It’s back. Just a quickie one, just to get into the habit again, sound good?
In Focus‘s lengthy interview with Harold Ramis touches on his whole career, and as is the case with most vets of the whole Lampoon scene it’s pretty damned impressive. But for our purposes, the interview has some fascinating tidbits for fans of the Ramis-co-written Ghostbusters, the best horror comedy of all time:
Part of the fun of
WEEPING STEPFATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF STEPSON
In a dramatic development in the District Court trial of Richard Macklin for the murder of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran, Macklin broke down under the stern cross-examination of County Attorney Bradley Whitsun and admitted he had beaten the four-year-old boy to death with a recoilless hammer, which he then buried at the far end of his wife’s vegetable garden before taking the boy to Derry Home Hospital’s emergency room.
The courtroom was stunned and silent as the sobbing Macklin, who had previously admitted beating both of his stepsons “occasionally, if they had it coming, for their own good,” poured out his story.
“I don’t know what came over me. I saw he was climbing on the damn ladder again and I grabbed the hammer from the bench where it was laying and I just started to use it on him. I didn’t mean to kill him. With God as my witness I never meant to kill him.”
“Did he say anything to you before he passed out?” Whitson asked.
“He said, ‘Stop daddy, I’m sorry, I love you,'” Macklin replied.
“Did you stop?”
“Eventually,” Macklin said. He then began to weep in such a hysterical manner that Judge Erhardt Moulton declared the court in recess.
—It, Stephen King
Oy.
A perfect storm of headache-inducing blog-obstacles has hit around ADDTF lately. First of all, as regular visitors have no doubt noticed, the entire All Too Flat empire has been experiencing frequent service outages and interruptions, some lasting for entire days. I’m assured by our crack squad of Cornell graduates (oxymoronic as that may sound) that we are simply victims of our own popularity, and measures are supposedly being adopted to prevent blackouts in the future. Please be patient with us.
Secondly, the increasingly hideous post-Yahoo-buyout blo.gs had another one of its periodic freakouts, ditching blogs from its database left and right and resetting a whole lot more to look like they haven’t been updated since early October, then refusing to allow new updates to register. This has really frigged up Where the Monsters Go, my horrorblog aggregator service, as it runs off of blo.gs’ code. (The same ignominious fate has befallen Dave G.’s wonderful Comic Weblog Update Page as well.) I’ve tried to add some of the missing blogs back in and will continue to do so, but it looks like getting all the listed blogs to register update will require some hours of work, hours that I don’t appear to have at the moment. And there’s always the fact that blo.gs seems likely, if not guaranteed, to have another meltdown like this in the near future, which means the whole fixer-upper enterprise would be a waste of time.
Finally, a heaping helping of extra work and a lingering hangover from the mandatory daily blogging of my big October marathon have left me too pooped to pop, as far as blogging’s concerned. Hopefully all three of these problems will be solved soon, but I just wanted to give folks a heads up as to what’s been going on around here.
Oy.
Recently I wrote a short comic about prolific Ukrainian serial child-murderer Andrei Chikatilo; a swell artist by the name of Matt Rota drew it. The end result is “It Brought Me Some Peace of Mind” (the title comes from a quote of Chikatilo’s explaining why he did what he did), which I’m happy to post for your enjoyment, or whatever, here on the site. It’s twenty stand-alone panels, so apologies in advance for the user-unfriendly interface, but a judicious use of your tabbed-browsing capabilities should do the trick. I hope you like it!
Boy, do I like lists. So how could I resist this meme? Taken from Bill Sherman, with some of the categories he deleted added back in and some new ones of my own thrown on the end for good measure. Pass it on!
