Everville by Clive Barker (1994): Infinite Dreams

(For the ever-popular Throwback Thursday, I present the following, a review I wrote for Amazon back in 1998)

Everville... the eternal city, the mythic point where this earth and the heavens meet, the "axis mundi," the crossroads of eternity and time, the sacred and the profane. Is Clive Barker the only author of these sore days who sees into these crossroads? It's a more than worthy sequel to 1989's The Great and Secret Show. Barker continually impresses me with each new book, both in the themes and characters he explores, the language he uses, and his subversion of the both the horror and fantasy genres. If I see one more book review or interview that refers to him as a "master of horror" - argh! He's got more in common with a Joseph Campbell, a William Blake, a Dali or Cocteau, than any mere horror writer. I think Everville is a very good book; but yes, I did get some smirks and sneers from my more "literary" acquaintances. Pity -they don't know what they're missing.

 2009 UK reprint

Barker's prose is as measured and musical as ever; this is the first book of his which, on several occasions, stirred me nearly to tears. While reading it, I kept a pen nearby, underlining dozens of beautiful passages. The story flows effortlessly - which it needs to, as Barker understands, as Story is the only way things of consequence get told. As he writes: And every life, however short, however meaningless it seems, is a leaf on the story tree. British-born Barker does well depicting "everyday" people in a small American town; a nice change from the distant misfits of his short stories and early novels. There is risk-taking here on his part, and yes, sometimes some of the Americana rings a tad false, and I was little let down by the literalization of Quiddity, but any writer who has the courage to revision Jesus, the Christ - the Christ of Dreams, and Dreaming - in the course of a "popular" novel, has my utmost admiration. Of course, anyone who's read Imajica or Weaveworld knows Barker does not shy away from re-imagining of what the supernatural is and what it means to those caught up in it.

 1995 UK paperback

I love Barker's depiction of reality as ever in flux, something malleable and always in transformation. As Joe Flicker asks himself, traveling through the Metacosm: "But when he slept here, and dreamed, was he entering yet another reality, beyond this one, where he might also sleep and dream?" An eternal question, asked by the ancients of all cultures. Stories and dreams have always made and remade the world; we are never satisfied with Reality. Why else would we regale ourselves with tales and visions of resurrections and journeys, virgin births and sacred mountains, men of wisdom and women of purity? All of this is "the Great and Secret Show" we never tire of, and Barker seems to effortlessly reach behind the veil and pluck out our appetites, our perversities, our loves and our hopes, our desires to comprehend these mysteries. That, I think, is the Art: a skill to divine our souls. One character, Owen Buddenbaum, desiring communion with the "gods", expresses this eloquently:

...to be free of every frailty, including love; free to live out of time, out of place, out of every particular. He would be unmade, the way divinities were unmade, because divinities were without beginning and without end: a rare and wonderful condition.

 1999 Harper trade paperback reprint

The visions in Everville are classic Barker: the creation of the Metacosm (a Jungian archetype if ever there was one) by Maeve O'Connell and Coker Ammiano - a whorehouse at the crossroads, negating the bluster about this nation being found on Christian values. Joe Flicker in the Metacosm, and absorbed into the 'Shu (marine pieces of the Creator - see Barker's sketch at bottom), then into the Iad, then a wandering spirit dreamed to glorious flesh by his lover Phoebe; the transformation of Tesla, and the glimpses she gives to Detective D'Amour of stories to come; Tommy the Death-Boy cradling a child "to his burned body, whistling for the killing cloud to follow him"; Lucien's talk of us being "vessels for the infinite"; the description of the city b'Kether Sabbat, "shaped like an inverted pyramid, balanced on its tip." Yes, all those, and more, right this way....

This is an amazing book, a gripping read, an epic in the making of "four journeys" as Barker writes: "One to the dream world, one to the real; one to the bestial; one to the divine." Like many contemporary literary novels, Everville is concerned with the act of storytelling itself, a self-conscious reflection on the creation of tales, events and characters readers know are made up but still have the power to transform and enlighten - in fact, they transform and enlighten precisely because they are created by us. Read this book carefully, savor its elegance and ferocity of imagination, and you will be uplifted. Everville - and Barker's fiction in general - is a worthy addition to the infinite branches of the story tree.

