of moments that assail you every day, like children tugging at you, demanding your sole attention.

There’s a lot more where that came from in this, one of Barker’s finest short stories. I didn’t really remember just how good it was until I reread it, actually.

It starts off with a sort of traditional fable/fairy-tale structure, extraordinary things happening with minimal explanation or justification. In this way the main character’s name echoes not only that of another mysterious and captivating woman, Jackie O, but of another character whose bizarre story illustrates the absurd horrors of the human heart, Josef K.

We then switch over to the first-person “testimony” excerpted above, by that of one Oliver Vassi, Jacqueline’s doomed lover. (That’s pretty much all she has.) It’s a switchover that shouldn’t work but does, even as the POV is switched back and forth several more times. Barker makes the most of the point-counterpoint through his prose–just by way of a for instance, as our male interlocutors shower Jacqueline with worship and fear, we barely notice that her habitual internal exclamations of “My God, this can’t be,” internalized supplications to the great Pater, gradually disappear from her mental vocabulary, until in her final triumph they are nowhere to be found.

It’s a story about gender and power, and the relationship between the two. As Oliver says,

I was convinced that something in her system was awry…On reflection, of course, that seems laughably naive. To think she wouldn’t have known that she contained such a power. But it was easier for me to picture her as prey to such skill, than mistress of it. That’s a man speaking of a woman; not just me, Oliver Vassi, of her, Jacqueline Ess. We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.

Students of the superhero genre will doubtless be interested to learn that Jacqueline’s powers fall into that traditionally female domain–the fluid powers of the telekinetic. The argument often goes that such powers, along with invisibility, telepathy, intangibility and so forth, are to be seen as inferior through their constant association with femaleness. But “Jacqueline Ess” is maybe the greatest act of reclamation for telekinesis ever, and I’m not even talking about the beautiful passages in which the resting Jacqueline’s flesh ripples and flows like a lake, or when her genitals pulse and throb like a sentient flower: Simply put, this is one of the most gruesomely violent stories I’ve ever read, and that really is saying something. When Jacqueline kills somebody, you know they’ve been killed. When I first read this story back in high school, I got about a sentence into the part where Barker describes the way the taut flesh of a man’s forehead and nose splits down the center as Jacqueline mentally flays him alive before I grunted in disgust and literally put the book down. I’d never done that before and I don’t think I’ve ever done it since. Barker really pushes body horror to its limits here, in the same way that he’ll push his phanatsmagorical bestiary/physiology to its limits in the next story.

There are many other moments to savor–the humor (Jacqueline’s patronizing shrink is named Dr. Blandish), the sex (telekinetically enhanced and super, super hot), the turns of phrase (the gorgeous iambic pentameter of “my fall from grace with ordinary life,” echoing “In the Hills, the Cities”‘s concluding “He interrupted neither with his name”), the bracingly direct graffiti shrine to Jacqueline, the Klaus Nomi-esque pimp she enslaves toward the story’s end, the punning use of “Her Will” in the title, and especially the last paragraphs, as transcendent as those of “In the Hills,” in my opinion. A greatest hit, without question.

Would that it were not so, but Where the Monsters Go has been experiencing technical difficulties out the wazoo lately. From erroneous dates to spam links to refusing to accept pings to maybe even dropping included sites off the list, it’s been giving me agita. Unfortunately, all these problems are the fault of blo.gs, which ever since Yahoo took it over has been sort of like a catastrophic dirigible accident. All I can advise users of the list or owners of the sites listed therein to do for now is be patient, and email me if your site gets dropped or you run into a similarly major problem. Thank you kindly.

At the risk of this feature becoming “ADDTF’s Dark But Shining Watch,” there’s a lot of good stuff going on over Chez Costello/Geerling/Melrose these days.

First, ther’s Sam Costello’s review of Uzumaki, one of the two best horror comics I’ve ever read (and one of the best comics of any kind I’ve ever read, for that matter). I think this is pretty close to essential reading for horror fans.

Second, here’s guest-blogger Aaron Weisbrod’s assertion that zombies aren’t scary. As someone who’s been scared by at least four zombie movies, I don’t know what I can say besides “nuh-uh.” But Aaron doesn’t do much to back up his assertion–he doesn’t even go so far as to say why, or even if, he’s never been scared by them. Mostly he focuses on how zombies are a surefire route to lousy storytelling in the hands of lazy writers. Well, yeah, but what isn’t? The comment thread is full of interesting and impassioned rebuttals; by all means read and make your own decision.