THE FAVORITE SONGS MEME
Favorite Beatles song: I prefer “the Beatles gestalt” rather than naming any one Beatles song, but okay, fine, “Mother Nature’s Son”
Favorite solo song by a former Beatle: “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison
Favorite Bob Dylan song: I don’t really have one
Favorite Pixies song: “Monkey Gone to Heaven”
Favorite Prince song: “Purple Rain”
Favorite Michael Jackson song: “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough”
Favorite Depeche Mode song: “Enjoy the Silence”
Favorite Cure song: “Pictures of You”
Favorite song that most of your friends haven’t heard: “2HB” by Roxy Music
Favorite Beastie Boys song: “Shake Your Rump”
Favorite Police song: “Synchronicity II”
Favorite Sex Pistols song: “God Save the Queen”
Favorite song from a movie: “Into the West” by Annie Lennox from The Return of the King
Favorite Blondie song: I dislike Blondie, but I guess “Heart of Glass”
Favorite Genesis song: I don’t really have one
Favorite Led Zeppelin song: sort of a Beatles-esque situation for me, but I guess I’d go with “No Quarter”
Favorite INXS song: “Don’t Change”/”Mediate” (tie)
Favorite Weird Al song: “Smells Like Nirvana”
Favorite Pink Floyd song: “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up”
Favorite cover song: “Across the Universe” originally performed by the Beatles, as covered by David Bowie
Favorite dance song: “Born Slippy.NUXX” by Underworld
Favorite U2 song: “Lemon”
Favorite disco song: “Born to Be Alive” by Patrick Hernandez
Favorite The Who song: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
Favorite Elton John song: the opening riff from “The Bitch Is Back”
Favorite Clash song: “The Card Cheat”
Favorite David Bowie song: “Stay”
Favorite Nirvana song: “Come As You Are
Ah, it’s good to be back! But it’s even better to have taken a couple of days off after a 31-day posting marathon. You don’t really realize how much time and energy blogging requires until you obligate yourself to do it every day, regardless of whether you’re tired or it took you two hours to drive home from work or you’re under six different deadlines and closed three publications in eighteen days or America’s Next Top Model is on.
That said, MAN did I enjoy doing Blog of Blood. In the same way that my Where the Monsters Go marathon from 2003 reignited my love of horror cinema, this blogathon reminded me of why I loved Clive Barker’s work so much in the first place. The elegance of his prose and fearlessness of his transgression are both stand-out inspirations. I hope you enjoyed reading along. Links to my examinations of each story in The Books of Blood–the complete Blog of Blood project–may be found here.
First up, a plug: I reviewed my beloved Black Hole by Charles Burns in the lastest issue of Giant (the one with Jennifer Love Hewitt on the cover), on sale now. Here’s a link to my review of Black Hole, as well as Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library hardcover, at Giant’s website. And while you’re there, why not subscribe?
Of course, I wasn’t the only guy who wrote his horror-lovin’ heart out in honor of Halloween. I always enjoy the Best Horror Movies of All Time lists that various pop-culture outlets come up with at this time of year, not so much for the fun of agreeing or disagreeing, but just for the peek they provide at the constantly shifting critical consensus as to where the strongest horror material lies. (For example, I’d bet that zombie movies get ranked a lot higher these days than they would have about five years ago, but that’s just a guess.) Here are a handful of lists for you to peruse and argue with:
IGN’s Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time (This is interesting in that while it picks pretty much the same Top 25 as everyone else, it seems to invert, say, the customary 15-10 with the customary 10-5.)
Entertainment Weekly’s 20 Scariest Movies of All Time (I’m delighted to see that they included Lost Highway, which certainly ranks on my Scariest of All Time list.)
Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments (This is really just a list of the films featured in the cable net’s spoileriffic countdown specials, which I studiously avoid watching for fear of having the endings of movies ruined for me.)
Hollywood.com’s Top 25 Highest Grossing Domestic Horror Films of All Time (a fairly even blend of quality filmmaking and evidence of the power of hype)
Entertainment Weekly’s Six Creepiest Forgotten Films (I guess I’ve got to see this Picnic at Hanging Rock movie, huh?)
