Clive Barker reminds me of those battlefield generals determined to win at all costs. Maybe a General Patton, who earned the infamous nickname Old Blood and Guts (doesn’t that sound like it could be the title to a Clive Barker book?). Even as their soldiers fall dead or wounded, these intrepid commanders push onward, heedless of the consequences. Prospects might be as hopeless as the Battle of the Somme or Stalingrad during the winter of 1943, but truce is unacceptable, peace a fool’s dream. I am reminded of General Walter Heitz's order to his troops in their last encounter: "We fight to the last bullet but one." Take a guess what you do with that last bullet.
That’s exactly how Clive Barker treats his characters. You wouldn't want to find yourself in one of his tales. Those poor devils pay the ultimate price, as the phrase goes, for the honor of participating in a Clive Barker short story. Almost everybody you meet in Books of Blood bites the dust before the final page—heroes, villains, major characters, minor characters, innocent bystanders. In some instances all of the characters are dead, or on the brink of death, at the end of the tale. No, Mr. Barker isn't one to leave room for sequels.
But like our General Patton, Barker may leave the field strewn with corpses, but he does produce results . There's more to his stories than just blood and guts. He understands that the rules for horror writing are not much different from those governing other types of narrative fiction. Barker doesn't just rush into the battlefield, but prepares methodically for the conflicts ahead. Those who have heard about this author's taste for carnage may be surprised at how much attention he devotes to character development, backstory, setting, mood and motivation. You might even say he deeply cares for his characters…well, at least until that moment when he ruthlessly disposes of them.
Barker first made his name with these Books of Blood . He parlayed these sinister tales into a wide-ranging career that has brought him everything from an Oscar (for best screenwriter) to acclaim as a painter and illustrator. He eventually turned his hand to comic books, children’s stories, photography, almost as if he were one of the characters in his tales attempting to escape the gruesome circumstances behind his past. In the introduction to the 1998 edition of Books of Blood, 1-3 , he even expressed something akin to embarrassment over his path to success. "I'm uncomfortable being viewed as the ‘Horror Guy’,” he explains, and adds that his distaste is so great that he practically dreads Halloween, avoiding the parties and processions that allow others to indulge their taste for frightening fare. Yet even today, the first phrase that comes to mind when people describe Barker is the simple epithet "horror writer." And he has garnered the highest of praise from the most celebrate of scaremongers: "I have seen the future of horror," Stephen King proclaimed back at the outset of this author’s ascendancy, "his name is Clive Barker."
Barker's protagonists are rarely adventurers or seekers after the occult. Much of the appeal of these stories comes from our author’s ability to combine the gruesome and mundane in ways that are almost plausible. The typical Books of Blood story starts by downplaying the reader's expectations, by mimicking the trappings of everyday life. In "The Midnight Meat Train," our protagonist is a middle-aged man who recently relocated from Atlanta to New York, only to find the city dreary, dirty and unexciting ….until he happens to fall asleep and miss his subway stop at the worst possible time. I will spare you the details, but next day the headlines read “Subway Slaughter.” Thomas Garrow, the hero of “Rawhead Rex” is a struggling country farmer who needs to clear out a rocky area where he hopes to plant next season. Few things could be more banal. But in his case, Garrow couldn’t have chosen a worse spot to dig into the ground. In "Dread," perhaps the creepiest story in the book, Stephen Grace makes the mistake of taking a philosophy course at college, and meets a peculiar fellow student who wants to study the existential concept of dread. Our hero soon learns, however, that his new friend has developed a methodology for isolating this phenomenon more suited for Sade than Sartre. Mick and Judd, protagonists of "In the Hills, the Cities" think that their biggest problem is a disagreement over the itinerary of their Eastern European vacation, but their compromise solution instead gives them a sight that most tourists would die to see— literally, in this case.
In the concluding story of the book, the novella "Human Remains," Barker builds his narrative around one of his typical protagonists, the pretty-boy slacker Gavin who finds that he can earn a reasonable living selling his good looks to a well-heeled clientele. He cherishes dreams of pursuing a more stable life, settling down to something better than a series of pick-ups and by-the-hour assignations. Maybe he can move up the ladder to the profession of gigolo, or even find a rich spouse who will pamper and bankroll him in a less tawdry profession. But he always decides to put off any decision for another day, and first make one more quick score. A chance encounter with a collector of illegal antiquities puts Gavin in contact with a mysterious nemesis—a strange half-dead entity that wants to emulate the young hustler, and somehow is able to take on his looks and gestures.
Here Barker evokes not only the classic horror stories about ‘doubles’—such as Edgar Allan Poe ’s " William Wilson " and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil's Elixirs —but also the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion. The end result is an appealing narrative that works on two levels, both as escapist story with all the familiar ingredients of the slasher story, but also as a deeper commentary on the displaced nature of the self in our intensely image- and youth-oriented society. This is Barker at his best, never neglecting the gruesome details that brought him a huge audience, but still pushing for something smarter and more open-ended.
By the way, it’s hard to believe that Clive Barker is only five years younger than Stephen King. King feels like old time rock ' n' roll, while Barker comes across as more New Wave and punk. At the dawn of his career, the latter smartly ditched the gothic overtones that have so long permeated the genre, and went stale at least a half-century ago. In their place, he crafted new kinds of nihilist scary stories, very up-to-date and often set in nightmarish urban landscapes. Few things are harder than modernizing the horror formulas that have been around for centuries—they were telling ghost stories in ancient Rome, and myths about evil spirits no doubt circulated in prehistoric times. But Barker has thrived by doing just that.
So don’t be deterred by the name. I was initially wary myself of Books of Blood , if only because the title seemed to promise little beyond an overabundance of the crimson tide. But I was more sanguine after reading Barker’s offering, and suspect you will be too. There’s more than gore here—that said, these stories are not for the squeamish. But there’s also wry humor, social commentary and well-crafted storytelling. No, don’t expect good to triumph, or even the main characters to survive to the last paragraph, but you will be properly entertained and agitated by the proceedings. And, above all, relieved that you merely read these stories, not inhabit them.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
In some instances all of the characters are dead, or on the brink of death, at the end of the tale. No, Mr. Barker isn’t one to leave room for sequels..