Third, here’s links to all their October horror-fest posts so far. Go nuts!

Moving on, Phoebe Gloeckner, one of the Greatest Living Cartoonists (and a big-time Uzumaki fan, btw), has been blogging again. This would be unalloyed good news were it not for the fact that in the September 17th entry (if there’s a permalink I can’t find it, so just scroll down) she reveals that she was alternately condescended to and excoriated during an appearance on NPR, by the show’s conservative and “liberal” co-hosts alike. Having your harrowing portrayal of childhood sexual abuse called “pornographic” by bluenosed nitwit Michael Medved is one thing, but he wasn’t alone, apparently. Now that’s scary.

On a more traditionally monstrous note, today’s installment of “Meet the Horror Blogosphere” brings us to the aptly named Giant Monster Blog. Who could say no to a blog whose subhead reads “My thoughts on everything from Angilas to Zigra?” If you dig the Kong or the kaiju, you should make this one a regular stop.

Clive Barker to collaborate with Frank Quitely? It could happen, if Barker has his way–Jonathan Encarnacion’s interview with Quitely, the best artist in genre comics today, at Silver Bullet Comics reveals that Barker is a big fan and has made an offer to collaborate on something, anything. Oh please oh please oh please. (Hat tip to Jim Dougan for the link.)

Finally, One Louder links to the video for “Give Me Every Little Thing,” a terrific P-Funk-meets-Pet-Shop-Boys track by the fun DFA-produced dance outfit The Juan Maclean. It’s kind of like a visual mash-up between 2001, Midnight Cowboy, and ’70s smut. NSFW, but delightful in nearly every other way. And while you’re at the Waverly Films directorial group’s site, be sure to check out the video for Jason Forrest’s “Steppin’ Off”, which is the most note-perfect recreation of ’70s arena-rock faux-Tolkienisms since Spinal Tap‘s “Stonehenge” sequence–or The Song Remains the Same for that matter…

Book Two, Chapter Two

“Hell’s Event”

You don’t read too many horror stories about track and field competitions, do you?

This story’s a tough one to really groove on, if you ask me. The conceit is just a little too, I don’t know, frivolous? I really hate to do this and I’ve tried to avoid it in my discussions of the stories so far, but I think I’ve got to just tell you what the plot is for you to understand what I mean. So, SPOILER WARNING…

Hell secretly enters a demon in a charity half-marathon in London. If a human wins, democracy will reign for another 100 years (“another”?–ed. Hey, it’s Barker’s optimistic assessment of the 20th century, not mine!). If the demon wins, the world will end.

Okay. So that’s what that is. Like I said, it’s a tough one. But still, there are pleasures to be found here.

1) This is the second of Barker’s stories to deal with the rules by which Hell is obliged to abide (the other being “The Yattering and Jack”). Considering how chaotic Barker’s Earth is, it’s curious his Hell is bound to follow regulations just like any other competitor. “We stand for order, you know,” says Hell’s human summoner in this story. “Not chaos. That’s just heavenly propaganda.” Obviously, for those familiar with Barker’s work in general, this theme is taken up once again, though far less lightly, in Hellraiser and Hellbound.

2) This is also the second of Barker’s stories to deal with issues of race (the other being “The Midnight Meat Train”). Tellingly, as in the earlier story, the character who most explicitly voices bigoted sentiments is a monster who subsequently goes down to defeat. But things were certainly set up before then, from the second we learn that the heroic protagonist Joel Jones is black and Hell’s contestant is posing as a white South African. I was also struck by the way Barker notes that racists view black people as not just less human, but also more human, than themselves.

3) There are just a lot of really great Barker horror moments–what happens to Jones’s manager when he sneaks one last look back at the thing coming out of the portal to Hell; the way one of the demons transforms its face from that of a human into what Barker describes as “a fan of knives” before arriving at its final insectoid form; the gleefully gruesomely described fate of Jones himself, making literal use out of the fact that he’s been voted by the tabloids as “the best loved black face in England”; and the fate of Hell’s human agent when the race is over, one that presages the bodies-past-their-limits imagery of the (superior) story that follows this one. (Tune in tomorrow!)

4) Though we are with both Jones and his manager Cameron only briefly as compared to similar protagonists in other stories, they’re both made pretty damn likable in a pretty short period of time. Perhaps it’s because so much of their respective narratives involve physical striving–Joel in his race, Cameron on his bicycle. Our desire to see them succeed is almost sympathetically physical.