Fearfodder’s Great, Over-Hyped, and God-Awful Horror Films (A novel approach to seasonal list-making, as its introduction of an extra degree on the rocks/sucks scale makes it easier both to agree and disagree with.)
Most of those links come courtesy of Dark But Shining, Dark But Shining again, and Escape from Obsession.
I also wasn’t the only blogger to make a marathon out of it. Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder has posted an enormous wrap-up link list leading you to her reviews of the 47 (FORTY-SEVEN!!!) horror movies she watched during October, 28 of which she’d never seen before. Wow.
Dark But Shining also has a massive round-up post with links to their 63 (SIXTY-THREE!!!!!) horrorblogging marathon posts from the month of October. Wow again. (Full disclosure: one of the 63 was from me.)
Here’s something a little different: found via the ads on the right-hand side of this page (which y’all click every time you visit, right?), “The Mechanics of Fear: A Look at the Construction of Horror Screenplays”, by Ryan Williams at Hollywood.com. It focuses primarily on popcorn-movie scares, but it’s a look at horror movies from a very different and nuts-and-bolts angle than I’m accustomed to. Check it out.
News of the real-world weird: Remember when I mentioned the mystery stench that struck L.A., D.C., and Wales? Last week another mystery smell enveloped New York City, the third major American urban center to be so afflicited–only this time, instead of smelling like a used diaper filled with Indian food, it smelled like maple syrup! You’ve got to love the headline of the NYT piece that reports on it: “Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers.” Well, it would, wouldn’t it? So at least we can rest assured that while whoever-it-is is conducting experiments on unwitting citizens, they at least have switched over to pleasant experiments.
Finally:
(Image courtesy of PostSecret.)
from left: Papagena the Kitty, Clive Barker, Sean T. Collins; Beverly Hills, California, April 28th, 2001
Book Six, Chapter Five
“The Book of Blood (A Postscript): On Jerusalem Street”
“Why do you talk about yourself in the third person?” he asked McNeal, as the boy returned with the glass. “Like you weren’t here…?”
“The boy?” McNeal said. “He isn’t here. He hasn’t been here in a long time.”
He sat down; drank. Wyburd began to feel more than a little uneasy. Was the boy simply mad, or playing some damn-fool game?
The boy swallowed another mouthful of vodka, then asked, matter of factly: “What’s it worth to you?”
Wyburd frowned. “What’s what worth?”
“His skin,” the boy prompted. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it?” Wyburd emptied his glass with two swallows, making no reply. McNeal shrugged. “Everyone has the right to silence,” he said. “Except for the boy of course. No silence for him.” He looked down at his hand, turning it over to appraise the writing on his palm. “The stories go on, night and day. Never stop. They tell themselves, you see. They bleed and bleed. You can never hush them; never heal them.”
A postscript indeed, “On Jerusalem Street” does not appear in the American edition of Books of Blood Volume Six, titled Cabal here in the States; nor does it appear in the collected edition of Volumes One through Three that’s available. Before I read it in my Complete Books of Blood last night, I’d never seen it before. So my Halloween treat comes two nights early, I suppose.
The story’s all of four pages long, and reintroduces us to McNeal, the ill-fated fraudulent medium from the story that kicked off the collection. As this story ends that collection, held as it is by the fiction itself to be readable in its entirety on McNeal’s flesh, you can guess how the story ends for McNeal. How it ends for the man by whom McNeal is ended did come as something of a surprise to me, though it probably shouldn’t have. It’s one final act of catharsis for Barker, who by this point had spent (I’m guessing) around four years at least pouring forth these ghastly stories. It shouldn’t come as a shock that he’d want somebody else to know how it felt to be drowned in these books of blood, making literal what had been only metaphorical for him, and for the reader too of course.
Is there any grand concluding statement to be found in the final story? I think so, actually:
It was a great relief to tell the story. Not because he wanted to be remembered, but because the telling relieved him of the tale. It no longer belonged to him, that life, that death. He had better business, as did they all. Roads to travel; splendours to drink down. He felt the landscape widen. Felt the air brightening.