RIP Iain M. Banks

Sad, although expected, news: the great Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks has died. Just two months ago he wrote an honest, clear-eyed note about his cancer, fully aware he would not live out the year. What bravery. I haven't read everything Banks wrote, but a couple of his works - The Player of Games (1988) and The Bridge (1986) - provided me with some of the most enjoyable reading I can remember. And I've always absolutely loved the cover art for his books published in the early 1990s, evoking as it does the epic grandeur of his space operas, all of which are filled with wit and drama, intellectual games, sharp characterization, beauty and sophistication - and yes, many a scene of alien guttural horror. I can't recommend his books highly enough!

 

 

 

 

 

Iain (Menzies) Banks, 1954 - 2013

Clive Barker Paperback Covers: The UK Harper Voyager Editions

Okay, they're not vintage and they're not collectible and they're not even available in the United States, but I recently found out that Clive Barker's novels have been reissued by Harper Collins under their Voyager imprint. I dig 'em; thought you might too. They're classy and accurate. How refreshing!

Above you see The Hellbound Heart, his 1986 novella which was the basis for some movie or other. I haven't read it since 1992 but I remember enjoying it. That cover image is perfect, utterly perfect, don't you think? Unfortunately I could not find the artist's name.

Odd that Tarantino has a blurb for an epic dark fantasy novel, but still, it's cool. I've read Weaveworld (1987) a few times, and reviewed it here.

Cabal (1988), another novella that led to another movie you mighta heard of. Nice tattoo-like imagery, evoking perhaps the monster Peloquin.

The American editions of The Great and Secret Show (1989) never used the strange totemic pendant that features so largely in the novel, its details showing the strange physical and spiritual evolution of humanity. The first in that eternally-planned trilogy entitled - not too pretentiously now! - The Art.

Ah, Imajica (1991). One of my favorite novels ever, and still Barker's magnum opus and, I believe, the work he wants to be remembered by. A dark and erotic epic fantasy novel that ultimately kills off God - Hapexamendios his name. But I hate to use that word, "fantasy," because it evokes hobbits and chainmail and faeries, which is precisely what Imajica is not. Unlike anything I've ever read. Except maybe other Barker books.

The first sequel to Great and Secret Show, 1994's Everville, also uses the pendant and reuses another famous King quote about Barker. I loved Everville back in '95 and wrote an effusively earnest review for Amazon way back when that makes me cringe now.

Sacrament (1996) was a departure: not an epic, but a much more personal story about a wildlife photographer's near-fatal run-in with a polar bear, and his recovery. Although the photographer is Barker's first major homosexual character, Sacrament is more mainstream than most of his stuff, but still has that unique sort of dark fantasy Barker's great at. It's a novel I recommend to non-horror readers.

Lots of sex and intrigue, this was Barker obviously out for a lark, producing a straight potboiler but in his own unmistakable voice. He's insisted that Galilee (1998) was the beginning of another series of novels about a Kennedy-esque clan. I'll believe it when I see it.

I never finished Coldheart Canyon (2001) and it's the last full-length adult novel he's written to date. The cover gets right at the historical Hollywood orgies depicted within. Nice.

And here's Barker on the back cover of the US paperback edition of Everville. Handsome!

The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker (1989): Waiting for the End of the World

A British edition of the 1990 paperback of The Great and Secret Show, the first novel in Clive Barker's long-planned magnum opus trilogy called "The Art." It concerns, as Barker was fond of saying at the time, his three obsessions: "sex, Hollywood, and the end of the world," and features one of the more astonishing creations in his fiction: the vast "dream-sea" of Quiddity, which is pretty much a literalized Jungian collective unconscious. Heady stuff for a horror novel.

Presidents, messiahs, shamans, popes, saints and lunatics had attempted - over the passage of a millennium - to buy, murder, drug and flagellate themselves into Quiddity. Almost to a one, they'd failed. The dream-sea had been more or less preserved, its existence an exquisite rumor...