5) It’s quiet, but you can hear a common Barker theme being played there at the end, as the knowing children in the crowd of spectators lead their horrified parents away–some people’s minds are as able to accommodate the unnatural as they are anything else.

Book Two, Chapter One

“Dread”

When I was in college a professor illustrated the nature of Jesus’ parables with the following clue: “To solve this riddle, change one pig.” The idea is that the way to interpret the clue is contained within the clue itself.

In much the same way, “Dread” is about what it does: exploiting specific phobias. In that sense it’s a very nasty, sordid story. As gruesome as some of the earlier tales are, this is the first one that makes you think, “Jesus, am I really reading this stuff?” It’s voyeuristic and unpleasant. And depending on how you relate to the three phobias encountered, it’s scary as shit.

In my opinion it’s the first of the three phobias–a vegetarian’s pathological fear of meat–that is the most harrowing. First of all, we’ve seen Barker make comparisons between the state of being alive and being meat before, obviously, in “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” so there’s that resonance: the way carnivorousness reduces all of us to consumer or consumptible.

Secondly, I’m married to a vegetarian, and in fact have recently become one myself. (After Hurricane Katrina I really couldn’t bring myself to cause, however indirectly, an animal to suffer so that I can enjoy my double quarter-pounder. No moral judgment on meat-eaters intended at all, mind you–it’s just a personal decision, like the way I won’t stop petting my cat until she decides petting time is over.) Amy’s vegetarianism, incidentally, is directly attributable to scenes of ostentatious carnivorousness in two horror films, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (when the raptors eat the cow) and Mike Nichols’s Wolf (when Nicholson eats the deer)–I’ve already got some experience, therefore, with the connection between vegetarianism and a fear of not being a vegetarian, which is what the relevant character in the story is faced with. Inasmuch as vegetarianism in women is often connected to disordered eating and my wife is herself a recovering anorexic, that’s another direct line to the dread (you see?) experienced by the pertinent character in the story–even more so because her choice is literally one between eating meat (eventually, eating rotten meat) or starving to death.

Thirdly, and I think most insidiously, that character, Cheryl Fromm, is a popular, intelligent, gorgeous blonde college student. We’ve all known popular, intelligent, gorgeous young blondes; what Barker is exploiting is simultaneous lust for and resentment of them. Cheryl’s degradation is presented painstakingly, methodically, and explicitly. We watch her lash out in anger, sob, urinate, bathe, vomit, and ultimately give in to the needs of her body and eat the meat. (No double meaning intended there from Barker, oh I’m sure.) So there’s the “serves you right for not being my possession already, bitch” element, I’m afraid–the desire to punish people for being beautiful, or for being more than we are. It’s unpleasant, but if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s undoubtedly present.

(I also think Barker taps into the strange eroticization of women eating, which arises from the fact that act is all but taboo in today’s society. Gregg Araki made the best use of this I’ve yet seen in his film Nowhere, which boasted a scene in which a group of bulimic teenagers binge with all the wet groans and grunts of a gangbang.)

The other fears? They’re tackled well, in their way, though I admit they’re a lot less scary to me than the meat one. My pal Jason Adams appears to disagree; your mileage, as they say, may vary. For my money, the approach to Fear #2 is a little too baroque, Fear #3 a little too forced. But they both offer something truly horrific–respectively, the dissolution of a mind over the course of a couple of pages, and a really direct and nasty definition of being tortured to death. Like I said, you’ll think, “Jesus, am I really reading this stuff?”

Book One, Chapter Six

“In the Hills, the Cities”

Hoo boy.

This story starts off similarly to “The Midnight Meat Train,” with a snapshot summary of disillusionment. The earlier story kicks off by detailing how main character Kaufman’s lifelong long-distance infatuation with New York City deteriorated so badly during his first six months of actually living there that he now sees the town he once referred to as “the Palace of Delights” as just another city, but worse–one that “bred death.” “In the Hills” begins by outlining the dissolution of a love affair, first from the point of view of Mick, who’s come to see his journalist boyfriend Judd as a humorless pedant, then of Judd, who regards Mick as a vapid prettyboy. As in “The Midnight Meat Train,” a momentary truce between the ex-beloveds is reached–in the former through the quiet beauty of a New York dawn or twilight, and in the latter through sex, where passion can express itself without words.

Maybe things won’t be so bad, then.

