Ramsey Campbell Born on This Date, 1946

Greetings 2017! Let's start the new year appreciating Ramsey Campbell and the paperback covers for the UK editions of his books. Of course several years ago I posted the US Tor covers. Enjoy them all!

PS: Working on a new review of a late-'80s anthology I read over the holidays. Did not enjoy it at all but wanted to start the new year on a more positive note.

The Reaping by Bernard Taylor (1980): Make It Real Not Fantasy

Who doesn't love a creepy fetus with devil horns smirking at you from the womb on a horror paperback  cover? That thing's practically about to wink at you, isn't it? There's no actual evil fetus in The Reaping (Leisure Books, Feb 1982) so that might bum some of you out; no, Bernard Taylor (British author of quiet, effective horror novels like Sweetheart, Sweetheart and The Godsend) doesn't stoop to such crass imaginings. Taylor is more interested in taking his sweet, character-developing time, guiding the patient reader through a subtle psychological tale of grown-up concerns and fears before deploying the malevolent goods in what I found to be a satisfying, unsettling, and successful climax. Sure, I mean it's kinda ridiculous after all the care that's gone before, but I can overlook that. The book is out and done before 250 pages are up.

The Reaping isn't the type of novel I'm gonna get in deep about, you can get the gist of it from back-cover copy. You wouldn't get it from that freaky fetus cover, but Taylor writes well of intelligent, thoughtful yet flawed adult humans and their often painful relationships, their disappointments, their compromises and their regrets (as I've said before, many many horror writers have no idea how to describe adulting). I mean, the main character is an artist who, when not painting the commissioned portrait, relaxes with the novels of Muriel Spark and Thomas Hardy. With the subject of his painting, the mysterious and shy and lovely Catherine, he discusses the novelistic merits of the Brontë sisters. Don't know about you but I like when characters in horror exist in the real world and not just as fodder for supernatural or psychopathic evil.

 1992 Leisure reprint

Rigby's desire to actually be an artist, working and paid and successful, rather than just a widowed shop owner who lost children in a car accident several years prior, motivates him to accept that commission. But what strangeness ensues in that countryside estate! And hot sex. And the most cringe-worthy massage this side of George Costanza. Guess he should've known... Suspense builds in workmanlike style, heading toward a finale the clues to which I actually was unable to spot and which I think Taylor kept well-hidden. But it all makes sense in the end, which is more than I can say for other novels, right?
 

1980 UK hardcover, Souvenir Press: quite accurate

Want a none-too-taxing read written by a grown man who knows his way around the English language, who presents his characters in a relaxed, believable manner, and who can raise a goosebump or two about the invisible machinations some people will undertake to gain ultimate power? Maybe check out The Reaping: it's not gonna change your horror-loving life or anything, but don't you want people to see you reading a book with such delightful cover art? Of course you do! *wink wink*

The Smell of Evil by Charles Birkin (1965): Who Could Write This Book of Cruel

I rather wish that the stories in The Smell of Evil were more in line with the moody, melancholy vibe of the paperback cover for the 1969 Award Books edition. Instead, British-born author Charles Birkin (1907 - 1985) offers up blistering contes cruels with a kind of demented genius; there's not a moment of moodiness or atmosphere anywhere at all. Editor Dennis Wheatley perceptively notes in his intro, however: "Young writers are always sadly handicapped by lack of experience; whereas anyone who has been through a war, met a great many people in all walks of life and had to face a number of crises on their own, must have automatically acquired a wide knowledge of places, events, unusual happenings and varied emotions. Charles Birkin has this advantage...."

This is all true, no doubt. The wide-ranging settings and types of characters are a pleasure appreciated (in fact I was put in mind of Barker's approach to Books of Blood 20 years later) and well-deployed. The baker's dozen of tales contained are ingenious clockwork toys, ready to snap and trap hapless folks within their merciless jaws. Which story element, I wondered while I read, will be the tripwire? I wanted to like the stories more than I did; I didn't mind that for many I could guess the twist; or the dated sociopolitical stances; or the lack of the supernatural (featured in a couple tales, and not very original at that). What I minded was the unremitting cruelty, the vagaries of fate that scoop characters up to dash them upon the rocks, the utter misanthropic (and often sexist and racist and homophobic) nature of each and every tale.