1990 HarperCollins paperback

Only two volumes have been published; the (excellent) sequel, Everville, was released in 1994. Barker unfailingly has insisted in the 15 years since that he's still planning on the final piece, but who knows? Barker has always insisted the project he was asked about was right around the corner, nearly finished. Hell, I remember him in 1991 talking about how he was directing the remake of The Mummy. The Mummy!

1999 Harper reprint

What I love about this UK cover is that each element is actually in the book. This is not always the case with cover art, as I'm sure everyone knows. I love the tiny embroidered details, in the same design as the UK edition of Weaveworld. Again, it's obvious the artist (unknown) read the entire book, from beginning to end, and didn't simply come up with one lame image to identify it. Compare it with the US cover, both paperback and hardcover: a mailbox. Because the first few pages take place in a post office. There you go. Guess that's as far as the artist read!

This hardcover UK first edition is actually my favorite horror fiction cover art ever; when I first saw it I thought it was some kind of fancy illustrated limited-edition version. It's not. It's the first edition UK hardcover, that's all. It's beautiful all the way round. I love its sickly yet elegant greenish hue. Guess I could live without the Groucho Marx there, though. Still.

2009 UK reprint

Now I haven't read Great and Secret Show since its original publication but I recall it fondly, and I loved Everville as well. Once I started reading scholarly mythologists Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade a little while later, I loved the books even more and could easily see from where Barker drew inspiration. Rich in transformative moments and transcendent visions, in themes eternal and ephemera most profound, the first two volumes of The Art have set a very high standard for that long-proposed third. We await the dream-sea, Mr. Barker!

Here's an impossibly young-looking Barker taking his trade to the housewives of the land on Good Morning America in 1990.

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978): The Dinner Party Horror

I simply love that glow-in-the-dark X, remember X was a big naughty letter in the '70s, exotic and spooky and enticing all at once: you had The Exorcist phenomenon and the rise of X-rated movies. Why, who knows what goes on in that house neXt door? Wife swapping, demon possession, adultery, Satan worship, stag films, key parties, or, perhaps, someone is wearing white after Labor Day! Serving bottom-shelf liquor at dinner parties! Hanging a velvet print of dogs playing poker in the den! Quelle horreur!

1993 reprint

Indeed, that's just the kind of faux-pas that Anne Rivers Siddons, in The House Next Door, realizes terrifies up-and-coming, well-to-do folk in the New South in the modern age. They don't believe in boogeymen or poltergeists or their ilk, but an untended lawn in the dog days of August, or a family with too many kids' toys on the lawn, or a car in the drive that wasn't traded in this year, those are the types of things that make the neighborhood collectively shudder. Siddons, known today for genteel mainstream fiction, wrote her early bestseller in 1978. Stephen King himself championed it over several in-depth pages in his masterful study of horror Danse Macabre (1981), which is where I first heard of it.

Polite 1995 reprint

I've read this a couple times and really really liked it; I recommend it wholeheartedly. The novel's depiction of the easy, satisfying, slightly liberal social lives of smart young professional couples living in the rather upscale suburbs of Atlanta, is spot-on. But when the house in question, a stylish inviting marvel of modernity (unlike the home depicted on the original paperback), built by an aspiring and likable young bohemian architect, begins to affect its inhabitants at their most vulnerable spots, the game is on. The anxieties of trying to fit into predetermined societal strata, even when one is aware of their total bullshit quality, is relentlessly exploited. Colquitt Kennedy, the attractive Vanderbilt graduate in public relations, narrates the story in her calm, rational and perceptive manner:

We like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly. Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They don't frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them. We watch the news, we are active our own brand of rather liberal politics. We know we have built a shell for ourselves, but we have worked hard for the means to do it; we have chosen it. Surely we have the right to do that.

1990 reprint

And it's Colquitt's, and her husband's, calm perception of what's happening that makes the reality so hard to accept or define. It's horror of the suburban kind, a masterful haunted house tale that's rooted in the most polite behavior, people horrified of giving offense or of having bad taste. Jobs could be lost, marriages broken up, ugly family secrets revealed, tennis partner can turn against tennis partner. But The House Next Door don't really give a fuck about your property values or your oh-so-tidy lives, that's for sure.

Siddons, from back of original hardcover dustjacket