Surely Barker’s talking about himself here, as storytellers are wont to do. But he’s also talking about nearly all his characters, nearly all their lives and deaths. Haven’t they spent each of their stories casting off their belongings–the obligations of responsibility, of morality, of sanity, of gender, of humanity, of body, of mind, finally of life itself? Freed of those possessions, doesn’t the landscape widen for them, even if they have to die to see it?
What the boy had said was true. The dead have highways.
Only the living are lost.
The pleasure of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood is that, lost though we may be, we are given by them a glimpse of a possible destination, and the encouragement, no matter how frightened we may become, to wander on our way.
Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Four
“The Last Illusion”
From a very successful blending of genres to a, well, less successful one. “The Last Illusion” is the story upon which Barker’s final directorial effort, Lord of Illusions, was based. Lots of changes were made in the adaptation–I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember it involved a cult leader with some sort of mask and a Euro Satanist guy who looked like a member of KMFDM. That I haven’t seen it in years probably says something about my feelings toward the underlying story, since (I don’t know if you’ve noticed) I’m a pretty huge Clive Barker fan and could reasonably be expected to have the whole movie memorized.
Part of the problem here is the main character, Harry D’Amour, a down-on-his-luck private dick who’s come to specialize, much to his own chagrin, in cases involving the supernatural. D’Amour was intended to be the star of an entire series of adventures, but then, it was black-widow killer Julia who was intended to be the franchise monster of Hellraiser, not Pinhead; characters take on lives of their own, and the impact and length of those lives are dependent on the audience. (Barker, perhaps in order to rectify this discrepancy, has implied that D’Amour will be involved in the destruction of Pinhead in some future short story/novella, by the way.) He’s a likable enough guy, especially because so much of his life has been determined by his greatest failure–he lost a client to Hell, or as Barker calls it, the Gulfs–but this isn’t exactly new territory for private-eye fiction; “forget it, Harry–it’s the Gulfs,” you know what I mean? (It also doesn’t help that he was played in the movie by Scott Bakula, who to me looks much less suited to be a leading man than he is the guy who holds up the tube of anti-fungal ointment in an athlete’s foot medication commerical.)
But the real problem–the reason why not just “The Last Illusion” but also “Hell’s Event” just don’t work as well as the rest of Barker’s Books of Blood tales–is that the monsters, the demons and their summoners, are fundamentally square. Rather than representing freedom, ecstasy, transformation, transcendence, they’ve got the same venal motives as corrupt government officials or Mafia capos who find their monthly payoff short by a couple grand. They’ve got nothing to offer but punishment for transgression, rather than a reward for it. Barker reworks his concept of Hell considerably in Hellraiser and the novella upon which it’s based, The Hellbound Heart–in those stories, Hell offers pain and pleasure, indivisible, too much for the human mind to handle but still, perhaps, worth a peek. As articulated in The Books of Blood, though, Barker’s then-vision of Hell and its denizens works much better when the joke’s on them, as it is in “The Yattering and Jack,” where Hell’s pettiness and adherence to rules is played for laughs. Make it serious, though, and no amount of creatively bizarre demons (there are plenty here) or inventive ways to dispatch them (plenty again) can distract you from the fact that when you’re reading a Clive Barker story, you wanna be able to root for the beasts–or at least find them more interesting than their victims. Oh well.
Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Three
“Twilight at the Towers”
Now here’s something out of left field–a spy-thriller/Manchurian Candidate/werewolf mash-up! Well, they’re not strictly werewolves per se, this being Clive Barker and everything, but lycanthropy is the myth being toyed with here. As I’m of the firm believe that we’re one rock-solid high-production-value maverick horror movie and/or comic away from werewolves becoming the next zombies, genre prognosticators are advised to pay close attention here.
