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.

My Favorite Horror Reads of 2013

This year was the year I thought I had been dropping the ball on writing actual reviews of books I read. I found plenty of great horror covers to post, sure, but as far as reading, it seemed like I was slowing down, hitting too many snags with just okay books but not finding that something special I just had to share. But then I looked through this year's posts and saw that I'd really read some great books and short stories. Some were surprisingly satisfying rereads, and some were new and welcome to my pantheon of favorites. All would be stellar additions to your own bookshelves! Click on links to read my full reviews.

The Bad Seed by William March. The pitch-perfect exposé of a child's clinical sociopathy.
Borderlands edited by  Thomas F. Monteleone. One of the major anthologies of horror, filled with challenging, imaginative, unsettling short works.
The Brains of Rats by Michael Blumlein. Scalpel-sharp stories of medical madness and domestic doom.
Carrie by Stephen King. She still packs a powerful psychic punch after all these years.
Cast a Cold Eye by Alan Ryan. A quiet, cozy, creepy Irish ghost story.
Childmare by A.G. Scott. A teenage riot in sleepy London town.
Cold Moon over Babylon by Michael McDowell. Vengeful Southern ghosts, alternately quiet and grotesque.
Night Visions 3: The Hellbound Heart edited by George R.R. Martin. Stellar example of 1980s short horror fiction thanks to Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Lisa Tuttle.
The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories edited by Alan Ryan. Spectacular tales of the vampire from ages past and present.
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Unparalleled popular fiction that dives deep into the pool of psychopathia.

Aaand one alternate: The Hunger by Whitley Strieber, a rich, violent, seductive novel of vampirism.

Additionally, I hit the jackpot several times throughout the year, scoring dozens of paperbacks at a local yearly book fair, while on vacation driving throughout Colorado, a random day at a regular haunt, and a brief Christmas visit to my hometown and the used bookstore I worked at while in college.

So you can see I've got plenty of reading material for 2014 - again, some rereads and some all-new to me - coming up, a review of a fairly well-known '80s horror novel in the next few days...

French Paperback Horror, Part Deux

Quelle horreur! And it continues, these covers for French translations of some terrific vintage horror (for more, much more of these as well as artist info, go here). For their splatterpunk magnum opus The Scream (1988), Skipp & Spector get a Heavy Metal-esque cover, pretty fitting considering the metal mayhem contained within.

Ah, The Cipher! Here, Kathe Koja's stunning debut novel becomes "Breach of Hell," fitting, although the cover image doesn't quite capture the amorphous quality of the cipher itself, which was basically a nothing... Still, creepy cool.

A simplistic, not too impressive rendition of Fletcher and Jaffe, the warring spiritual duo in Barker's 1989 novel of the fantastique, The Great and Secret Show.

Holy shit is that terrifying. And erotic. And terrifying. Nice work! Don't know this book by the recently late Gary Brandner, who is most famous for writing The Howling (1977).

A glorious rendition of the images contained in Poppy Z. Brite's essential 1993 short story collection, variously known as Swamp Foetus and Wormwood. I believe the title translates as "Stories of the Green Fairy," that being an old literary term for absinthe - clearly visible and ready for the imbibing. Watch out for Kali though!

This noxious cover reminds me that I really need to reread The Fog since I really member nothing about it; the James Herbert classic from 1975 is highly praised for being a pure pulp delight in Steve King's Danse Macabre. But you knew that.

A gorgeously Gothic and evocative work of art for Straub's 1980 novel. "La terre l'ombre," if my high school French serves, could've been the translated title.

Last but not least, Lansdale! Lurid and lusty. Lovely!

Paperback Horror: French Editions

Mon Dieu! Imagine my delight upon discovering these French editions of classic horror novels. French covers seem more likely to feature art that corresponds to the novel they adorn. J'ai Lu ("I read") is a French publisher, while "Épouvante" means "terror," so you can guess what's going on here.

At top is Joe Lansdale's blistering The Nightrunners (1987), and its French title translates nicely as "Children of the Razor."

Although this cover might look generic - snakes n' skulls! - both title (translating as "Scales") and image are relevant to the story John Farris tells in 1977's All Heads Turn As the Hunt Goes By.

"Mindless" - a perfect translation of Bad Brains, Kathe Koja's second novel from Dell/Abyss, published in '92, about a failed artist whose vision and imagination are being assaulted by a silvery nightmare.

1980's Firestarter's title was simply changed to Charlie, the little girl's name, which I like a lot as it links up with Carrie, Cujo, and Christine.

