Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996): You Get Me Closer to God

With his seventh novel, published in hardcover in 1996, Eighties horror icon Clive Barker outdoes even himself. Sacrament (1997 Harper Books mass market, cover by Phil Heffernan) in this story of Will Rabjohns, a gay British wildlife photographer. After a wild animal attack puts him in a coma, he dreams/remembers/revisits a strange couple he knew as a boy. Once he is well again, Will travels back to England, to confront the mystery of his past, his estranged father, and his boyhood friends. What we have here is a metaphysical mystery tale, as a man confronts the past and the present, his art and the world, and the strange powers that seem to drive them all.

As with much of Barker's fiction, it is this confrontation that drives his characters. What transformation awaits at the heart of this mystery? Who are Jacob and Rosa Steep? They live fictions, through decades. There is a dark, violent power that lies in their fingers, in their seductive charms. In Will's photography of the world's wildlife, they see a "conduit"—he brings to Jacob an unwelcome vision of a 19th century artist named Thomas Simeon. (It's my guess that Simeon is a stand-in for William Blake; it's no secret that Barker has long considered the English poet one of his literary icons, and with good reason). There is a lineage from Simeon's art and writings to Will's photography: life is hidden and waiting for apocalypse in Simeon's work; its aftermath and extinction in Will's.

This is a novel about a longing for transcendence, for transformation, to confront the mystery, to find out, "Why have I lived?" Barker writes that perhaps, at the end, "There'd be understanding, there'd be revelation, there'd be an end to the ache in him." The final scenes in the living heart of the world—the Mundus Domini—are terrific; Barker's prose is masterful, pure, poised. Here is his Thomas Simeon, in one of the book's most wonderful passages:

"It seems to me, we must invent religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only constant is inconsistency.... It seems to me the purpose of religion is to say: All things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing that is yet to be: All Are So."

How about that? Barker is simply an excellent, lyrical writer, whose works reflect upon the spiritual mysteries of our lives. Sacrament is, in a word, magnificent. I'm appalled upon learning of some readers' distaste for its erotic homosexual depictions—they have no business reading Clive Barker. I found this aspect to be incredibly well-done and insightful, these scenes with Will and his lover. Will has an ache for transcendence (as do so many of Barker's men and women: see Gentle and Jude in Imajica, Cal Mooney in Weaveworld, or Fletcher and the Jaff in The Great and Secret Show), as does Jacob Steep. One man who creates to get closer to God, one man who destroys.

That sometimes spirituality is a dark and violent—and sexy!—thing in no way diminishes its importance in Clive Barker's art; in fact, this quality powers its engine. Sacrament may not have the "horror cachet" of the author's more famous, more graphic stories and novels and movies, but I think it is an essential work for those who appreciate his sui generis approach to horror fiction.


(Note: I wrote this review in the unbelievable year of 1998, for a new bookselling website called Amazon)

Cold Front by Barry Hammond (1982): Frozen Warnings

Published only in Canada in 1982 by the Canadian wing of Signet/New American Library, Cold Front is one of the rarest horror paperbacks of that era. I'd bet there are only maybe dozens of copies in existence, if that. For years searchers after horror have had to contend with copies being sold online for hundreds of dollars. The handful of readers who did dole out the bucks fortunately, or perhaps frustratingly, announced that wow, the book is actually pretty good. (Never assume that a book's high secondhand market pricing has anything to do with its quality, however). This made people want the damn thing even more.

Now, independent publisher Fathom Press, taking a cue from Valancourt Books' Paperbacks from Hell line, is going after white whales like this one. And this one was captured! Fathom was able to secure reprint rights from Canadian author Barry Hammond, who even contributed an explanatory and insightful afterword about the origins of his sole horror novel. (While writing, Hammond says he was playing difficult-listening albums by Lou Reed and Nico to capture the right vibe he was imagining, truly fitting.)

In Cold Front, Hammond doesn't even pretend to try to get you to identify with his three male leads. These guys are dumb, grimy, pig-ignorant losers who speak like it; no Tarantino pulp-crime pop-culture witticisms, no self-referential jokes, no self-aware callbacks. You're in the company of some real ugly drunken dum-dums, and it ain't fun. Hammond has a way of setting up a scenario that's pure no-way-out hopelessness. The almost-sole locale of the disgusting cabin in the snowy wilderness also functions as a kind of freezing existential locus, stripped of all extraneousness, few provisions, howling storm outside, confronting sex and terror inside this desolate dwelling that seems to exist in some netherworld, a purgatory hungry for lives to send on to Hell.

Sure, there's gonna be things to be grossed out by in a trashy Eighties horror paperback novel like this: the crude jokey racial comments, the "childlike sexuality" of the bizarrely pale white girl the men find hiding in the cabin's basement, the threat of rape and worse. Silent and mysterious, yet able to kick ass and defend herself, the young woman both attracts and repels each trapped man. The blurb on the back cover gets it right: it's not the girl they need to be afraid of... 

Fathom Press reprint, Thanks for a copy! 
cover art by Stephen Andrade.

As I read, I got notes of Jim Thompson crime novels, and of Laymon/Ketchum in the simplicity of setup and prose style, grue and bloodshed. Our monster, hinted at throughout—and ably represented in the Signet cover art, by the great Tom Hallman—is underplayed till the end, which is quite the frigid whirlwind of death and mayhem. While I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" Cold Front, I absolutely appreciated its commitment to single-minded unease, disgust, and fatalistic despair. And thanks to Fathom Press, you can now "enjoy" it as I did as well!

With the sun full on them, they were the very centre of the horror before they realized what it was... Then the pieces of it hanging from the trees seared their eyes. They could see the silhouettes. Not understand them, but know who it was from the shreds of wool still attached to the raw, frozen meat. Not understand how such a thing was possible. Logic of human geometry had been thrown aside. That the human body could undergo such stretching, ravaging, seemed impossible. The image indelibly inked across their minds even when they closed their eyes. Hard to believe that such obscenity could exist in sunlight.