SOURCE: Hoppenstand, Gary. “Embracing Imagination: Uncollected Short Fiction and Final Comments.” In Clive Barker's Short Stories: Imagination and Metaphor in the Books of Blood and Other Works, pp. 171-209. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1994.

“LOST SOULS”

“Lost Souls” is the second Clive Barker short story to feature the occult private investigator Harry D'Amour. It was originally published in the magazine Time Out (issue number 800; December 19, 1985-January 1, 1986). Later, it was reprinted in the horror fiction anthology edited by Dennis Etchison entitled Cutting Edge (1986). “Lost Souls” follows the tradition of the Victorian Christmas tale, imitating the seasonal ghost story as exemplified by Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843). The Christmas ghost story typically celebrated the miracle of Christ's birth with stories about the supernatural. The holiday season ghost story was an annual literary event that was practiced in the popular serial publications appearing in England from Dickens's era to the early twentieth century, when such eminent authors as Henry James and M. R. James made their own respective contributions to the tradition.

Clive Barker's rendition of the Christmas ghost story, though ostensibly working within the tradition, becomes during its telling an anti-Christmas story, one that lampoons the problematic spirit of giving as made famous by Charles Dickens's Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and one that also mocks the morally hypocritical institution of the modern Church. Barker portrays the Church as destroying miracles before they take root, or fanatically preserving the status quo, even though such fanaticism leads to murder, and more important, to the destruction of miracles. Taking Barker's argument to its logical, ironic conclusion, if the Church had its way, there would be no Christmas and no Christ. The author thus suggests to us that self-determination (as perhaps exemplified in Harry D'Amour's character), rather than religious despotism, reveals the process by which one should conduct his or her life. It's the only way that true miracles can be nourished.

Two plots co-exist in “Lost Souls.” The first of these plots recounts Harry D'Amour's efforts to track down and destroy the “sublimely malignant” demon from Hell named Cha'Chat. Within this narrative, Barker inserts his parody of A Christmas Carol. The second plot updates and burlesques the Biblical nativity scene of Christ's birth, though in Barker's rendition, the Church prefers things as they are and through one of its assassins—Darrieux Marchetti, also known as the Cankerist—literally murders a potential modern-day Messiah.

Both plots concurrently take place in New York City immediately preceding Christmas. Barker contrasts the seemingly joyous seasonal atmosphere with the antics of the creature from Hell, Cha'Chat. Yet Barker blurs distinctions between good and evil in the story, and what would otherwise appear to be the season of goodwill also is described by the author as the season of suicide. What is good about Christmas (i.e. love, compassion, tolerance) is vulnerable and open to attack from either supernatural evil or mortal evil. In fact, both Cha'Chat and Marchetti are flip sides of the same ugly coin. They each—as supernatural agent and mortal agent of evil respectively—exploit or seek to harm the symbolic nobility of what Christmas actually means beneath the tarnished veneer of commercialism and religious exploitation. Hence, that which initially appears a profound contrast in the setting of “Lost Souls” instead acts as a narrative reinforcement of the duplicity and hypocrisy that are the cornerstones of Barker's message. Indeed, the author describes the Christmas atmosphere as paradoxically being conducive to Cha'Chat's activities. Evil preys voraciously upon naïveté and ignorance and the mundane. Barker writes, “… it was almost Christmas in New York; season of goodwill and suicide. Streets thronged; the air like salt in wounds; Mammon in glory. A more perfect playground for Cha'Chat's despite could scarcely be imagined.”

Harry D'Amour is thus compelled to solve quickly the problem that Cha'Chat presents to the mortal world (“Just as long as Cha'Chat didn't see Christmas Day this side of the Schism,” the author informs the reader). He is assisted by a psychic called Norma Paine, who at first directs him to a “derelict house on Ridge Street” where she believes the demon is hiding. When Harry arrives at the house expecting the worst, he instead encounters a young, “undernourished” woman of “Puerto Rican extraction,” Linda, who is “heavily pregnant”—a sign he takes as proof that the demon is nowhere in the area since she would have made a “perfect victim” for the monster. Disappointed at the prospect of possibly having to search the entire Manhattan Island area, Harry returns to Norma Paine's apartment. Norma assures Harry that she is “never wrong,” that she “saw power in that house on Ridge Street … sure as shit.” Harry actually encountered the same “power” that Norma had described: he simply was looking for the wrong type of power. This early brief encounter between the P.I. hero and pregnant woman later becomes a significant coincidental irony when Harry meets her one more time near the story's conclusion, though we, as readers, come to know that he might have sincerely wished he hadn't seen her again.

