Eternities Lost to Darkness

I had never heard of Emergence (Avon Books, July 1981) when I found it in a bookstore a few months back, but I recognized the cover art as by the hand of Don Brautigam and bought it solely for that. Author Robert D. San Souci was an award-winning children's writer; he died in a sad accident just a few years ago. I held out some hope for the book because of his reputation, and while this work of Native American vengeance is told with lots of local New Mexico color and characterization, the mythological/horror elements don't have quite the power implied. I was more than halfway through when I realized nothing was happening.

Skipping ahead to the final chapters reveal an epic apocalyptic climax that is somehow muted, albeit a touch creepy. Just not enough of a touch. Emergence really could have been a work of overwhelming ancient horror, I really am fascinated by goddesses of death and destruction and the scholarly pursuit thereof, but San Souci couldn't quite twist the knife where it counts.

Despite a knowing depiction of teenage homosexuality and punk rock house parties, The Lake (Avon Books, Aug 1989, cover art by Jim Warren) is a YA novel—something about the back-cover typeface style screams it—and folks that is just not my jam. It was John Peyton Cooke's first novel, and he eventually moved on to crime writing. Again, it's not terrible: he writes clear, more than competent prose, but the witch story was one-dimensional and simplistic and could not keep my engagement very long. First few chapters were fine, teenage relationships are believable, but I absolutely have no interest in middle-school dialogue or shenanigans.

That said, other horror readers more sympathetic to this style might dig The Lake. Points for its nicely self-aware moments ("You tell me, you're the one that reads all those Stephen King novels") and especially the punk party held in a suburban home while the parents are away, man that really took me back. Too bad about the puke on that Clash t-shirt, now that's a collector's item.

Miss Finney Kills Now and Then by Al Dempsey (1982): I'm Younger Than That Now

I hope you enjoy this terrific Jim Warren cover art because that's the only enjoyment you're gonna get here: Miss Finney Kills Now and Then (Tor Aug 1989 reprint/orig Feb 1982) is inept, clunky, and dumb as hell. In short, unreadable. I began reading in all open-mindedness, but its idiocy factor is all-consuming. Nothing depicted has any relationship to humans, living or dead. If someone with a knack for the written word had attempted the same storyline (*cough* Michael McDowell *cough*), I have no doubt it would've been a lurid romp of some entertainment value. Instead we've got whoever Al Dempsey is writing what seems to be a novelization for a movie never made (copyright page notes "based on an original screenplay by Joseph Van Winkle").

Two young women, crude simpletons both, talk their rich aging aunt of the title into participating in a seance—we're in New Orleans, if you must know—and, coerced by an occult con man who only made me think of this guy, Miss Finney "learns" from the "spirit world" that she can become immortal if she simply, you know, kills people ("You must take a life and add to yours"). But she's in a wheelchair how can she do that?? Why, she'll get her two turd nieces to do the actual dirty work of killing, which Miss Finney brings up over coffee. But it's a scam solely to get money from the old biddy since they're not going to actually kill anyone and then oh my god it becomes all too real!

1st Tor edition, 1982

The first murder sequence is staged and executed in a manner reminiscent of a middle-school play made up and performed by, well, middle-schoolers. Aunt Finney's nieces, Brook and Willa (you know their names because neither one stops saying the other's) set up a rapey handyman (ain't they all) to take the "fall." They're gonna fake kill him, see, and collect $5,000 apiece ("Isn't that rather high?") from old Auntie!

Except that's not how it turns out, and from there I think there's some supernatural shit—book spine states "supernatural horror" under Tor monster logo—but by then my eyeballs were melting down my face like I was a Zap comix. I'd re-commit, take a deep breath, and try to read more, in good faith, but that was fuckin torture. I physically couldn't read this book any longer. Even with dialogue like "I've killed, Detective Scarne. I think that is pretty legal and pretty problematical!" 

