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The
horror genre is largely the domain of the Id—Freud's
"cauldron full of seething excitations"—our base, animalistic
desires lurking in the back of the mind like a sweaty, priapic
troll. Horror is all perverse desires and dark urges unfettered
by society's constraints. Clive Barker knows this. In his
intro to Books of Blood, a collection of his early
short fiction, Barker explains, "We need to touch the darkness
in our souls now and again" in an effort to allow ourselves
an opportunity to express certain primal urges that "culture
demands we repress most of the time." And Barker knows that
when we get in touch with this urge-y self, it's going to
be a tad messy. Fluids will abound.
Blood
seems the obvious fluid of choice for horror; the book's title
gives that away. However, Barker's take on horror embodies
so much more of the corporeal, incorporating any and all fluids
(uric, seminal, etc.). His artistic vision seems fixated on
our whole sweaty, excreting, horny selves, mixed into one
large primordial stew. Books of Blood's title page
features a short pun: "everybody is a book of blood; wherever
we're opened, we're red." Barker's horror fiction is unusually
preoccupied with people as bodies, breaking us down to the
meat-machines that shamble through our everyday lives. This
preoccupation allows the author to define transgressions against
that meat, tapping into a tribal sense of self versus "the
other" with an almost anthropological eye (albeit an anthropological
eye which has been ripped out of someone's head by an ages-old
killing machine). The man is a gifted author of horror (and
other genres), and this skill has lifted him from the mire
of mediocre genre hacks.
Though
Barker is now known for his successful writing career (which
have included numerous film and TV adaptations, GLAAD Media
Awards, his own BBC program, and British and World Fantasy
Awards), the stories collected in Books of Blood represent
a time when he may still have been honing his writing skills
and still trying to find his authorial voice. As a result,
like most short fiction collections, Books of Blood
contains both hits and misses. Some stories focus on being
perversely inventive than ever really establishing an entertaining
or interesting plot or tone. "The Skins of the Fathers" would
seem to aspire to a surreal commentary on both harmful masculinity
and ignorance, but it only delivers a tepid tale reminiscent
of the B-horror movie Tremors, though making less sense.
"Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," a story about a
woman who develops something akin to telekinetic powers after
a suicide attempt, seems far more wrapped up in the nightmarish
ways her male victims are mutilated than making Barker's points
on interpersonal need and relationships.
However,
Barker also allows himself room to explore different tones
of the genre across the book's collection. Stories like "The
Yattering and Jack," about a demon covertly sent to break
a seemingly pedestrian man, is written with the same slightly
comedic comic book tone of Tales from the Crypt or
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Elsewhere, a story like "Son
of Celluloid" is a big slab of the messiest grindhouse horror
one can imagine, as a female protagonist wields a metal bar
called "the motherfucker" against a malicious presence which
has taken over the local revival house theater. There are
stories that resemble bloodier remakes of Twilight Zone
episodes ["Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud"], Poe
tales ("Dread"), fantastical serial killers ("The Midnight
Meat Train"), and good old-fashioned "monster-is-loose-in-a-rural-area-killing-the-hell-out-of-everyone"
stories ("Rawhead Rex"). And while Barker clearly pulls from
horror's history (even doing a "sequel" of sorts of Poe's
"Murders in the Rue Morgue"), his bloody fingerprints are
all over these narratives.
While
Books of Blood seems preoccupied with the human body
as meat and fluid, Clive Barker is no misanthrope. In the
same intro where he discusses our need to explore our souls'
dark parts, he relays an anecdote of attending a Halloween
parade in Los Angeles with his partner who was dressed as
"an amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely
to fuck you as tear out your heart." And while many of the
stories in Books of Blood fall well onto the side of
"tear out your heart," Barker often works in the other option.
If many of the stories focus on the human as a body, Barker
infuses them with enough "fucking" (in this instance, shorthand
for a whole host of emotions and relationships) to elevate
these tales above the dreck of Eli Rothian murder-porn. Books
of Blood may have its fair share of flubs and failures,
but the 16 stories held within are varied enough, and fun
and bloody enough, to have allowed Barker to continue writing
and become one of the best-known names in horror.
(June,
2009)
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