The black-and-white photos here of blank-eyed men make me think of the various kinds of WWII survivors, which Clive Barker touches upon in his first novel The Damnation Game, from 1985.

I haven't read Ramsey Campbell's 1986 novel The Hungry Moon, but I love how this cover evokes his gloomy, opaque, quiet style of horror.

This is kinda-sorta what's going on in Brian Hodge's third novel Nightlife (another Dell/Abyss title, from 1991); while it does involve some creature transformation, I don't remember any boobs.

Sometimes the French covers aren't so accurate; Nightwalkers, from '79, is a somber, ambiguous "werewolf" novel, and the subtle prose of Thomas Tessier is rarely if ever used for this kind of graphic monster shock.

A severed head adorning this cover for Song of Kali, Dan Simmons's seminal 1985 work of exotic horror? Mais oui.

And androgynous punk vampires, no doubt about it - this has got to be Poppy Z. Brite's classic first novel from 1992, Lost Souls (the French title is a literal translation this time).

More, as they say, to come!

Horror Café (1990) with Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, and Others

A wonderful roundtable discussion of horror hosted by Clive Barker, shown on BBC way back when (according to Barker's website, it was filmed April '90 and broadcast that September). With guests Pete Atkins (old Barker buddy and Hellraiser 2 scribe), Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, and a couple filmmakers you mighta heard of, John Carpenter and Roger Corman. Hell, even the waiter is a somebody! I would've gladly killed for a chance to have seen this when it was on originally, but of course only with the advent of the internet....

Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart, edited by George R.R. Martin (1986): Love Comes in Spurts

"Bad horror stories," writes editor George R. R. Martin in his perceptive introduction to the anthology Night Visions 3, "concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia." Go on, I'm listening. "Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy... about loneliness and alienation and psychosis... the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself."

All this is true and all this is (mostly) what I want in my horror fiction. Sure sometimes you need to know six ways to kill a vampire, and who doesn't love a good rat chomping? But for this, the third volume in Dark Harvest's long-running hardcover series Night Visions (published in paperback by Berkley, Mar 1988), Martin has chosen well and wisely the kinds of the stories he's described, and almost to a one, they show the width and breadth of what good horror is. Or at least was, in the mid 1980s.

First, two of the biggest names of '80s horror, Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker. Campbell at this time was already fairly well-established as both an editor, while Barker, hot off the Books of Blood, was the rising star, the enfant terrible, the upstart splatterpunk. Fellow traveler Lisa Tuttle, while much less known, had been writing SF/F shorts for years, and even co-authored a fantasy novel with Martin. Her 1985 collection (published in the UK only) Nest of Nightmares was well-received, and she also appeared in the seminal horror anthology Dark Forces in 1980. Together these three writers provide perfect contrast to one another. Let me not quibble: Night Visions 3 is as good a horror anthology as I've read lately; I enjoyed it immensely (a far cry from my experience with Night Visions 2).

First up are seven short stories from Campbell, and lemme tell you, these are classic Campbellian works (I know, I know). Lone, lonely characters are sloooowly immersed into a world askew, rural or urban, seeing distorted faces seen in tree trunks and deserted windows, hearing rhythmic whispers tangled up in their ears, threading through thought and deed, and deaths obscurely predicted and decidedly met. Everything seems to happen just at the jagged edge of perception, where one's identity bleeds out and some kind of violence - whether physical, psychological, supernatural - begins to breathe. I read all seven over about three or four days and honestly they flickered off and on in my head the entire time I was not actually reading them; "Looking Out," "Bedtime Story," "Root Cause," "This Time" and "Beyond Words" were all so so good... Listen:

His wife lay face up beside him, her mouth gaping. She might have been panting in her sleep, except that her chest was utterly still. No, the sound was coming from the face that quivered above hers, the jowly face with its tongue gray as slime and its tiny pink eyes like pimples sunk in the white flesh. He thought of a bulldog's face, but it was more like a noseless old man's, and its paws on her chest looked like a child's hands.

Tuttle and Martin, 1970s

Now I've read a few of Tuttle's horror stories over the years and I've liked them just fine. After reading the three longish ones here - "The Dragon's Bride," "Another Country," and "Riding the Nightmare" - I hope to move on to at least one of her '80s novels. Yeah, she's good - an entirely different writer from the more stylized Campbell and Barker, her prose almost a palate refresher. Her depiction of male/female relationships is a welcome one, a healthy one - Campbell has almost none, and Barker's is beyond the pale - a believable one. Relationships she describes however don't necessarily end happily.

