Fangoria Nightmare Library Reviews, Sept 1987

Another stellar crop of Fangoria mag fiction reviews of works by esteemed '80s horror writers, including erstwhile Eric C. Higgs. I really can't thank reader Patrick B. enough for sending these along to me! I'll get back to reviewing in the new year if not before.

Fangoria Nightmare Library Reviews, March 1987

The Fangoria vaults have been opened once again, this time thanks to reader Patrick B., who sent me a treasure trove of Nightmare Library review scans from the golden era of '80s horror fiction. Behold this particular cache, as it features reviews of some of our favorites... 

Powell's Birthday Visit

Spent Friday afternoon kinda hungover after a late night of birthday dinner and drinks on Thursday. But I wouldn't let that deter me from shopping at Powell's House of Books, here in Portland. One of America's premier bookstores, I visit maybe three or four times a year. Their horror section is a mix of new and used titles (all of their stock is, actually) and while their pricing reflects a knowledge of the collector (Charles Beaumont's 1960s paperbacks going for $15; a first-edition paperback of I Am Legend for $35), you can often find great deals mixed in. In fact, they had a whole spinner rack of 1980s horror paperbacks for fans of Netflix's "Stranger Things" series, priced around $2 - $3 each.

First read is that Barker bio from 2001 by the great Douglas E. Winter; I'm enjoying all the behind-the-scenes stuff about deals with his first publishers and editors. Not sure what's next; I've got some other writing projects I'm working on and am halfway through a not-so-great 1970s horror title that I'll probably review before the end of the year. Anyway, any visitor to Portland needs to stop in at Powell's and give themselves plenty of time to explore their delirious maze of seemingly endless shelves... hope you make it out alive!

Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden, ed. by Stephen Jones (1991): Of Minds to Madness, Flesh to Wounding

"I don't scare easily," said Clive Barker to a journalist in 1990, while promoting his then brand-new novel The Great and Secret Show. Barker continued: "But I'm terrified of two things. One is the general condition of being flesh and blood. Of minds to madness and flesh to wounding. The other is banality. My characters are constantly escaping from banality." That quote struck me back then and it still strikes me today. The great thing about Barker is that he's so in tune to his own wavelength; he knows just what and why he's writing and what he wants his readers to experience, and he's eager to talk about it too.


And that's just what Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden (Underwood-Miller, Oct 1991) gives us. An anthology of interviews, discussions, reviews, quotes, and endless illustrations, it's a beautifully produced hardcover. At 450+ pages, this is Barker unadulterated, talking at length about his art, his influences, and anything else he might want to expound upon. Shadows covers the gamut of his early career: his plays (and minor forays into stage acting), stories, novels, movies, and comics. I can hardly overstate its importance for the Barker fan. I bought this lovely title from the specialty-press Underwood-Miller as soon as it was published, and have happily revisited it for 25 years.

"I was very aware that if I was going to rise I was going to have to be a proselytizer for my work. I'm aware that many writers are actively reluctant to do that. They don't like to do public readings, they don't like to do television and so on... I have, no pun intended, something of the carnival barker in me."

Disturbingly erotic yet humorous front/endpiece art by Stephen Player.

Shadows in Eden is littered with Barker's sketches in the margins and rough drafts of paintings, some representative of characters and scenes from his fiction, others simply unlimbered escapees from his fevered brain. Some years ago I was waited on by a bartender who had a tattoo of one of these sketches and I said as she served me my beer, "Hey, that's a Clive Barker!" She told me I was literally the only person who'd ever recognized it.

Who doesn't love seeing their favorite writer's handwritten manuscripts?! Critical essays are also included, exposing the metaphors and subtleties—and yes, when necessary, the weaknesses—of Barker's literary output. Alas, Shadows doesn't include anything about Barker's magnum opus Imajica, since that novel was published pretty much concurrently.

Creepy art—Brother Frank?—and Ramsey Campbell's original introduction to the first editions of the Books of Blood. I'm still not sure what a Balaclava is and now I don't even want to find out, I enjoy the tantalizing mystery of it.

Of course: the first time I ever heard the word "meme" and learned what it was was reading this conversation between Barker and Neil Gaiman. They talk comics and how, in the late '80s and early '90s, they were rather like twins, figuratively and literally. And literarily. (Gaiman doesn't get the definition of meme exactly right, but ah well, the point is made.)