Skipping to pages near the end, I discovered there's a Satanic cult ("He cannot speak. He has no tongue. Look at the power of Satan, dear Brook"), like you'd find in a satirical Levin, and bloody nonsense around the climax; I found this passage at random:

Men and women alike participated in the blood anointing of her body. Hands coursed sensually across her breasts, fingers ushered blood into her orifices... The participants in the ritual retreated and she could see that a thing, a vulgar form, was approaching her. Her efforts to cope with the horror were futile. She experienced total revulsion.... The form's skin was covered with open sores that dripped a gray mush, bearing an odor from the bowels of the earth... Its member was erect...

However it's all bargain basement rehash of shit any horror fic fan knows by heart. Turns out Dempsey was more a political thriller writer of the kinds of '80s novels with swastikas on the cover; his attempt at horror is unmitigated hackwork. I had to give up for my taste and my sanity. In all honesty Miss Finney is one of the special handful of pitiful horror novels I've attempted to read that make me despair: why am I, an adult grown-ass middle-aged man, reading, or trying to read, such shallow shitty pandering carelessly-produced garbage? Why do I do this to myself? How it got two printings from Tor boggles the mind. 

Waiting on the Last Train

Douglas Clegg Born Today, 1958

Books of Blood, Vol. 5 by Clive Barker (1985): In the Flesh

But then monsters were seldom very terrible once hauled into the plain light of day...

Four more stories of challenging, thoughtful horror in which our bodies and our world are transformed in ever more complex and illuminating ways. This penultimate volume of the Books of Blood, his famous series of short horror fiction, finds Clive Barker diving deep into the subconscious myth-pool and coming up with more utterly fantastic tales: of crime and punishment in "In the Flesh," of gender fluidity in "The Madonna," of the insane vagaries of international politics in "Babel's Children," and perhaps most famously, of the fearsome legends we pass on to one another in "The Forbidden" (the basis for the 1992 horror movie Candyman). Sound good? Of course it does.

Poseidon Press hardcover, 1986

Like its companion The Inhuman Condition, which was originally simply titled Books of Blood Volume IV in the UK, Volume V was retitled after one of its stories when published in the US in hardcover in 1986 and a Pocket Books paperback in 1988; it became In the Flesh (with cover art by Jim Warren). As the volumes went on, Barker’s strengths as a writer grew; the long stories here - the longest of any volume in Blood, each over 50 pages - allow some of his strongest, most evocative prose to shine and features some of his most thematically potent imaginings. This is metaphor made flesh at its finest, most realized, most satisfying. My review could be double its length, such is my admiration for Barker and these tales! Invention, boldness, terror, eroticism, and yes, self-knowledge await...

The title story is an ironic rumination on sin - or, if you prefer, "sin" - within the walls and bars of a prison. Young Tait might look like fresh fish to his new fellow inmates, but his forebears are of stronger stuff: his grandfather, known as Saint Tait, hanged for murdering his family; all of them, except his daughter, who would grow up to birth Tait the younger. Sharing a cell with petty experienced thief Cleve, Tait slowly reveals the shadows of his truest self and a dream-city which, despite its appearance of vacancy, houses the worst of humanity. Cleve wants to know (as do all of Barker's heroes): Why? Why does Tait call upon the rotting shade of his grandfather and allow himself to be transformed painfully? Tait's answer is chilling in its simplicity: "To be not myself; to be smoke and shadow. To be something terrible."
"The Forbidden" is like the best Ramsey Campbell story you’ll ever read. One of urban destitution and a dilettante intruder who seeks to intellectualize the vulgar graffiti of a rundown, crime-ridden housing estate, it evokes Barker's fellow Liverpudlian but is still distinctly his own. It is also, quietly, unobtrusively, about the “pleasures” of horror itself: of the stories we tell solely to chill the blood but ultimately to familiarize ourselves with our final ends. We are drawn to it, no matter who disdains us. Myths and legends live, literally live, Barker shows, and when they step from shadow, we must be ready to meet them. Filled with passages and ideas I must refrain from quoting at length, this is surely one of Barker's best works. Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?

In Barker's own illustration for the cover of the UK paperback of Vol. V, you'll see"The Madonna." This story is ripe to bursting with Jungian imagery of feminine fecundity, pools of water, sucking vortices and suckling babes (part squid, part shorn lamb), and prefigures part of the climax for his magnum opus Imajica (1991). Two business-criminal men lost in a labyrinth of an abandoned health spa, and the wet, shimmering female wonders at its center. Barker's talent is to subvert notions of normalcy and reveal unseen truths: There were miracles in the world! Forces that could turn flesh inside out without drawing blood; that could topple the tyranny of the real and make play in its rubble.