A bitingly sardonic episode in “Lost Souls” serves as Clive Barker's critique of the now clichéd Scrooge character, the miserly individual who, at Christmas time, undergoes a moral conversion via supernatural means, and because of this re-birth of the soul subsequently becomes outlandishly generous to others. Disguising its form in the body of a grossly obese woman, Cha'Chat approaches a hapless mortal named Eddie Axel as he staggers drunkenly out of his favorite bar. Eddie is the owner of a “highly lucrative” grocery store known as Axel's Superette. Barker writes, “He [Eddie] was drunk and happy; and with reason. Today he had reached the age of fifty-five. He had married three times in those years; he had sired four legitimate children and a handful of bastards.” Barker's pointed remark about Eddie's sexual prowess underscores his character's limited, self-centered mentality. The things that make Eddie happy are proficient sex and a proficient business. Otherwise, he offers the world little else. Desiring to have some wicked fun, Cha'Chat confronts Eddie while floating before him in the air. The disguised demon warns Eddie that he will die soon and that his immortal soul (visibly portrayed to Eddie as a very real, pathetic-looking creature) is in jeopardy because of his “paucity of good works.” When the terrified Eddie asks what he should do, Cha'Chat replies, “Tomorrow, turn Axel's Superette into a Temple of Charity, and you may yet put some meat on your soul's bones,” thus setting the stage for a grisly joke. For when Eddie opens the doors to his grocery store to give away food, he causes a riot in which thirty people are killed and sixty people injured.

Cha'Chat fulfills its nature and achieves what it so desires—making a grim mockery of the spirit of giving during Christmas. Yet Barker accomplishes more in this scene than the enactment of a fictional evil. He is also commenting about the hypocrisy of a faked Christmas generosity. Barker tells us that the act of giving gifts during the holiday season may be frequently motivated by selfish reasons. He implies that the Christmas spirit should not be bought and sold as if it were a commodity huckstered in Macy's Department Store. By inference, we understand Barker's argument to suggest that generosity must come from the soul rather than from the wallet. Giving, if done for the wrong reasons, can be quite destructive, as demonstrated in “Lost Souls” with the Axel's Superette disaster. No doubt Barker would tell us that the same thing might have happened when Scrooge opened his coffers at the conclusion of A Christmas Carol. His contrived generosity would have probably caused a similar riot in Victorian London. Clive Barker understands that magnanimity cannot be superficial. One should not give something while expecting something in return.

Harry senses Cha'Chat's vile hand in the calamity when he sees it reported on television, and he goes to the location to continue his hunt for the demon. Arriving at Axel's Superette on Third Avenue, Harry spots Cha'Chat (he overhears two young boys discussing the terrible smell of a woman, and he knows he has discovered the demon because all the “infernal brethren” possess this same odoriferous attribute) and pursues the creature. Barker develops a scene that wonderfully deflates our trite, horror fiction expectations when Cha'Chat defies Harry D'Amour's verbal incantations, at which point Harry draws his gun and shoots the demon. Though not fatally wounded, Cha'Chat is embarrassed at having received so ignoble a scar. Before Harry shoots the creature from Hell a second time (“It was almost impossible to slay a demon of Cha'Chat's elevation with bullets; but a scar was shame enough amongst their clan. Two, almost unbearable”), Cha'Chat offers Harry what it considers important information in order to be spared further humiliation. It tells Harry, “There's something going to get loose tonight, D'Amour … something wilder than me,” and when Harry demands more information, the demon replies, “Who knows? … It's a strange season, isn't it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don't you find?” Harry presses Cha'Chat for the location of this miracle, and after telling the occult P.I. what it knows, it tricks Harry with an ingenious disguise (“suddenly it was Norma who was bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry's feet”), thus facilitating its escape (“The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry's hesitation was all that Cha'Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He'd lost the creature, for the second time in a month”). Barker is deliberately vague when he has Cha'Chat tell Harry that “something wilder” than itself is about to “get loose.” Does the demon's remark mean that this entity will be a harbinger of good or evil? Barker probably would say to us at this point that questions of good and evil are irrelevant, that the more correct issue might be the intrusion of the wondrous into the world of banality, and banality's fatal reply as an answer, via the actions of the insipid Church.