Movies: Hellraiser and more are featured. Nightbreed was going into production as Shadows of Eden was being put together, so it was cool to see some behind-the-scenes goodies. Here Barker's with illustrator icon Ralph McQuarrie. And then there's some stuff on, uh, Rawhead Rex.

The great Lisa Tuttle, who'd been featured with Barker in Night Visions III, contributes this wonderful piece in which she and Clive discuss Cabal and all manner of horror and art. "Whenever Clive and I have met to discuss horror, writing, fantasy and similar topics—whether on a public platform, or in private—I've always enjoyed it. More than enjoyed it: found it exhilarating. There's an intellectual rapport, so that even though we don't agree about everything, we're on the same wavelengths, shortcuts can be taken, intuitive leaps made; we spark responses in each other. I find what he has to say invariably interesting, and often illuminating, not only about his work, but about my own, as well as about art and life in general."

A treat from the Barker scrapbook! My God I can't imagine a bigger treat than sharing a bottle with Barker and discussing Books of Blood. Except maybe sharing a bottle with Barker and King and discussing Books of Blood (see below).

You'll recognize lots of the journalists and writers included: J.G. Ballard, Douglas E. Winter, Dennis Etchison, Kim Newman, Philip Nutman, Stanley Wiater, and oh yeah good ol' Steve King, whose piece "You Are Here Because You Want the Real Thing" opens Shadows. He recalls the first time he heard the name "Clive Barker" (New Haven World Fantasy Convention 1983, "drunk, drunk" as he puts it) and mused, since there was so much talk about him being a real game-changer, on the famous quote about Bruce Springsteen back in the mid-1970s, "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen." (King—drunk, drunk—misremembers and misattributes the quote, according it to Rolling Stone mag founder Jan Wenner. Not so but ah well, the point is made.) Of Barker King says: "And, oh my God, can the man write. No matter how gruesome the material, you are witched into the story, hooked, and then propelled onward."

My goodness what a perfect image for Barker's work. Jesus wept.

Stranger Things Typeface: ITC Benguiat

 

Clive Barker's Books of Blood: The Berkley Editions, 1986

June 1986 saw the first American paperback edition of the first volume of Clive Barker's unparalleled short-story collection Books of Blood. Vols. II and III followed later in the year (for those keeping score, August and October respectively). Sure, the covers were adorned with rubbery face-masks but there's no denying the power within, and the sober back-cover copy still delights. These are essential horror reads. As fellow Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell writes in his intro:  

When it comes to the imagination, the only rules should be one's own instincts, 

and Clive Barker's never falters.

Clive Barker: The Art of Horror

The one and only Clive Barker was born October 5, 1952 in Liverpool. Here's a fantastic video biography from about 1990 or so, judging by his spiky mullet—probably my favorite Barker era, between The Great and Secret Show and Imajica. And remember these comics?! Those were the days!

Cabal by Clive Barker (1988): Stand Me Up at the Gates of Hell

Weren't there, among those creatures, faculties she envied? The power to fly, to be transformed, to know the condition of beasts, to defy death?... the monsters were forever. Part of her forbidden self. Her dark, transforming midnight self. She longed to be numbered among them.

Another prime example of Clive Barker's consistent concern with monsters and the humans that dwell in their midst, Cabal came out at perhaps the height of his success as a bestselling horror author. The 250-page novella was published in hardcover in the US along with the stories from Books of Blood Vol. VI, while in the UK it was issued as a standalone title. Then a year later Barker began adapting this work for the screen as Nightbreed, the storied, troubled production of which probably most horror fans of that era are familiar with. I'd read Cabal twice but oh so long ago: once before the film was out in early 1990 and once not long after. A couple weeks ago I watched the recently released director's cut of Nightbreed and afterward reread Cabal. Not as a "compare and contrast" exercise, which is a bit too English Comp 101 for me, but the movie had gotten me thinking: how has a quarter century's passing affected my affinity for the Tribes of the Moon (a phrase found only in the film)? Would I still be as excited and eager about the Nightbreed as I am in this photo?

Clive Barker and me; he's signing my Nightbreed poster. 