The story continues to draw you in, but this time through a difference from earlier stories. In both “Midnight Meat Train” and “Pig Blood Blues,” the first time Barker shifts the focal point of the narrative from the protagonist to the antagonist, he makes you aware almost immediately of the nature of the horror you’re about to confront. Right away you know that you’re in the presence of a serial killer with a sense of purpose; right away you know that you’re in the presence of a hungry, evil animal.

But when “In the Hills” makes a similar shift, what, exactly, are you hearing and seeing? A Serbian villager laughs to himself that the expression “a head in the clouds” will be made real. “Limbs” and “flanks” are being lashed together by an entire town, one of two that’s been so mobilized. There’s the potential for trouble since (we learn) the long-time organizer of this special day for one of the towns has died, leaving her inexperienced daughter in charge. But…that’s it, really.

What’s going on? Barker is coy, very coy indeed, for a very long time. He is able to rely on what the villager himself knows to be true–that what is going on is beyond rational comprehension. It defies belief, it beggars belief. By the time you grasp what was happening, you’re busy conjuring the image in your head, wrapping your brain around its immensity, when you see this, at the end of the relevant passage:

The badly knitted flank might not have caused an accident in itself, but further weakened by the frailty of the competitors it set a scene for death on an unprecedented scale.

Barker waits until the exact moment when you puzzle out what is happening before abruptly dispensing with all pretense of hope. When you finally grasp what you’re reading, it’s too late. As it is for the villagers. As it is for Judd and Mick.

This is virtuoso writing.

I’m reluctant to say much more about this story. It’s my favorite piece of writing by Barker, and one of my favorite pieces of writing by anyone, ever. The prose is so confident, so demanding of attention, awe, terror, it would be churlish (for me, impossible) not to go along with it. I actually wonder whether Barker understood just how good this was as he was writing it (it reminds me of the breathless rock fan’s questioning of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant as to what it was like in the studio when “Stairway” was being recorded); I sort of think he did, and at any rate I know he does now, since I believe he regards it as among his finest work himself. But you can get that sense from the writing, which after it turns a certain corner is as relentless as anything you will ever read. “From now on…they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.”

The concept at the story’s core is sui generis, by the way. I assure you you won’t see it coming. It may conjure echoes of The Wicker Man, but it’s as different as it is similar; it’s original and new and mind-boggling. It’s an embodiment (literally) of the horrors at the heart of Europe, the Communist and fascist death machines; I’m not the first person to point out, moreover, that Barker set this story in Serbia, just a decade or so before the rape camps were established. The piles upon piles of bodies, the literal rivers of blood–does it need to be said that this speaks not just of Europe, but of all of humanity?

The beginning of the story is perfectly executed. The end of the story is rapturous and, I think, flawless, as Mick makes literal the journey that we the readers are on, and Judd demonstrates why we would choose to merge with something larger than ourselves, even something horrible, lest we face obliteration, the fear of which drives all other fears. (The only potential chink in the story’s armor is found early on, with a bit of perhaps too-neat foreshadowing involving mice and bugs being trodden on in a field–but maybe I’ve said too much now.)

“And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength,” Barker says of the horror in the hills. “Vast and mad and deathless.” That’s “In the Hills, the Cities,” in content and in quality.

Book One, Chapter Five

“Sex, Death and Starshine”

When I think of Books of Blood Volume One, I tend to forget that this story is in it. Even when I turn the page and, hey, there it is, it takes me a while before I can remember what happens in it. Compare that to “The Midnight Meat Train” or “Pig Blood Blues” or “In the Hills, the Cities,” the conclusions of all of which I practically have committed to memory.

Perhaps it’s because this story is very different from all of those, in a way that dovetails less with my concerns and preoccupations as a horror reader than they do. It’s far less fatalistic, I think. Which is odd, because if anything the characters involved, a troupe of theatre people putting up a production of The Twelfth Night with a soap star playing the female lead, deserve their fates less than the characters in the other stories; moreover, it’s tougher to square what we presume to be the motivation of the monsters here with their eventual actions. They seem not just cruel or even capricious, but contradictory.

But the unevenness of the story works for it in a certain sense. The idea here is that theatre people–Barker himself was one before he turned his attentions from script-writing to prose–the really great and dedicated ones at least, operate in a world of their own, where their art is both cause and effect, means and end, alpha and omega. Their actions and the consequences thereof, Barker appears to say, shouldn’t make sense to us, any more than a cat could understand that when her master disappears for an hour he’s actually gotten in the car and driven to the grocery store to pick up hummus and baby carrots. I’m not wholly convinced that it makes for effective storytelling, but there are certainly moments and images that linger all the more because it’s difficult to wrap your head around them. There’s a bit of business with footlights that’s like a collision of grand guignol with comedia dell’arte with the theatre of the absurd. “The mask he wore was neither comic nor tragic,” says Barker at another point of another character, “it was blood and laughter together.”