Unfortunately, Harry's failure was not the only loss of the evening; Christmas was to lose a potential miracle as well. Harry locates the “small hotel” that Cha'Chat had told him about (“The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry”). After overpowering a young man who attempts to stop him in the hotel's lobby, he climbs the stairs and hears a woman's cry and then sees a “man in a gray suit [who] was standing on the threshold [of a door at the end of the corridor], skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves.” Harry “vaguely” recognizes the man as Darrieux Marchetti, who is “one of that whispered order of theological asssassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both.” Barker's use of paradox in suggesting that Marchetti's orders come from Rome or Hell is fitting in that Marchetti, as a symbol of the Church, is a profoundly evil individual. Earlier in the story, when Marchetti is tracking the pregnant Linda, he is listening to a woman singing “some tragic aria” in Italian. Barker writes,

Marchetti regretted having to forsake the show. The singing much amused him. Her voice, long ago drowned in alcohol, was repeatedly that vital semitone shy of its intended target—a perfect testament to imperfectibility—rendering Verdi's high art laughable even as it came within sight of transcendence. He would have to come back here when the beast had been dispatched. Listening to that spoiled ecstasy brought him closer to tears than he'd been for months; and he liked to weep.

As illustrated in the above scene, Marchetti (and, by implication, the Church) revels in fallibility. He is a vicious sadist in that, for him, life (read: art) is best appreciated when perfection is within sight, yet still tragically unattainable. Marchetti is proficient at spoiling ecstasies. He is moved to tears—a most appropriate emotion for him since it signifies more in the way of humor than of grief—when he recognizes in others some glimpse of high talent that is ignobly wasted. True art terrifies Marchetti and his masters since it grants us a glimpse at perfection, at the divine, at the miraculous. Ironically, Marchetti's job is to destroy miracles, to make perfection imperfect, to encourage art to be laughable.

Marchetti also recognizes Harry D'Amour in turn by name. When Harry demands to know what has just happened, Marchetti replies “Private business,” and warns Harry to come no closer. However, Harry sees two bodies “laid out on the bare bed”: one is the pregnant woman named Linda he met earlier in the house on Ridge Street, the other her aborted child. Marchetti informs Harry that the woman fatally protested, that all he wanted was the child, but that he had to kill both. Harry demands to know if the child was a demon, to which Marchetti replies, “We'll never know. … But at this time of year there's usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those—I number myself amongst them—that believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs.” Marchetti then tells his assistant, Patrice (the youth who had grappled with Harry in the hotel lobby), to fetch the car, because he is late for Mass. Appalled, Harry says to Marchetti that he is not above the law, but Marchetti simply walks away when his assistant places a knife at the base of Harry's skull as a warning not to interfere.

To Harry's chagrin, Marchetti and the Church are indeed above the law. They are, in fact, a law unto themselves, a law that enforces senseless ritual and that prosecutes the unusual, judging and condemning to death without a fair trial that which might threaten the status quo. Barker leaves us in doubt as to whether Linda's murdered child will be a power for good or for evil, but because this supernatural power exists at all is a dire threat to an institution that preaches the belief in supernatural miracles, yet doesn't practice what it preaches. We are left after reading “Lost Souls” with the understanding that there are two monsters in the story. The one monster is recognizable. We expect it to do what it does because of its nature. The other monster, the mortal monster, is less comprehensible, and hence more frightening. Both creatures utilize duplicity in what they do, in the evil that they perpetuate, but Marchetti's brand of deceit is infinitely more terrifying than Cha'Chat's because what Marchetti does is so antithetical to the sacred ideology that he is supposed to represent. Marchetti's actions are unnatural because the firm he represents is supposedly in the business of miracle births. If one is looking for answers to the important questions in life, if one is attempting not to be one of the “lost souls,” if one is looking for the true meaning of Christmas, if one is even looking for Christ, then the place not to look is the Church.

Instead, Clive Barker argues a type of self-determinism in “Lost Souls.” After showing his reader the despotic attitude of the Church, Clive Barker gives us a viable alternative, one that denies political and or religious ideology and that encourages optimism in the very process of living life from moment to moment. Barker has Harry D'Amour provide a sanguine philosophical contrast to Cha'Chat and Marchetti. “Lost Souls” concludes with D'Amour presumably resuming his hunt for Cha'Chat (the demon was “Still out there somewhere. In a foul temper …”). Harry contemplates how no two snowflakes are alike, and this image allows Barker, through his protagonist, an opportunity to outline a hopeful future, despite the grim events that have previously taken place in the story. Barker writes,

Each moment was its own master, he [Harry] mused, as he put his head between the blizzard's teeth, and he would have to take whatever comfort he could find in the knowledge that between this chilly hour and dawn there were innumerable such moments—blind maybe, and wild and hungry—but all at least eager to be born.