January 1991

Spoilers! Cabal is the story of Aaron Boone, a young man on the run from his psychiatrist Dr. Decker, a secret madman who plans to blame Boone for his own serial killer crimes. Boone is being chased by Lori, the woman he left but who loves him still. If all that's not enough, Boone is attempting entry into a fabled world where the monsters live. It's a vast forgotten cemetery near an abandoned town called Midian in the Canadian wilds, a catacombed necropolis beneath the earth in which hide the monsters of myth and legend, exiled from a fearful, vengeful humanity. But Boone is not the monster Decker's convinced him he is... yet.

He'd heard the name of that place spoken maybe half a dozen times by people he'd met on the way through, in and out of mental wards and hospices, usually those whose strength was all burned up. When they called on Midian it was a place of refuge, a place to be carried away to And more: a place where whatever sins they'd committed--real or imagined--would be forgiven them. Boone didn't know the origins of this mythology nor had he ever been interested enough to find out. He had not been in need of forgiveness, or so he thought. Now he knew better...

Harper Collins, Toronto, 1989

Boone's entrance to Midian is foolhardy and near-fatal: a bite from a Breed member "more reptile than mammal" called Peloquin--who can instantly sense Boone's guiltless, Natural self--gives Boone a kind of immortality, which comes in handy when Decker brings the police force to Midian and they shoot Boone dead. But he's not dead. Now, as a walking dead man, he's become the Breed, and escapes the morgue. But his return bodes unwell for the inhabitants of Midian, who fear he will reveal them to Man. Boone defies the laws of the Breed when he rescues faithful Lori from blood-hungry Decker outside Midian's gates, which causes all sorts of problems. However, here in horror Boone's truest self's revealed:

In Decker's presence he'd been proud to call himself monster: to parade his Nightbreed self. But now, looking at the woman he had loved and had been loved by in return for his frailty and his humanity, he was ashamed. 

His will making flesh smoke, which his lungs drew back into his body. It was a process as strange in its ease as in its nature. How quickly he'd become accustomed  to what once he'd once have called miraculous. 

To make up for his folly Boone demands to see Baphomet, the Nightbreed god who created Midian as a haven for these creatures.  Following Boone, Lori gets a glimpse of a column of flame and:

There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb... this was Baphomet, this diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.

This meeting is a moment out of all man's primitive religions: the holy fire, the sacred other, that once seen cannot be unseen, and once experienced the profane is transformed. There is no going back. Boone is a Moses and Baphomet his Yahweh; prophecy foretold. Barker has always gotten good mileage out of this comparative mythology aspect of his fiction, mileage I'm always happy to travel. While Lovecraft parodied and satirized religious beliefs with his "Yog-Sothothery," Barker recognizes that humans have a need for transcendence, but not one that annihilates, one that transforms. Boone bravely embraces his true nature; he is no Outsider reaching out in cowering fear and touching a mirror.

And so the tale continues, and closes, with redneck cops--led by the truly odious Eigerman--and a gaggle of shotgun-wielding yahoos on loan from Night of the Living Dead descending on Midian thanks, again, to Decker. He's set on killing Lori, who now knows his secret. He loathes the Breed, cannot wait to participate in their destruction: "They were freaks, albeit stranger than the usual stuff. Things in defiance of nature, to be poked from under their stones and soaked in gasoline. He'd happily strike the match himself." They rout the Breed in a final confrontation that will create a new enemy and destroy another. Boone is renamed Cabal--"an alliance of many"--by Baphomet and ordered to rebuild ("You've undone the world. Now you must remake it"). Lori and Boone are reunited at last.

But the Nightbreed are not ended. Irony abounds, even until the very last line: "It was a life." Lori's words to Boone after he rescues her from death and gives her his Breed balm (heh, and yes, he does this figuratively and literally) are, "I'll never leave you," which the astute reader will recognize as the words in the opening paragraph, words Boone considers a lie. What does this irony mean? Barker knows how to leave readers wanting more by undermining expectations; the tale ends just as it's beginning!

Fontana UK movie tie-in, 1990

In a 1989 Fangoria interview with journalist/author Philip Nutman, Barker talked about the motivation in making Cabal a novella:

"I wanted to do the reverse of what I did in Weaveworld, which was to really cross the t's and dot the i's, give every detail of psychology and so on. In Cabal I wanted to present a piece of quicksilver adventuring in which you were just seeing flashes of things, Boone, Lori, the Breed, each character's psychology reduced to impressions. Part of the fun for me was to write it in short, sharp bites." 