It’s a real testament to Barker’s abilities at this stage in the series that he can graft this kind of horror into this kind of genre thriller (something he really hadn’t touched at all up until this point) and have it make so much thematic and plot-driven sense that you end up wondering why no one ever thought of it before. Shifting allegiances, hidden identities, the demands of the self vs. the demands of society–Barker horror and Cold War espionage have a whole lot in common, don’t they? To arrive at this conclusion Barker sets up an enjoyable and engrossing mystery that, in the end, leaves you cheering for the monsters. I suppose you could criticize the story for its (much less enthusiastic than many similar cases’) embrace of the ’80s-chic notion that the free West and Communist East were six one way, half a dozen the other, but I think that would be churlish and point-missing. The point is that monsters, good and bad, are everywhere,
First up today, some long-overdue linkage: Matt Maxwell responds to my quibbles over his differing (and in my view, overly proscriptive) definitions of science fiction and horror. The difficulty in a debate like this is that so much of it boils down to what the Dude would refer to as “just, like, your opinion, man,” but I think I can locate where the disagreement really stems from:
Science fiction, and I’ll add the caveat “to myself”, doesn’t and can’t bring the scares like horror can. It’s not trying to, for the most part. Even the at best unsettling “Hey you old fogeys, what happens when we start jacking ourselves into computers and hacking off our limbs and replacing them with blenders” cyberpunk fiction of the mid-80s doesn’t scare. Can’t. Won’t….And sure, science fiction could address the span of human emotion, but it largely chooses not to. Then again, horror often doesn’t soberly consider the intersection of technology/politics/society.
Caveat acknowledged and reiterated on my own behalf, but this feels like saying something is a certain thing definitionally because it tends to be that thing practically. Even if we were to grant that sci-fi doesn’t aim to scare (which I don’t) or that horror doesn’t aim to elucidate intellectual issues (which, again, I don’t), isn’t defining them based on this recalcitrance like saying “comics aren’t about things other than superheroes” simply because most comics are about superheroes, at least as far as comic shops go?
I don’t know; I tend to be very generous with my genre definitions. I don’t see why Alien is less of a work of science fiction because it’s like Jaws or a haunted-house story, for example; on the horror front, you’re talking to a guy who classifies Deliverance and Eyes Wide Shut in that genre. This is not to say that I’m willing to include just about anything within genre boundaries–I’m pretty skeptical, for instance, regarding Aaron Weisbrod’s case for the spy comic Sleeper as horror (though I’m largely sympathetic to his larger argument that horror need not, and frequently is not, located in monsters). I said something similar back when Steve Bissette said that Maus and Jimmy Corrigan were horror–basically, while almost all great horror is bleak, not all things that are bleak are horror. This debate with Matt is sort of the flipside of that: Sci-fi is different than horror in that is defined largely by concept, not by tone. So within that larger framework, can’t you do pretty much anything?
Anyway, on with the quick hits!
Returning to my beloved Black Hole beat, here’s Time.com’s Andrew Arnold’s very lengthy, very effusive review of the book, tying it directly into the Halloween spooky-media season–a smart move for publisher Pantheon and anyone else who wants to see this book get into as many hands as possible.
Speaking of BH‘s Charles Burns, Rod Lott at Bookgasm reviews the new anthology The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror, which boasts a Burns cover. It also sounds pretty cool based on the stories included, from Lovecraft, Bierce, Blackwood, Machen and all the usual cosmic-horror supsects. (Sorry, Matt!)
Back here on Earth, sometimes real life is more horrifying than fiction: I’m sure you’ve all come across the story of the Delaware woman who hanged herself from a tree and was subsequently mistaken for a Halloween direction. I don’t have much to add other than “Jeeezus.” If this weren’t being reported in virtually every major news outlet around I’d suspect, as did Infocult’s Bryan Alexander, that it was an urban myth, but the fact that it took place in America as opposed to a European or Asian nation where English is not spoken and therefore facts are more difficult to confirm leads me to conclude it’s probably legit. Life imitates a horror-movie set-piece.