I don't want to make a whole thing about it but what makes Tuttle's stories so, as I said, refreshing, is the ease with which she writes about women. Which you didn't always find in 1980s horror fiction (quelle surprise!). In "Riding the Nightmare" (the basis for the cover art of the UK paperback above) Tess O'Neal rides the treacherous line in a ménage à trois when a nightmare from her childhood creeps back into her slumber. Then a pregnancy threatens to tear the whole relationship asunder. What terrifying revelation does a child bring? Only this: this baby girl made her feel not only love but also fear and frustration and pain. Motherhood was not as instinctive as she had believed it would be. And only that nightmare will give understanding.

"The Dragon's Bride" might have been my favorite work in Night Visions 3. It's interesting people doing interesting things. A young man picks up a shy young woman in a bookstore and learns she knows as little about her past as he does. Together they journey to the English countryside after the aunt who raised her commits suicide. Young man realizes he may, as the saying goes, have gotten more than he bargained for. Dragons, snakes, sex, caves, vaginas, father issues: "Dragon's Bride" has it all, plus a great - ahem - climax.

The cave was hot and moist around them, she was hot and moist, embracing him, and then he felt the dragon moving, still alive, and he tried to free himself, but she held tight, and it was too late. As he came he shouted. The orgasm seemed to empty him of everything, pain, pleasure, memory, desire, understanding. He lay, stunned, on top of her, unable to move, as he waited for his personality to come back from wherever it had gone.

Which brings us to, finally, the infamous novella that gave the paperback its subtitle and the world a new pantheon of monsters, "The Hellbound Heart," Barker's hellish fable of love, romance, and otherworldly sadomasochism. I wonder about those who read it before Hellraiser was released, and what they thought: did they think it wasn't as good as the book? Were the Cenobites what they'd imagined? Clear your mind of Pinhead and the Chatterer, for what Barker presents in impeccable prose is mostly insinuation: scars, hooks, wounds, stench, deep-sea phosphorescence. The first chapter captivates with its originality, its visionary power, with Frank Cotton opening Lemarchand's box and summoning the Cenobites:

He had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread on the floor underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press him - upward, upward - to undreamed-of ecstasies. The world would be forgotten in their arms. He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for it. But no. No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.

Original Dark Harvest dustjacket, Oct 1986 

Sure, there's more - there's always more with Barker - but there's not as much as you'd think; he could have more thoroughly fleshed out (pardon the pun) characters both human and not, given us more of the Order of the Gash, the Engineer, the backstory of Kirsty and Rory (renamed Larry in Hellraiser), because I had no idea why Kirsty kept turning up. She's not his daughter as in the film, which makes sense. Why would imperious, beautiful Julia permit one of Rory's former lovers - is that right? - to be part of their married life? I really dunno. What I do know is that "The Hellbound Heart" showcases Barker's immense talent, his untouchable talent, for twining the repulsive and the seductive; for limning the limits of desire and the thirst for knowledge. Characters do not shy away from horror, at least not for long; they confront it, embrace it, confound it, bargain with it - as Kirsty does, promising Frank back to the Cenobities, to which one replies: "...And maybe we won't tear your soul apart." Gee, thanks guys! (Also includes the line "No tears please. It's a waste of good suffering," case you were wondering.)

Barker's original sketches for Pinhead and Frank Cotton, 1986

Julia could not see Frank's eyes, but she felt them sharpened beyond pricking by envy and rage. Nor did she look away, but stared on at the shadow while Rory's moans increased. And at the end one moment became another, and she was lying on the bed with her wedding dressed crushed beneath her, while a black and scarlet beast crept up between her legs to give her a sample of its love.

So, yeah: Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart. So good it hurts.

Books of Blood, Vol. 6 by Clive Barker (1985): Only the Living Are Lost

Originally published in paperback by Sphere Books in the UK in July 1985, Books of Blood Vol. VI completed Clive Barker's era-defining collection of short stories. Written in the evenings by hand after working days in London's underground theater circuit, these 30 stories in total were '80s horror fiction's watershed and its high-water mark. This final volume can stand with the rest; before turning to his unique brand of epic dark fantasy novels, Barker ended his Books on a high and inspired note of horror, a talent fully matured (these stories weren't published in the United States till 1988, when they appeared in hardcover under the title Cabal, the name of Barker's then-latest work, which they  accompanied).