One final word: Lots of sex in this one! I remember thinking it was really hot stuff when I was in high school. His depictions of beautiful, sexual women and heterosexual liasons generally are certainly steamy enough to explain how he passed as straight for so many years, at least to the general public. And really, you’ve got to hand it to any author who takes the time to puzzle out the advantages and disadvantages of being fellated by a reanimated corpse.

Let’s get right into it…

The indefatigable Bill Sherman keeps on walking the post-Lost creepy hourlong drama beat. This time up, he looks at Night Stalker, comparing it to the original Stalker in both its TV movie and weekly series incarnations.

Pete Mesling’s Fearfodder is definitely a new favorite site of mine. He unearthed a couple of interesting links recently. First, he reminds me to remind all of you that Giant Magazine, the delightful pop-culture publication for which I review graphic novels, recently came up with its Scariest Movies of All Time list, which can be found online via The Guardian. Pete, I assure you The Shining made the top 15…

Second, Pete links to this interview with Clive Barker at Barker’s official fan site, Revelations. The usual talk of sequels to previous publishing projects and plans for upcoming movies abounds. Horror fans might also be interested in hearing Barker’s feelings on getting back in front of horror fandom, from which he’s been away for a while, at several upcoming horror cons.

Also on the Barker beat, Bloody Disgusting has some updates on the current status of Barker film projects The Plague and The Midnight Meat Train.

I don’t know why I never made this connection before, but Kevin Melrose at Dark But Shining makes a strong case for the central scene of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as (though he doesn’t use the phrase himself) a monumental horror-image. That’s exactly what it is–surely it influenced my appreciation of such images even if I never picked up on it until now.

Des at the brilliantly titled Without Me You’re Only You is writing up one of his favorite horror movies every day all month. Fun stuff so far–just click over and keep scrolling.

Finally, just something I stumbled across while flipping through a magazine: Shadow of the Colossus, a video game that revolves around the awesomely intimidating nature of monsters that are really, really, really big. Take the vertiginous sensation of being dwarfed by skyscrapers or big sky country, add in the idea that the thing that’s dwarfing you is alive, and I think you’ll get a sense of why this is the sort of creature I really find exhilarating in a primal way. (It’s sort of like the flip side of the way my beloved sea monsters exploit depth.) Worth thinking about in advance of tomorrow’s Blog of Blood installment…

Book One, Chapter Four

“Pig Blood Blues”

This is one of the saddest tales in the series. Sadness is an emotion that horror should probably exploit with more regularity and force, because horror by its nature is about loss and weakness and futility. (One of the most horrific scenes in any movie I’ve ever seen is when Joe Pesci’s character in Casino is forced to watch as his brother is beaten to a pulp with baseball bats, then thrown into his grave while he’s still breathing. It’s also one of the saddest scenes I’ve ever seen–Pesci’s Nicky Santoro sobbing, mournfully muttering his brother’s name over and over again.) Throw in madness–real up-is-down black-is-white what-the-fuck madness–and you’ve got this story in a nutshell. Each of the characters seems to have arrived at the end of the road, resigned to a life that’s a lot less than they wanted it to be. When the horror happens, they desperately try to avoid it, but you never get the sense that they think it’s anything less than inevitable. “He even began to understand Lacey’s lassitude, his inability to fight the powers that overtook him,” writes Barker of his main character, bitter ex-cop and shop teacher Redman. “Mama, they fed me to the pig. Not Mama, help me, save me. Just: they gave me to the pig.”

And god help me, I never made the connection between the pig who lives in the story’s reformatory’s farm and the fact that Redman is himself a “pig” until this read-through. Can you believe that? It’s not like it’s subtly laid out, either. The pig is an interesting symbol in art–it represents a predatory greed, but also slaughterability. “This is the state of the beast,” as Barker puts it. “To eat and be eaten.” The cop who wants to save one last victim, for whatever (sexual? parental? more noble, or less?) reason–which is he, ulimately? Or does it matter? Does shit just happen, has it always happened, will it always happen? It seems like throwing the word “Blues” in the title is just a delicious way for Barker to deflate the capital-I Import of his prose, but aren’t we really singing these blues all the time?