Finally, it can’t touch RetroCrush’s 100 Scariest Movie Scenes countdown, but it’s still pretty cool: this thread at College Bargain assembles a virtual parade of scary images from film and TV. They’re not all winners (the Crypt Keeper?) and some linkrot has set in, but there are a whole bunch of astutely chosen images up there, certainly enough to make your heart skip a beat once or twice. I’m most impressed by how off-the-beaten-path they got: I’m happy to see iconic images like the demon face from The Exorcist (added bonus: I showed the selection to a friend, who immediately confirmed that the Special Edition’s added glimpse of the face went on too long and killed the effect) and such, but including the masked Burger King mascot, the dogman from The Shining, Bilbo’s freakout from The Fellowship of the Ring, Large Marge, the chicken-chop from Willy Wonka, the Scarecrow from Batman Begins (I hated the movie, but even so I could see the horrific genius in the whole “Would you like to see my mask?” moment), and the woman in the bathtub from the TV-movie version of The Shining–a face-meltingly scary moment in an otherwise tepid production–shows a heterodox and sharp horror mind at work.
Oh, you want to know what my favorite image was?
Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Two
“How Spoilers Bleed”
We’re now heading down the home stretch; we’re also heading up river–“How Spoilers Bleed” is Clive Barker’s Heart of Darkness. It’s about what happens when avaricious Europeans head into the jungle, though the jungle in this case is found in Brazil rather than the Congo (or Vietnam and Cambodia, for that matter). It’s the the nastiest, angriest story in the collection, and that really is saying something.
This time around, it isn’t the gore that makes the story so nasty (although there are one or two spectacular gore scenes, the first of which is, thanks to its easy understandability, maybe the most brutal in the series). No, this time around it’s the characters who radiate awfulness. All the characters–that’s a first, believe it or not. Greedy, callous, deceitful, despairing, and ultimately genocidal, they’re just plain rotten. And it’s no coincidence that that’s the word that comes to mind–Barker makes rottenness itself the central horrific metaphor in the story, in large part I would guess because these terrible men practically demand it.
The really remarkable thing about the story is the way the rottenness infects the prose as well. Barker’s horror writing generally cuts like a machete, and as appropriate as that might be in a story about the catastrophic exploitation of the rain forests and their inhabitants, here he decides to wield his prose like a blunt instrument instead, crushing decency and beauty any time it threatens to bloom just as easily and viscerally as main character Locke crushes a mosquito between his fingers when we first meet him. Consider Barker’s description of the rain forest itself, generally considered to be one of the most breathtaking environments on Earth:
This burgeoning diversity was a sham, the jungle pretending itself an artless garden. It was not. Where the untutored trespasser saw only a brilliant show of natural splendors, Locke now recognized a subtle conspiracy at work, in which each thing mirrored some other thing. The trees, the river; a blossom, a bird. In a moth’s wing, a monkey’s eye; on a lizard’s back, sunlight on stones. Round and round in a dizzying circle of impersonations, a hall of mirrors which confounded the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether.
Later:
Their noisy progress, the Jeep engine complaining at every new acrobatic required of it, brought the jungle alive on every side, a repertoire of wails, whoops, and screeches. It was an urgent, hungry place, Locke thought: and for the first time since setting foot on this subcontinent he loathed it with all his heart. There was no room here to make sense of events; the best that could be hoped was that one be allowed a niche to breathe awhile between one squalid flowering and the next.
In Conrad’s time the notion of a corrupting jungle may well have been part and parcel of the Western sense of superiority to the Third World; I wonder if that’s still the case here. By the time of Barker’s writing modern liberalism had transformed even the most squalid “developing” area or brutally inhospitable wilderness into a pre-fallen paradise, simply by virtue of there being no Westerners there to fuck it up yet. Suggesting (even through an odious interlocutor like Locke) that the undeveloped wilderness can be ugly is a transgressive act–as taboo, in its way, as were films like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacare, whose visions of the supposedly glorious frontier roots of America answered the likes of Easy Rider‘s “we blew it” with the response “it was already blown long ago.”