It's not that I dislike that merciless ironic last sentence-style reveal of an unimaginable horror; Birkin does it very well. But a whole book full of them makes for some dispiriting reading. Perhaps if I'd read a story here and there—indeed, I first read the title story over two years ago and enjoyed it on its own—I'd have been more satisfied. I don't know. Anyway, there were some positives. In "The Smell of Evil" a novelist on an island holiday learns of a horrific scheme to bilk a young mute heiress out of her inheritance. It's the only first-persona narrated work in the collection; its denouement benefits greatly from the technique, a reaction of rage against an unconscionable breach of trust.

"Text for Today" is a silly trifle of literal cannibalism set in Papua New Guinea; "The Godmothers" is kitchen-sink realism without mercy as it puts a child in grave danger. "Green Fingers" was my favorite of all: a well-observed story of a WWII Nazi officer and the unsuspecting woman he coolly romances. The twist crept up on me slowly as Birkin takes his time setting it up with an unforgiving depiction of self-deception and willful delusions. The original nature of zombies features in "Ballet Nègre" but feels icky for other reasons. "The Lesson" is kind of like a "Mad Men" party gone horrifically wrong (don't get drunk around children), while "'Is Anybody There?'" flirts with ghosts and psychic drama in an agreeable way. The brutal climax of "The Serum of Dr. White" is bitter and hopeless as a mysterious doctor attempts to treat a disfigured young girl.

Tandem UK edition, 1965

The teenage ruffians of "'Dance Little Lady'" could be right out of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, but they go down one of the darkest paths known to humanity. The whisper of otherworldliness works well in "Little Boy Blue," another family on a holiday that ends in tragedy. "The Cornered Beast," meh, freak-show escapee. "The Interloper" is quite good in and of itself but its sexual politics are, um, troublesome: a tropical island of lesbians who've left civilization and men behind deal with a wounded man who stumbles ashore. At first it seems Birkin is showing some sympathy to women who've endured such humiliation and violence at the hands of men; the climax reveals otherwise, I think.

The final story, "The Cross," is a predictable bit of science-fiction that uses nonsense words to hide its turnabout. It's been done before. Throughout, Birkin's prose is unfailingly British: crisp, precise, mature, stuffy sometimes and irreverent at others. Fine with me. It's just that, as I said, the unforgiving quality, the bleak ends and meaningless deaths, the utter lack of humor, scares, wit, and/or creepiness (that Tandem UK paperback cover is irrelevant as well) add up to a work I'm not sure I'd recommend to readers of traditional horror fiction. Proceed, if at all, with caution.

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.

It's a Jungle Down There

Dark Dance by Tanith Lee (1992): Going to the Darklands

Oh my Goth is this a lovely cover! Taken right from the back of a Siouxsie Sioux record or ripped from the pages of Propaganda magazine, it's a perfect image to appeal to the reader who wants romance tinged with a hint of death and black nail polish: Let her taste the forbidden, the erotic, the evil... Yeah, potential readers of 1992's Dark Dance know who they are. The bats have left the belfry...

Tanith Lee is a writer I've been meaning to read for over 20 years. A prolific British author whose many, many paperback novels combined elements of fantasy, horror, science fiction, myth, and fairy tales, it was her recent death, alas, that made me realize I needed to do that now, and so I picked up Dark Dance, the only book of hers I own, published by Dell as a title in their ground-breaking Abyss line. Like many novels from Dell/Abyss, it isn't only/just/quite a horror novel. Nothing is scary, or even meant to scare, but there is foreboding and threat, a gloomy old house near a cliff-side overlooking the sea, a secret family made of members of indeterminable age clad in black, and the promise of illicit pleasures. We are in Gothic romance territory here, as will become clear early on.

The dance begins on a foggy London day as 29-year-old Rachaela Day arrives at her paltry job in a dingy dank bookshop (She hated computers, they frightened her. She liked old things... she was happy only with printed words). Her mother, a bitter and resentful woman, has been dead several years, and Rachaela's found herself utterly thankful for the release. She knows little about her father, who pretty much disappeared before she was born, although her mother complained about him and his ne'er-do-well family, the Scarabae (a weird name to go with a weird fly-by-night man). Into the bookshop then comes a man with a letter for Rachaela, from a law firm representing her father's family: as the back cover of Dark Dance tells us, the Scarabae beckon to Rachaela, inviting her to their family estate by the sea. And all travel expenses included!