I quote this because it explains what at first I disliked about Cabal on this reread: strokes were too broad; too much time giving impressions and not specifics; characters were moved about like a kid playing with action figures--so much to-ing and fro-ing! After the short sharp shocks of the Books of Blood and the epically-drawn dark fantasy of Weaveworld, maybe the novella format was not good idea. But as I read, Barker's writing grew in its conviction; he's more adept at the contradictions and ambiguities of murderers and marauders than he is with the banalities of everyday life. Still, some frustrations:
 

Decker's psychopathy could have been expanded; the creepiest moments belong to him, like when Ol' Button Face, the glib nickname Decker has for his killing mask/personality, chatters hungrily to him while it resides in his briefcase. The conflict of his inhumanity versus that of the Nightbreed is sketched in here and there, none more illuminating than when Barker writes of Decker: "The thought of his precious Other being confused with the degenerates of Midian nauseated him." Decker is a fascinating character; the witless police not so much.

Fans of the film looking for bizarre monstrosities will have to be satisfied with only glimpses of the Nightbreed. Unlike some of the detailed creatures that inhabited Barker's earlier short stories like "Rawhead Rex," "In the Skins of the Fathers," or "Son of Celluloid," the reader is given mostly impressions. With a surrealist's eye Barker gives us intriguing hints but doesn't belabor the descriptions. When Lori first descends into Midian:

...was it simply disgust that made her stomach flip, seeing the stigmatic in full flood, with sharp-toothed adherents sucking noisily at her wounds? Or excitement, confronting the legend of the vampire int he flesh? And what was she to make of the man whose body broke into birds when he saw her watching? Or the dog-headed painter who turned from his fresco and beckoned her to join his apprentice mixing paint? Or the machine beasts running up the walls on caliper legs? After a dozen corridors she no longer knew horror from fascination. Perhaps she'd never known.

1989 Pocket Books edition

Yes, Barker's mantra has always been thus. In the monstrous there is beauty; the normal course of daily things is a horror. But I wanted more. Cabal works better if one considers it as allegory, as fable, and its politics are a liberal dream: evil is not evil, it's an alternative lifestyle! Witness the callous crude cruelties of doctor, cop, and priest: the first is a psychopath literally wearing a mask; the second an egomaniac concerned only with his brand of law, order, and notoriety; the last is a hypocrite. The undoing will be at the hands of these traditional authorities; it is they who will squeeze the life out of the untamed, the unwanted, even the undead. Cabal ends clearly stating that the enemies are still active, still enraged, still stung by humiliation and eager to bring a comeuppance.

Poseidon Press 1988 US hardcover 

I guess I'm saying there's a theoretical distance in Cabal which prevents me from really, truly enjoying it the way I do so much of Barker's other work. Maybe it's the movie, which I like all right in its new incarnation but have never been overly fond of (although this version is a more faithful adaptation, Nightbreed remains irredeemably cheesy in a way Cabal is not), intruding upon my imagination; I can't at all recall how I envisioned the story before its film adaptation. And it reads, and ends, like a prequel. This has been a problem with Clive Barker since, well, since 1988. He's always intended to continue the story of Cabal. To continue the story began in The Great and Secret Show. And Galilee. And Abarat. Later this year we'll finally get The Scarlet Gospels, which apparently concludes the stories Harry D'Amour and Pinhead, an apotheosis of two aspects of Barker's art. His ambition might outreach his vision, his health, and dare I say it, his life. But again, it pays to see Cabal as a fable, a beginning, a story for us about us: fans of the Breed are the Breed, "The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity's sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside." That is a story that continues, and continues, and continues.

Barker '88

Ramsey Campbell Born Today, 1946

Birthday greetings to the esteemed Ramsey Campbell! He was one of the--if not the--first modern horror writers I began reading in the 1980s that wasn't named King or Barker. First purchased was Cold Print, a collection of his Lovecraftian tales. Next up for me was 1987's Scared Stiff, his later collection of stories of "sex and death" or "seduction and terror," with intro by, of course, fellow Liverpudlian Clive Barker. I haven't revisited Scared Stiff (heh) since those days, but hope to reread it this year.

Clive Barker born today, 1952

Best birthday wishes to the one and only Clive Barker, pictured here from the cover art of the wonderful 1991 nonfiction book Shadows in Eden, edited by Stephen Jones. It's an essential piece of Barkerania, and one day I'll get a review of it posted here. Promise!

Throwback Thursday

Oh, there should have been so many more pictures like this.