The natives in Barker’s story are another integral part of the tale’s unique nastiness. In all likelihood they come across better than those in Conrad’s. For one thing, Barker’s European spoilers do not “go native”–quite the opposite, really. Barker treats the natives as monsters, yes, but of course that means they get treated fairly well: terrible but wonderful, corrupting yet pure in their corruptness. They reflect the jungle itself in this way:
They seemed, in their silence, like another species, as mysterious and unfathomable as mules or birds. Hadn’t somebody in Uxituba told him that many of these people didn’t even give their children proper names, that each was like a limb of the tribe, anonymous and therefore unfixable? He could believe that now, meeting the same dark stare in each pair of eyes, could believe that what they faced here was not three dozen individuals but a fluid system of hatred made flesh. It made him shudder to think of it.
Now, for the first time since their appearance, one of the assembly moved. He was an ancient, fully thirty years older than most of the tribe. He, like the rest, was all but naked. The sagging flesh of his limbs and breasts resembled tanned hide; his step, though the pale eyes suggested blindness, was perfectly confident. Once standing in front of the interlopers he opened his mouth–there were no teeth set in his rotted gums–and spoke. What emerged from his scraggy throat was a language made not of words but only of sound, a potpourri of jungle noises. There was no discernible pattern to the outpouring, it was simply a display–awesome in its way–of impersonations. The man could murmur like a jaguar, screech like a parrot; he could find in his throat the splash of rain on orchids, the howl of monkeys.
The sounds made Stumpf’s gorge rise. The jungle had diseased him, dehydrated him and left him wrung out. Now this rheumy-eyed stickman was vomiting the whole odious place up at him.
What follows owes as least as much to Camus and The Stranger as it does to Conrad and Kurtz. That’s as good a way as any as seguing into the fact that the real monsters here, obviously, are the Europeans, the spoilers. They’re physically diseased, first of all: One has dysentery, another a case of syphilis advanced enough to render his dick an afterthought. (There are worse diseases in store, alas for them.) They are also, of course, murderers, about as cold and unfeeling as you please. Barker goes to great lengths to hammer home their sheer hideousness in virtually every facet of their lives. I mean, what can be said of a sentence like this–
It was one of Locke’s few certain pleasures, and one he never tired of, to watch a local woman, face dead as a cold manioc cake, submit to a dog or a donkey for a few grubby dollar bills.
And when one of Locke’s liasons is about to reach its sordid climax…
The woman with the squint was about to accede to a particular peccadillo of Locke’s–one which she had resolutely refused until drunkenness persuaded her to abandon what little hope of dignity she had…there came a rap on the door.
A little boy has come to tell Locke his colleague is in the hospital, dying.
“Well, let him. Understand me? You go back, and tell him, I won’t come until I’m ready.”
Again, the boy shrugged. “E meu dinheiro?” he said, as Locke went to close the door.
“You go to hell,” Locke replied, and slammed it in the child’s face.
When, two hours and one ungainly act of passionless sex later, Locke unlocked the door, he discovered that the child, by way of revenge, had defecated on the threshold.
Do you see what I mean? Awful, awful. Before it all ends there’s a dead pig that reminds us of Lord of the Flies and an ending that, interestingly, is the closest to the Bradbury–Matheson–King tradition we’ve yet seen. But I think the most striking thing, which is really only registering
with me now, is that what we don’t see is a glimpse of the transcendent, which can usually be found in even the worst of Barker’s horrors. It’s as though the transcendent was rotted right out of this story. It makes me wonder, once I’m able to recover from the reading, who the author was really trying to scare.