Desiring something more in her life but unsure what, she accepts the summons to the Scarabae home after her apartment building goes up for sale, quitting her bookseller job in a fit of pique (I was a bit disappointed when this segment concluded; I do love tales set in dusty old bookstores!) and is driven up the seaside coast. In the house, faceless and black but for its one lit window (I told you we were in Gothic romance land!), she is met by Miss Anna and Mr. Stephan, very old, thin as twine, one female and oen masculine,and at that borderline of age where the sexes blend, these two had sustained their genders. At dinner she meets the  rest of the Scarabae, more than a dozen, each with their own role save the oldest, Uncle Camillo, who labors under some kind of juvenile dementia, galloping about the endless halls and rooms as if on a horse only he can see. One of them at least was insane.

Warner Books UK, Feb 1993

Removed from the world at large, the family's only contact a hired driver, with rare trips into a desultory village some miles' walk away for supplies, Rachaela spends malingering days and nights in the home. The reader feels the claustrophobia of the Scarabae estate, its bizarre stained glass windows and winding halls, locked doors and silent inhabitants. She hears snippets of the family history: superstition, outcast, pogroms, escape, told in hundreds of years. Vampires? Perhaps. She learns her father is called Adamus and he lives in the tower (of course!) but he comes and goes as he pleases, a mystery almost even to the others. He seems to spy on her in the night, accompanied by an enormous black cat. When she finally confronts Adamus, it goes about as well as expected:

"You dropped me like a lost coin. Less than that."

"I meant to make you. I tried with many women. The Scarabae seed is reluctant. It inbreeds better. But your stupid and soulless mother had, surprisingly, the correct ingredients to accommodate me..."

"All her life she hated you and what you'd done. She made me pay for you."

Rachaela resents Adamus, certainly, and comes to resent her captivity, which she's told again and again is a freedom. But just as I was beginning to feel a little worn out by the constancy of Rachaela's entrapment in the house, she makes her escape, back to the village she'd visited earlier for supplies. Rachaela misses the infrequent train to London, sits in a church to pity herself, and then turns round to see... Adamus. Who's come for her, who seduces her there in the church pew:

"Yes, I want to fuck you. Come back and be fucked by me."

"Now you're speaking the truth, you bastard."

"Now I'm speaking the truth. What's the problem? The family will be thrilled. They'll revel in it. It's happened over and over, mother with son, father with daughter. Brother and sister. Two-thirds of them are inbreedings of one kind or another, several twice over. A charming little intimate orgy has been going on for centuries. Secret pleasures of the house. And what other values hold you back? The criterion of the church, of morality and the world? It's nothing to you. Come to me and let me give you what you want."

It works. In an erotic trance, she lets Adamus sweep her back to the house Scarabae. What follows is a night of torrid sex, imagined with stylish high-minded eroticism by Lee (A harp string plucked in her loins... glissandi of fires. He kneeled in prayer between her thighs, his face cruel as an angel's... Her own tongue moved on him in sympathetic sorcery) till the next morning, when Rachaela is disgusted and angered by what's transpired. Once again she escapes, and this time, she will not return. In a way she will not need to return, for now she has brought a bit of the Scarabae with her: Rachaela learns she is pregnant with her own father's child. Like her own mother, she is merely a vessel for this immortal family, nothing more than an incubator. The plan all along. It's all too clear why Rachaela's mother was so horrible to her. Will Rachaela be like that to her own child? There's an unsettling scene when she visits a doctor to try to get an abortion but he patronizes her ("Children are wonderful things. Special... Think of all those women who long to bear a child and are unable..."). Ugh. The patriarchy!

The narrative moves up over a chapter and little Ruth is now seven, mostly cared for by motherly neighbor Emma, whose adult children are grown and gone. Rachaela regards Ruth with distaste, unsurprisingly, but Ruth is no abused or put-upon child; she's secretive, weird, self-possessed, and actually rather ugly (that strange white face of an elf). When Emma moves away, Rachaela and Ruth are wary of one another, estranged in the same flat, till a few years pass and Ruth begins to learn of the Scarabae, and a strange man is lurking about, and Ruth herself will escape to that darkened house by the sea, clad in black, searching for the man who fathered her. It is Rachaela's worst fear realized: for Ruth to be the child-bride of Adamus: Just before midnight Scarabae's betrothed came downstairs. She looked like a bride in Hell, in her dress of blood...