Book One, Chapter Three

“The Yattering and Jack”

And now for something completely different.

This story is horror-comedy, believe it or not. While many of Barker’s stories have their funny moments–“What would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?” is the line from one of them upon which author Ramsey Campbell seizes in his introduction to Volume One–few are as through-and-through lighthearted as this one. Which is not to say it’s all Evil Dead 2, though; try to imagine that film with its predecessor’s tree-rape sequence grafted in and you’ll get a feel for some of this one’s darker moments. Nothing quite that untoward, but someone is driven insane, and since our protagonist (Jack), who loves her, knew full well this could happen, it’s a wrenching thought. “That was hard,” as Barker puts it. “That was almost unforgiveable.”

Almost. Barker extends quite a mercy in this one, one of the few he ever extends, when during the climactic confrontation between the two titular characters–a poltergeist-like minor demon and a more-than-meets-the-eye gherkin importer–Jack’s daughter smiles at her father, despite the fact that she on some level is aware that he’s put his daughters at grave risk for both their sanity and their lives. “Whatever was at issue here, she loved him.” Tender, all the more so because it’s probably undeserved, or at least underdeserved.

The comic business is a real larf in this one, provided you don’t mind animal mutilation played for laughs–three cats, a tankful of guppies, and a Christmas turkey meet unfortunate ends. The fate of the turkey, and of the Christmas tree itself, are antecedents of the wackily improvisatory calypso possession scene in Beetlejuice, tinged here though with menace that makes the laughter come through gritted teeth. And there are funny moments with the prose, too: Whenever the Yattering thinks of his masters, Beelzebub and the other Powers of Hell, he reflexively adds a parenthetical “(long may they hold court, long may they shit light on the heads of the damned).”

Underneath it all there’s a common Barker theme (albeit one that’s usually played much more seriously): that some folks are perfectly able to live outside the rules. It’s a Hell of a message. Pun (as is the case with the whole story) intended.

The Carnival is really crowded today. But then, it’s October now, so it would be…

First things first: This Dark But Shining post is your one-stop-shopping destination for all the big October/Halloween blogathons that are going on around the Internet. Dark But Shining’s own 31-day “My Favorite Monsters” postfest, by DBS member Rick Geerling, begins here.

DBS also has a little contest goin’, in which those of you who are visually inclined stand to win some truly terrific horror manga. Since the only book they’re offering that I’ve already read is Junji Ito’s masterful Uzumaki, I sure do wish I knew my way around Photoshop.

Speaking of horrorblogging marathons, Steven at Corpse Eaters has kicked off his comprehensive examination of the Friday the 13th series, and even though I have yet to see a single one of those flicks, I like reading what he has to say about them so far.

And were you aware that I may have been doing some marathon horrorblogging of my own? Scroll down this very site and see!

Jason at Infocult links to another hilariously reimagined film trailer–from the series that brought you The Shining as a feel-good comedy and West Side Story as a fast-zombie flick comes Titanic as an American J-horror riff. Fricking great.

The other day I mentioned that I was fixing to do a series of “meet the horror blogosphere” posts stemming from some of the sites I’ve discovered in my quest for fresh links to feed into Where the Monsters Go. I don’t think I’ve got the time to do dedicated posts to that effect, but let’s throw a few into the mix right now, shall we?

Fearfodder is a horror news blog with a clean, non-“ooh how scary” look, equally clean grammar and spelling, and a whole lotta opinionated news links. Here, Fearfodder blogger Matt links to an article in Scotland on Sunday in which Wicker Man director Robyn Hardy expresses his dismay with Neil LaBute’s upcoming American remake. Among the bits of news I’d not heard anywhere else are that 1) The new version will involve killer bees in some fashion; 2) the pagan community (now run by Ellen Burstyn) will be matriarchal; 3) Hardy and original Wicker Man villain Christopher Lee are planning a new film about Scottish paganism called May Day. Hmm.

Also on Fearfodder, a title too good not to pass along: From Ringwraiths to Cenobites. It’s from a post about the upcoming documentary Ringers, about the fan culture surrounding The Lord of the Rings, which apparently features your friend and mine Mr. Clive Barker. Considering how influential the look of the Cenobites has been on everything from Dark City to Darth Maul, and how influential the look of the Ringwraiths is becoming (we all love Dave McKean, but if he sincerely the Dementors in the last Harry Potter movie are derived from his designs, he’s got another think coming), the confluence was a welcome one.