I’m pleased and priveleged to announce that today I am a Very Special Guest over at the indispensable horror/fantasy/SF blog Dark But Shining. I’ve penned them a little essay on the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and why it belongs in the horror pantheon. Yeah, you heard me! It’s gonna be a while before you see it around these parts, so go over to DBS and check it out. Heck, go over to DBS and don’t check it out–it’s a great site whether or not they’ve let me be a part of it for a day!
Book Six (Cabal), Chapter One
“The Life of Death”
First, a quick note: People who purchase the American edition of this volume will find the first story in it to be not a story at all but “Cabal,” a more or less full-length novella. As this story (which is pretty great, incidentally) is not included in The Complete Books of Blood as published in one volume three or so years ago, I won’t be tackling it here; perhaps at some point I’ll do a Blog of Blood post-script that will include it and the subsequent novella The Hellbound Heart, the inspirations for Nightbreed and Hellraiser respectively. But for now, on with the show.
I have yet to reread the final story in this volume so I don’t want to say for sure, but I think that pound for pound this may well be the strongest volume in the series. It certainly starts off that way, as in “The Life of Death” Barker is writing at a very high, very direct, very powerful level. I really like the way he teases out the central metaphor of the story–that a woman recovering from a physically and mentally traumatic hysterectomy has, essentially, become pregnant with Death–in such a way that, for all its obviousness and potential heavy-handedness, it instead feels perfectly natural and even alluring to be drawn into. As she regains her strength, so too does the prose liven up and become hot-blooded:
She was pleased with what she saw. Her breasts were full and dark, her skin had a pleasing sheen to it, her pubic hair had regrown more lushly than ever. The scars themselves still looked and felt tender, but her eyes read their lividness as a sign of her cunt’s ambition, as though any day now her sex would grown from anus to navel (and beyond perhaps), opening her up, making her terrible.
It was paradoxical, surely, that it was only now, when the surgeons had emptied her out, that she should feel so ripe, so resplendent.
“When the surgeons had emptied her out”–so callous, so (I’d imagine, and I’m fortunate that I will never know) dead-on. And so much of our central character’s “ripening” revolves around the peculiar eroticism (already noted in “Dread”) of a woman voraciously eating. There are devourers aplenty here, as there are in nearly every story in the collection.
And this is another tale in which so many passages demand to be called out:
“I only ever saw one dead person. My grandmother. I was very young at the time…”
“I trust it was a pivotal experience.”
“I don’t think so. In fact I scarcely remember it at all. I only remember how everybody cried.”
“Ah.”
He nodded sagely.
“So selfish,” he said. “Don’t you think? Spoiling a farewell with snot and sobs.” Again he looked at her to gauge the response; again he was satisfied that she would not take offense. “We cry for ourselves, don’t we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.”
And from thanatos to eros, or more accurately to the union of the two:
He was bending over the body, whispering in its ear as he rearranged it on the tangled sheets. Then he unbuttoned himself and unveiled that bone whose inflammation was the sincerest form of flattery.
Ha! Damn. I bet he waited for MONTHS to work that into something.
But perhaps my favorite part of the story is not the insightful writing, not the sensuously bleak setting and events, not even the way it expertly toys with reader expectations as to what, exactly, is happening–it’s that line I quoted in the title of this post. “I like places where the dead are.” I’m going to try to avoid spoiling anything by making comparisons between the character who says that and the author who gave put those words in his mouth–would Barker find such a comparison apt, even flattering? beats me–but I wonder if here, in the final volume, Barker hasn’t gotten right to the point. Has he answered the question asked in “The Forbidden”? Do we tell, and listen to, these horrible stories because a part of us, knowing how our own stories will end, likes where they’re going?
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.
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?
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 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.
Here is a listing of each of the Blog of Blood entries, to be updated continuously as the series progresses.
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 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 Three: “Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud”
Book Four (The Inhuman Condition)
Chapter One: “The Inhuman Condition
Chapter Two: “The Body Politic”
Chapter Five: “The Age of Desire”
Book Five (In the Flesh)
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”