I found Lee to be a lovely and melodic writer, with prose that sings (to a Yank like me) in that British lilt, reminding me at times of Ramsey Campbell or Clive Barker. Language must serve the story, and so Lee can use "maenad" and "bacchanant" in the same paragraph and get away with it. More than get away with it; she escorts you through a hazily-lit twilight world of ambiguous vampirism and motherhood, her protagonist a young woman who abhors her mother and has never known her father. When this dark dance is over, she will know her father in ways which will make her abhor herself. Rather than creeping you out, Lee's approach to events seem removed from the real world, occurring in some demimonde where myth and fable entwine.

If you're in the mood for a kinda slow, moody, insular novel with sharp tinges of the Gothic but no horror to speak of, told in a style that's perceptive and sensual, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Dark Dance. Vampires? One never knows for certain. But one thing is: I will definitely be reading more Tanith Lee.

Spectre by Stephen Laws (1986): Down at the Rock and Roll Club

For 1980s horror fiction aficionados like me, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as when you buy an old paperback based solely on its promising cover art and then finding, upon actually reading the book, that the contents deliver on said promise. Now, ironically, the photo-realistic cover for Spectre (Tor, July 1987) by Stephen Laws—featuring some young denizens of that amazing decade in various stages of disappearance—doesn’t exactly scream “Horror! Terror! Dismemberment!” So why pick it up?

Because that's precisely what struck me about the cover, thanks to the talents of J.K. Potter, a renowned artist who’s illustrated countless volumes of horror fiction: its utter lack of tacky tasteless imagery (aside from an oversize sweater or two). I was drawn to Spectre because it promised, perhaps, quiet chilling scares, rather than the full-on assault of so much ’80s horror, often done with all the finesse of Leatherface working his saw. Did the novel deliver on its promise of quiet horror? Actually, no: Laws’ novel is filled with tentacles and teeth, torn limbs and slashed throats, abhorrent rituals and hungry gods… but it’s all done with the finesse of Hannibal Lecter preparing you dinner.

1986 UK hardcover

Not quite a coming-of-age story, Spectre introduces the reader to a group of inseparable friends from Byker, a blue-collar town in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Although they grew up together, and dubbed themselves the Byker Chapter, Laws doesn’t spend too much time detailing their childhoods like, say, Stephen King; he flashbacks mainly on their university years a decade ago. It’s the present, as they enter their 30s, that Laws is concerned with. The horrific death of one of the Chapter opens the novel, as Phil Stuart languishes drunkenly in his flat, TV and radio blaring to vanquish the fear and depression that has plagued him for weeks. A photograph of the last night the Byker Chapter spent together comforts Phil, a charm against his panic, but it works no longer: unbelievably, he seems to be fading from the photograph. He knows that can mean only one thing. And alas, he is correct.

After Phil’s introductory demise, we meet our protagonist Richard Eden, drinking with his memories at a nightclub called the Imperial. He’s 10 years older than the others partying in this disco, which was once a movie theater at which he and the others in the Byker Chapter saw many a Hammer horror film in the 1960s (Laws has dedicated Spectre to Peter Cushing). Richard’s wife has left him and her new boyfriend has humiliated him, and soon he will learn one of his old friends has been murdered horribly. Employed as a lecturer at a college, his coworkers are still sexist morons, and the one person he hopes to feel a connection with, the beautiful and smart Diane Drew, susses him as an emotional wreck. When Richard pulls out his own copy of that Byker Chapter photo, he sees Phil is gone… and so now is another, Derek Robson. It all makes Richard think of the “spectre,” an inside joke between the friends, a word used as shorthand for all the horrible things that could go wrong in one’s life, whether a schoolyard bully or an absent parent, a police siren in the night or, indeed, the deaths of one’s old schoolmates.

NEL reprint, 1994

What better way to get back on one’s feet than to get drunk and then investigate the death of one’s former mate? Richard enlists the help of a colleague of Derek’s, who coincidentally was also Derek’s landlord. Together they pay a visit to the scene of the crime—and so begins one of the more effective scenes of horror I’ve read recently. I read it one morning over coffee before work, and was excited at how convincing Laws presents and pulls off the two men’s encounter with—wait for it—a ventriloquist’s dummy. What could have been laughable is rendered with a physical realism and dream logic. It happens about 50 pages in, and while I was quite enjoying Spectre up to that point, it was this sequence that convinced me Laws truly knew how write a horror novel: his characters were real enough, with just the right amount of back story to explain motivation and relationship, while his skill in offering up the horror genre goodies as well was rather an unexpected treat. I spent my whole day at work marveling over that scene in my head, eager to get back to the tale and see what else Laws had in store.