Continuing our blogospheric tour, welcome to The Black Lagoon, a beautifully designed blogspot site (!) featuring lengthy and considered reviews of tons of horror classics. If you can forgive them for perpetuating the inexplicable hardcore-horror-fan CW that the Dawn of the Dead remake was soulless Hollywood action-horror hackwork, there’s much to be read and admired there.

Bill Sherman continues his series of posts on how the networks have all been saying “Let’s get Lost” this season with a review of Invasion. Along similar lines, Kevin Melrose at Dark But Shining tries to figure out what exactly is so fishy about the underwater-monster series Surface.

This is not horror-related at all, really, and I’m breaking my embargo to do this, but I don’t think anyone will care. People, DO WHAT ERIC REYNOLDS SAYS and order Michael Kupperman’s absolutely hysterical Tales Designed to Thrizzle. This humor comic is an absolute classic in the making, I’m telling you. I mean, look at this cover:

That’s comedy!

Finally, this is why I love the Internet: This morning I open my inbox and I find an email linking to a ton of downloadable, Halloween-themed mp3s. The source? Sub Rosa, an invite-only, clothing-optional, underground stoneworking studio-slash-slow-food restaurant in Dundee, Oregon. Ladies and gentlemen, is the world not a pretty fine place? (Thanks to Sub Rosa proprietors Mike and Linda for the link!)

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.

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.

Thanks to Technorati’s Blog Finder and some diligent Google searching of my own, I discovered a whole bunch more horror blogs last night and added them to the big list; really, you should just scroll down and start clicking on anything that’s new to you, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there. If I have time sometime in the near future (unlikely, given my plans for October), I’ll do a “Meet the Horror Blogosphere” series running down some of the best. But for now, I leave it to you as a DIY project. (I’d also like to email the various blogs who don’t know they’re included and give them a head’s-up, but that too is a project for another time. But hey, if you find a new blog through the list, tell ’em Sean sent you!)

As always, I would encourage you to email links to any blogs or sites of note that aren’t already included to me here.

One blog I found last night deserves special mention, though, for reasons that are apparent to regular ADDTF readers: Dumb London, a very well-written zombie blog. At this point I’m no longer surprised to find these, though with Dumb London I at long last found one newer than mine. I haven’t had a chance to really dig into this one yet, but I already appreciate the time the author took to develop what appears to be a zombie hierarchy, or at least a zombie taxonomy.

Finally, from (I’m told) the same contest that produced yesterday’s Shining trailer, here is a balls-out terrific zombie horror trailer assembled from…well, you’re just going to have to see for yourself. Mambo!

A few days back I asked if any of yall were planning on watching any members of this season’s crop of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Lost!” TV shows. Loyal ADDTF reader Kerry answered thusly:

Hey there! I have posted a few basic reviews on my blog, which you are welcome to check out. I took it upon myself to watch at least one episode of the new shows, and trust me, that was no easy task!

The best of the spooky award goes to Supernatural, so far. Demons, spirits, haints, hags, and other campfire creepies being hunted by two brothers searching for their father, burning ladies on the ceiling … how can you go wrong? [It’s also] X-Files-y in the sense that each episode is self-contained, though there is a running plot as well.

Threshold is more conspiracy-based, all about the futile attempt to keep the lid on some alien invaders, but is also worth watching. It is decidedly creepy, what with the backward-talking and the midget. [Sounds familiar… -Ed.]

I watched Invasion last night, and it was not terrible; Threshold seems to be a superior show, but I’ll continue to give Invasion a chance.

Surface is more family-oriented, but offers some thrilling moments, especially when you realize how MAMMOTH the whatever-it-is IS. [Soooo tempting… -Ed.] The only irksome aspect so far is that some kids found an “egg” and are now raising a baby whatever-it-is in a cooler… I feel that the quality of this show will decline as the “baby” gets bigger and is used as a plot device, but I could be wrong.

Prison Break might just be the best piece of TV drama I have seen since …well, since I don’t know when. Of course, the things that happen on the show would NEVER happen in a real prison, but the script is so compelling you voluntarily suspend your disbelief and just take the ride.

The Night Stalker has not yet premiered; when I see it, you’ll know what I think of it.

And Lost is still the leader of the pack

You’ve probably already had this emailed to you by your officemates today–I’ve received it from at least two separate groups of people–but what the hey, it’s horror-related and funny as all get-out: The Shining as a feel-good comedy. This is so well done in its mockery of a particular type of uplifting Hollywood pablum that watching it will actually creep you out. The use of “Solsbury Hill” is a particularly nice touch–I now feel about movies that use that in their trailers the same way I feel about ones that use “Takin’ Care of Business” or that song that goes “hey! hey! hey! hey!”