Barker's own handwritten ms. for the Books of Blood

Readers and publishers loved to compare Barker to King and - gack! - Koontz back in the day, and that has always seemed an ill-fitting comparison to me. While Barker may, at least in these early writings, have lacked the human warmth and bestseller plotting mechanics that gave K&K their huge middle-America audience, Barker is worlds ahead of them when it comes to style and imagination; he is also literary in a way those guys aren't. Barker easily employs irony and wit to his horrors; an erotic and perverse sexuality is threaded throughout; the metaphysics, if you will, of his stories aren't borne out of old monster movies or tawdry thriller novels but from ancient mythology, classic European art and philosophy, and obscure religious history (bet you didn't know a cenobite was a real thing!). Not content to simply scare us, Barker's world is one in which characters confront death, confront monsters, and learn to accept that sometimes banishing "the other" will result only in a world less worth living in, one that's been sanitized and banalized till it's fit for consumption only by toothless children.

The first story is "The Life of Death," and one might think it a trite title but the tale itself lives up to that literalization. It also is a perfect example of how facing fears enables us to see the world afresh... even as we see it for the last time.The world of Elaine Rider, a 34-year-old woman who's just had a hysterectomy and almost died twice during the surgery, has now become wintry and dull; she cries all the time and feels utterly bereft. That is until she happens upon the excavation of a 17th century church, All Saints, and meets near the underground crypts an interesting man, Kavanaugh, who piques her curiosity about whatever lies within those walls. He had legitimised her appetite with his flagrant enthusiasm for things funereal. Now, with the taboo shed, she wanted to go back to All Saints and look Death in its face. But it won't be as simple as all that, of course, not with Barker at the helm.

The jungles of South America, and the greedy foreign interlopers looking to exploits its riches, feature in "How Spoilers Bleed." Confrontation between those deceitful men and a tribal chieftan ends in death; curse is imposed; watch the bodies felled. But it is the precision of the curse, its nightmare delicacy, that unsettles:

 In the antiseptic cocoon of his room Stumpf felt the first blast of unclean air from the outside world. It was no more than a light breeze... but it bore upon its back the debris  of the world. Soot and seeds, flakes of skin itched off a thousand scalps, fluff and sand and twists of hair; the bright dust from a moth's wing... each a tiny, whirling speck quite harmless to most living organisms. But this cloud was lethal to Stumpf; in seconds his body became a field of tiny, seeping wounds. 

Oh, that's not going to end well at all.

One of Barker's strengths, I think, is that he never dipped into that seemingly bottomless well known as the Cthulhu mythos. He wasn't above mixing genres, however, in several of his stories he went to other wells - here, hardboiled crime fiction in "The Last Illusion," and Cold War spy fiction in "Twilight at the Towers." The latter has spies, no strangers to shedding and changing skins, subjugating personalities that, upon discovery, could get them killed. Surely there is power in that half-forgotten personality, power still within reach? Ballard is sent on the trail of potential KGB defector Mironenko, but petty bureaucracy and petty, angry men seem always in the way. Mironenko, Ballard will find, has more in common with him that he thought, and the defector will show that beneath the skin - ever-changing - the two are brothers. Becoming a spy, Ballard lost a part of himself, but the thing he was becoming would not be named; nor boxed; nor buried. Never again.

1992 French paperback

Harry D'Amour is one of Barker's few characters that spans stories and novels and movies, and he appears in "The Last Illusion," a New York City detective in the classic world-weary Bogart tradition. But D'Amour is otherworldly-weary, dealing as he does - for a price, of course - with real magic and real demons. The Castrato is one of those:  

It did not carry the light with it as it came: it was the light. or rather, some holocaust blazed in its bowels, the glare of which escaped through the creature's body by whatever route it could. It had once been human; a mountain of a man with the belly and the breasts of a neolithic Venus. But the fire in its body had twisted it out of true, breaking out through its palms and its navel, burning its mouth and nostrils into one ragged hole. It had, as its name implied, been unsexed; from that hole too, light spilled.

Sept 1989 Pocket Books paperback - probably the worst of Barker's book covers

A short-short tale ends Volume VI, one that didn't appear in Cabal; it is "The Book of Blood (a postscript): On Jerusalem Street," and it brings the entire story arc back to the beginning, the very first tale told in Volume I, quite nicely. I hadn't read this volume in well over 20 years; in fact, I'd never finished "The Last Illusion," and the only one I recalled anything about was "How Spoilers Bleed," and that because of its perfectly abrupt ending. Again, Barker in no way let me down as I found these final pieces a fitting end to perhaps '80s horror fiction's greatest artistic achievement. Volume VI might not be my favorite - to be fair my favorite tales are spread across all the Books - but it is, as virtually all of Barker's '80s output, essential horror reading.

The dead have highways.

Only the living are lost.

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!