It’s obvious that Laws has based these characters’ experiences on his own, and ably conveys it in these pages; the Imperial must be a real place as well, I decided (and the author’s postscript proved me right). The characters that work there could be people you'd actually meet: young single-mother bartender Angie; Josh, who hides his true nature from mates; and doorman/bouncer Paul, exploiting his "power" over anyone he dislikes (which is mostly everyone). Too many horror paperbacks seem written by people who have no ability to capture the real world, the one of friends and lovers and colleagues, work and play, “writers” who don’t care about character or plot but only the next shock. If these authors realized that shock is heightened only when we care about characters, have some insight into what they fear, what they hold dear, what loss will mean to them...

Sphere Books, 1988 

Richard now realizes he must track down the other people in that photo, old friends he hasn’t been in touch with for years. Drinking again at the Imperial (lots of drinking in this one, which I totally dig), he is surprised to see Diane arrive with some friends. They engage in some banter that isn’t embarrassing at all to the reader, and find they actually rather like one another. When Diane reveals that her mother had been a psychic, Richard dares to tell her about what’s going on his life… and it doesn’t scare her off. She offers to help him track down the other people in the photo, three men and the lone woman, Pandora Ellison. But this proves unnecessary; returning from work one evening to Richard’s home, they are met by two men in his doorway: Joe McFarlen and Stan “the Man” Staftoe, two more of the Byker Chapter. They’ve all been depressed, feeling trapped and hunted, and have tracked Richard down first. All are determined to get to the bottom of the Photo of the Disappearing Chums.

Memory is one of the strangest tools of the human brain; Laws literalizes its tenuous quality using that photograph. Music, too, evokes the powerful sense of our past, emotional cues buried deep and forgotten but brought to instant life the moment, as here, “Layla” is heard (he uses it to punctuate and underline various scenes, and this well before Scorsese used it the same way in Goodfellas). It’s this kind of personal sentiment that lends depth to his tale; it reminded me of when one dreams of memories of things that never happened, thus lending one's actual dream a palpable sense of heartbreak. The survivors of the Byker Chapter are racing against something worse than heartbreak, of course.

Laws in 1985

Along the way we learn that Pandora had told each of the men that she loved him alone and wanted to sleep with him, and then she did. She broke each of their hearts, unbeknownst to the others, and moved back to her parents and broke off any contact with the Bykers. Eventually, after much horror and death—all exquisitely rendered—Richard, Stan, and Diane arrive in the Cornish port town of Mevagissey, looking for Pandora’s family. Which they find, and then learn the answer to Pandora’s deceit and departure. It’s a doozy: Greek myth and occult orgies, an Aleister Crowley wannabe and an unholy motherhood, and a vision of humanity extinct. Now that’s a horror novel!

French paperback, 1992

In every way, Spectre is a success, and I was delighted that a book I bought on a whim, solely because of its cover art, turned out to be such a pleasure to read. Stephen Laws doesn’t reinvent the wheel here, and many scenes and characters are comfortably familiar. But his prose presents fresh insights, his depiction of English life and streets and architecture authentic and gritty. Best of all, he never hesitates to ramp up the horror with a vivid eye for the grotesque, and a ready pen to describe it: from a sludge monster rising from a developing tray in a photo lab, to a clay sculpture coming to life and embracing its creator; from a stuffed grizzly bear in a museum exhibit mauling a man in his own office, to electric-blue tentacles shooting from a TV screen; from an old woman with no face and a bloody gash for a mouth who explains all to the intrepid survivors, to a blood-drenched finale on the dance floor reflected in the glittering glass of a revolving disco ball—Laws lays on the ’80s horror good and thick.

But not too thick; Spectre doesn’t even reach 300 pages, and can be speedily read in a day or three, which was another thing I appreciated about the novel. In that '80s era of bloated bestsellers, paperbacks with over-large type, and novellas padded out to novel length to give merely the impression of value for money, a sleek torpedo of a horror novel like Spectre is a welcome addition to the genre.

(This post originally appeared on Tor.com)

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