1996 Audiobook

And last, "Babel's Children" is unclassifiable; like his earlier "In the Hills, the Cities," it's an example of his ability to meld the sublime and the ridiculous slyly, ironically. Vacation-adventurer Veronica, lost in the scrub of a Greek isle, comes upon a sort of monastery for the mad, and finds the entire world owes all to it. And if - as her dizzied mind had concluded - these were creatures as sane as herself, then what of the tale that Mr. Gomm had told? Was that true too? Was it possible that Armageddon had been kept at bay by these few giggling geriatrics?

The Pocket Books edition at the top has a surreal cover painted by Jim Warren; look again after reading and you'll see those grotesqueries spring from the pages themselves. Don't wanna spoil any for you but one: the eyeball impaled by a knife, a piece of graffiti art from "The Forbidden" that would please a Dali or Cocteau or Breton: Close by was an image of intercourse so brutally reduced that at first Helen took it to illustrate a knife plunging into a sightless eye.

2001 Pocket Books trade paperback

Having not read In the Flesh for some many years (it's another book I clearly remember reading in high school classes instead of doing schoolwork), I was thrilled upon returning to find them as fresh and effective as ever; the years have not dulled their ability to chill, to amaze, to repulse, to provoke. Barker was certainly in a class by himself; as I’ve been reading and rereading all this horror fiction from that era I can easily see why everyone was so taken with him: the high caliber and unexpected elegance of his writing and his boundless imagination that left nothing to the imagination are simply greater than almost anyone writing at that time. His towering conceptual powers have few equals. He still ranks as one of my all-time favorite writers, horror or not. Whichever way you refer to it, In the Flesh or Books of Blood Vol. V, Clive Barker has provided us with yet another collection of essential horror fiction.

Barker in Highgate Cemetery, London, c. 1986

Blue World by Robert R. McCammon (1990): This Isn't Really Anything I Think I Like

When it comes to the work of Robert R. McCammon, I think I'm in the minority of fans of 1980s horror fiction: I have never had my interest piqued by one of his books. He's got plenty of rabid fans who swear by Swan Song (1987) or Wolf's Hour (1989) or A Boy's Life (1992), still, even though he went on a 10-year hiatus and only recently began writing and publishing again. Despite his widespread popularity in the late '80s, he always seemed to me bland and middle-of-the-road, a writer for teenagers or hausfraus. I read a few of the stories in his only short-story collection Blue World (Pocket Books, April 1990, cover art by Jim Warren) when it came out, and remember absolutely nothing about them. But I really wanted to give him another try for this blog. Fair enough, right? Well...

UK paperback, Grafton 1990

The writing is simplistically homespun, the metaphoric descriptions amateurish, the psychological insights jejune, the storylines passable but unremarkable for the most part. His prose is so mild that I was never hooked, never captivated. The best story is probably "Nightcrawlers," about a maddened Vietnam vet whose nightmares come to life (wow, really) in an out-of-the-way diner. But the "magical Negro" and one-dimensional sentimentality of "Yellachile's Cage" seems not a patch on King's "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption." The venomous insects of "Yellowjacket Summer" are pretty nasty, and this story works in a straightforward manner. Post-apocalypticism features in "Doom City" (written for Charlie Grant's 1987 anthology Greystone Bay II) and "Something Passed By." Both of these are decent reads, and the mixed-up town of the latter is filled with places like Straub Street, King's Lane, Ellison Field, Barker Promenade, and McDowell Hill. Is that supposed to be funny, or clever, or...?

More: "He'll Come Knocking at Your Door" mines the territory of Joan Samson's The Auctioneer, in which a creepy dude demands payment for the townspeople's good fortune. The solitary madman of "Pin" and his murderous fantasies, and self-mutilation, are somewhat disturbing. "Makeup," "The Red House" and "I Scream Man!" are some of the tritest horror stories I've ever read. They don't suck, mind you, they're just kinda there. Never could get into "Night Calls the Green Falcon," way back when it was Schow's Silver Scream anthology. And I tried, tried to read the titular story, a 150+ page novella about a priest who falls for a porn star, but if there's one thing in this world I care about less than the tortured conscience of a priest who suddenly discovers sex is real and people like it, I don't know what it is.