Oh my god.

This is a red-letter day for people who love sea monsters, let me tell you:

For the first time, a giant squid has been captured on film in its natural environment!

Photo (c) Reuters.

A pair of Japanese scientists were the lucky fellows who managed to pull this off (somewhat literally–the squid lost a tentacle to the crew during its struggle to free itself from the bait it had snapped up). The discovery was actually made this time last year, but the scientists’ report on it is only now being made public.

For those who are unaware, giant squids have long been known to exist thanks to everything from carcasses washed up on shores or caught in fishing nets to scars on sperm whales. However, actually observing a live one doing its thing in the ocean has up until now been a vision quest not unlike capturing Bigfoot, only all the more frustrating because the giant squid is and was indisputably real.

I’m so damn excited about this I may have to add Surface to my TiVo To Do list.

I was gonna wait till October before I brought this to your attention–it seemed more appropriate that way, somehow, even if ADDTF is now pretty much a 24/7/365 horror blog–but this post by Kevin Melrose at Dark But Shining forced my hand.

So to speak.

Horror site The Flesh Farm has put together a set of lovely tributes to folklorist Alvin Schwartz and illustrator Stephen Gammell’s infamous Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series. Click on the links below for pictures, stories, and general pluggy goodness for one of the current generation of horror fans and creators’ universal formative influences:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones

I came across these pages when conducting research a few weeks back for what I hoped would be an interview with Stephen Gammell for Giant Magazine. I found out that Mr. Gammell doesn’t give interviews, so that plan fell through, but any excuse to re-immerse myself in these books is a welcome one. I’m of the mind that Gammell’s work with Schwartz (who passed away several years ago, unfortunately) is one of the great unheralded touchstones of contemporary horror, particularly in comics. Here’s what I said on the topic over at Tom Spurgeon’s ComicsReporter.com site:

I know [the Scary Stories series] isn’t comics per se, but fans of cartooning and illustration are hereby heartily advised to go to their local Borders and pick up the chain’s super-cheap omnibus hardcover collecting all three volumes of this series, which they may remember fondly and fearfully from their childhoods. Schwartz’s economical, just-so prose meshes perfectly with the incredibly bizarre and still-frightening ink-washed illustrations by Stephen Gammell. These books are an unsung influence of contemporary American comics, I’m quite convinced; for example, the work of artist Ben Templesmith, whose collaborations with writer Steve Niles have almost singlehandedly revived the commercial fortunes of the genre, is thoroughly indebted to Gammell’s style.

And when I said “still-frightening,” I meant it: Any of you who (like me) occasionally flip through your copies of the books before laying down to sleep will undoubtedly testify that it makes for a nerve-wracking night. And hey, if the only people the books scared were kids, they wouldn’t have been the 1990s’ most frequently challenged library books.

There’s so much to recommend these books: The astoundingly frightening art, some of which is seared into my brain as deeply as any scene from my favorite horror movies; the all-business prose, written for children but translating as economical and almost documentary-like for adults; the brilliantly worded story and section titles, which when taken as a group are my favorite batch of titles this side of Gang of Four’s first album; the stories themselves, selected from folklore and urban legend across the United States and striking chords you didn’t know you were equipped with. Just wonderful in every way, and an utterly essential addition to every horror fan’s library. Makes a fine Halloween present for the kiddies, too. Provided you don’t mind scaring the daylights out of them.

Now this is bad news: D’Angelo was critically injured in an SUV wreck a week ago.

Best known to the general public for his outrageously good physique–in his video for “Untitled” he made Brad Pitt in Fight Club look like Will Ferrell in Old School–D’Angelo is also EASILY the greatest member of that whole “neo-soul” movement from a few years back. His album Voodoo is in my opinion a major funk achievement, and ran neck-and-neck with Kid A for best album of 2000. I hadn’t been paying attention to what has been something of a downward spiral for D’Angelo in the years since, so reading that article and its account of his various substance-abuse-derived legal problems was upsetting. And it also made me lose some sympathy for him, as he’s quite clearly someone who had no business whatsoever behind the wheel of a car (which is where I’m assuming he was during this accident). If he were a defendant on Judge Judy I’d be angry if the audience didn’t clap after he lost his case, let’s put it that way. But he’s a brilliant musician and I hope this doesn’t keep him from making more music.