"One-dimensional" is really the best way to describe these stories. I know some of them date from the early days of his career, a period he's said did not showcase his best work. But many were written for and published in this collection, after he'd become a successful writer of paperback originals for Pocket Books. And I can tell he wants you to like his stories; maybe it's that kind of eagerness, earnestness, that puts me off. As I said, McCammon's work has never appealed to me; I went into this read of Blue World hoping my impressions were wrong but found that, no, my old impressions were right: he's simply not a very interesting or inventive writer, at least not in these stories.

I need more from my horror fiction! This stuff's not trashy, it's not particularly well-written, it's not graphic, it's not haunting, it's not dangerous enough. But McCammon does have an inoffensive readability; perhaps if I'd read this when I was a young, inexperienced horror fan, say about age 13 or 14, I would have enjoyed it. But that's an impossibility no matter what since Blue World came out in 1990 when I was already 20 and well into the genre. It's sadly ironic that one of the most prolific writers of '80s paperback horror novels is one I find least essential.

Books of Blood, Vol. 4 by Clive Barker (1985): The Inhuman Condition

When the final three volumes of Clive Barker's Books of Blood were published in the United States, they were each retitled for a (seemingly random) story in the collection, and so Vol. IV became The Inhuman Condition. I assume it was because a different publisher, Poseidon Press, had the rights to those books and wanted to put them out in fancy little hardcover editions; no more of those déclassé paperbacks that cluttered up spinning metal racks at the local drugstore (although I'm sure that's still exactly where the above 1987 Pocket Books - art by Jim Warren - edition ended up).

No, it was high time for Barker to step up to the bestseller world of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub, get him into the all-important literary and fantasy book clubs of the day. This was how he became not just another acclaimed paperback horror writer with a King-size blurb, but a brand-name author with huge publisher promotions behind him and TV and radio appearances - which Barker, not unaware of the origin of his name, took to like a natural.

Poseidon Press hardcover, 1986

I well recall the excitement I felt when I saw Barker's latest was in hardcover; the intent to build prestige for him worked on me and I started to really see him as a serious writer - or more importantly, that other people saw him as a serious writer. And the stories themselves are a solid, inventive, original bunch that more than justified the hardcover and the wider-spread readership that would bring. Right after this would come his major bestselling novels The Damnation Game (1986) and Weaveworld (1987).

With hints of Hellraiser, Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show (1990), the title story is an enigma ultimately about, of all things, evolution. A puzzling cord of knots stolen from a vagrant mesmerizes a young criminal; their unloosening begets raw-fleshed monsters. Classic Barkerian moment: when the first of the monsters hides in shadowed trees, the criminal says to it, "Show yourself... I'm not afraid. I want to know what you are." The playful and absurd "The Body Politic" is referenced on the dust-jacket for both editions of Condition: human hands take up arms against their oppressors and cleave themselves to freedom, scuttling in the darkness like errant crabs, eager to be away with their leader. Neat imagery - the fires escape [was] solid with hands, like aphids clustered on the stalk of a flower - and a cool twist ending; a good example of the author's more lighthearted weirdness.

Barker's own painting is featured on the paperback from his UK publisher Sphere; this happy fellow is obviously from "The Age of Desire," in which an experimental aphrodisiac maddens and arouses at once; no nook or cranny or cop is safe from this man's advances. This was one of Barker's tales that I read with glee in high school, passing it along to a couple other friends who bothered to read at all. Barker's repertoire has always included an unflinching and perverse sexuality but his approach is more Georges Bataille than the juvenile or mainstream t-n'-a that one usually finds in horror fiction.

It was a new kind of life he was living, and the thought, though frightening, exulted him. Not once did it occur to his spinning, eroticized brain that this new kind of life would, in time, demand a new kind of death.

Rather an odd one in the entire Books of Blood, "Down, Satan!" is a story only a few pages long, no dialogue, no characterization really. This one is more like a fable, a fable of Gregorius, a sickeningly wealthy man who has lost his faith and is determined to meet the Dark Prince face-to-face, and has built a suitable palace of horrors for just such a happening. Surely the Devil could not resist such a roost to call his own, hopes Gregorius. For God was rotting in Paradise, and Satan in the Abyss, and who was to stop him?

Set in the hinterlands of Texas, "Revelations" reveals the prosaic banality of the afterlife: no cosmic justice, just the shades of a murderess and her husband the victim who, on the anniversary of death, return to the scene of her crime. But that motel room is now occupied by an evangelist obsessed with (the comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with) St. John the Divine, and his suffering wife. In Clive Barker's imaginings, arousal extends into eternity...

2001 Pocket Books trade paperback

Barker's writing here shows much growth from earlier volumes of Blood; there is a more assured quality overall, his sentences are elegant, crackling with dry humor, and his tone is ironic, poetic, knowing. Characters witness strange and beautiful horrors that no metaphor can contain, or they are horrified to learn that a trite sentiment such as Give me your heart can become literal in a deadly flash. Barker upends horror tropes and brings new ones to the genre and demands readers keep up with his ideas. I say happily that The Inhuman Condition is an integral part of what made Clive Barker one of the premier horror writers of the '80s and '90s.

You never can tell what Barker's been smoking.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker (1987): The Uses of Enchantment

Only his second novel, Weaveworld shows Clive Barker already stretching as a writer of visionary horror fiction. At an epic 700 pages, it is an ambitious, genre-straddling work, evoking William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and other fantasists and magic realists rather than the outright horror of Books of Blood and his first novel The Damnation Game (1985). Later titles like The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Imajica (1991) would find Barker continuing in this particular blend of fantastical worlds filled with both guttural horror and transcendent beauty - as well as splendidly perverse eroticism.

True to its title, there is a world woven into a carpet, a carpet which comes into the hands of Cal Mooney, an ordinary young man whose life in Liverpool seems to drift aimlessly. Called the Fugue, this world is inhabited by a race of mythical people known as Seerkind who through history had been viciously hunted by man (Cuckoos to the Seerkind), but have spirited themselves into this carpet to escape persecution. The human guardian of the Weave has fallen ill while several evil forces, led by exiled Seerkind sorceress Immacolata, attempt to destroy it.

Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, each subtly different from its neighbor. The effect was not overbusy; every detail was clear to Cal's feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if band together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border, others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there... its colors as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could read each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.

Pocket Books Oct 1987

This first edition of the US paperback has some pretty ridiculous cover art, verging into silliness, by Jim Warren. There are a couple recognizable characters but on the whole I prefer the UK edition at the top, which clearly, and cleverly, incorporates specific images, people, places, and events from the novel into a carpet-like design. We can thank British artist Tim White for this subtler, more profound imagery (he repeated this style for other Barker reprints as well). More cover artwork from around the world can be found here.

Inside Pocket Books '87 edition - art by Jim Warren

Barker has always spoken of the "subversive" qualities of the imagination, of its ability to save us from banality and a stifling status quo, and that's precisely what happens to Mooney once he's swept up into adventure. Weaveworld may not be Barker's best work - in his introduction to the 2001 edition he writes he was "on occasion irritated that [the book] found such favor among readers when other stories seemed more worthy" - but I certainly have enjoyed reading it several times over the years. And as a prose stylist Barker is unmatched; it's simply a pleasure to read his writing in a way not usually common in the genre.

Ahead there were such sights unfolding: friends and places they'd feared gone forever coming to greet them, eager for shared rapture. There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noon-day visions and midnight glory...

There is more than a touch of sentimentality, but Weaveworld is a good recommendation for people who don't enjoy straight-up horror novels. "That which is imagined need never be lost," Barker writes, intimately understanding the value of imaginary fiction and storytelling. People are enchanted by the myths and fairy tales woven into our cultural subconscious over the ages, and the most useful of all are not those that allow us to escape our nature, but the ones that dare to confront it directly; Weaveworld is one of those indeed.