Barker's birth metaphor in the above passage is an appropriate one. The future and all that the future has to offer are like the child that Marchetti murdered. Each metaphoric child, each new instance in time, suggests great potential and new hope for a better tomorrow, and though the Church butcher Marchetti may have destroyed one such hope, many more will rise to take its place. The Church attempts to protect a past that is dead, while Harry prepares for the future. Barker breaks with the roman noir formula by having his detective hero face the future as master of his fate instead of the reverse. Not defeated by living, Harry adapts to life, being reborn himself like the snowflake into each subsequent fresh minute. Barker has thus transformed what is otherwise a traditionally pessimistic narrative form into an existential vehicle that denies Fate and Fate's control over human actions. In “Lost Souls,” Clive Barker takes the noir out of the roman noir. Harry may be battered and beaten, but he faces the next moment as a father would his new child, with equal measures of trepidation and intense joy.

“COMING TO GRIEF”

Barker had originally intended to include “Coming to Grief” in the Books of Blood, but the story instead found its way to publication in the October 1988 issue of the British edition of Good Housekeeping magazine. It appeared in book form in Douglas E. Winter's anthology of horror fiction entitled Prime Evil (1988). Looking in retrospect at Clive Barker's corpus of short fiction, “Coming to Grief” is perhaps the most difficult tale to approach critically because of its subtle tone. It is also one of the most rewarding.

“Coming to Grief” is a story about how a thirty-something-year-old woman named Miriam comes to personal terms with the death of her mother, Veronica Blessed. During the course of Barker's narrative, Miriam is not only learning how to approach an understanding of the death of a loved one—and concurrently an understanding of guilt and the dilemma of facing one's own mortality—she is also coming to terms with her past childhood memories. Barker explores the irrational nature of memories and the way they serve to define adult emotions. Miriam's adult confrontation with a dreaded, nameless monster lurking in the dark Liverpool quarry framed by the “Bogey-Walk” articulates her conquest of death and her fear of death. Miriam's monster is representative of her id, but it also, as the reader notes in the story's marvelous twist ending, is an actual, physical creature that lures the unwary to their death using the victim's emotion of grief as bait. Equally as important, Miriam, during her rite of social reintegration, deals with peripheral issues such as the terror we feel at the prospect of being alone in the world, and also the joy we should feel with living itself.

When Miriam returns to the Liverpool of her childhood, eighteen years have elapsed. She was nineteen years old when she left, the author tells us, “to taste the world: to grow; to prosper; to learn and to live.” She arrives from her new home in Hong Kong a successful, fulfilled woman, having both a husband who “idolized” her and a daughter who “grew more like her with every year.” Since leaving Liverpool, she has achieved her life's ambition. She has become “a wholly sophisticated woman of the world.” She has become “universally adored.” However, despite Miriam's many successes in life, she still harbors within her soul several tenebrous weaknesses, such as a fear of death and of the unwanted prospect of facing the death of her recently deceased mother.

Early in the story when Miriam enters her mother's house, the thought occurs to her that her mother isn't dead, that she is “camouflaged in the house somewhere, pressed against the wall or at the mantelpiece; unseen but seeing.” Interestingly, this is a similar image that Barker uses to describe Miriam's camouflaged monster of the dreaded Bogey-Walk. Both monster and mother represent for Miriam the same fear, the same dread: the inevitable reality that death cannot be avoided or conquered. Yet, as Miriam discovers within herself during the course of the narrative, death may be an unbeatable foe, but the fear of death can—and must—be subdued if one is to proceed with the day-to-day reality of living. Miriam begins this process simply enough with the trivial business of organizing her mother's things. Barker writes, “The task of dividing, discarding, and packing the remnants of her mother's life was slow and repetitive. The rest—the loss, the remorse, the bitterness—were so many thoughts for another day.” As noted elsewhere in Clive Barker's fiction, banality is viewed negatively; it is the antithesis of imagination, of divinity, of the things in life that are worthwhile. However, in “Coming to Grief,” Barker recognizes the value of using mindless ritual to arrive at mindful contemplation. The author shows us in Miriam's early actions in the story that inane activities, though otherwise reprehensible, can temporarily soothe strained, wounded emotions.

One of the causes of Miriam's emotional wounds is her sense of guilt regarding her difficulty in learning how to come to grief. As her mother's death is an alien thing for her to deal with, so, too, is her willingness to tap the depths of her feelings about what has happened. Miriam experiences guilt when she anticipates returning to Hong Kong, wishing her mother's funeral was “soon done.” Barker writes, “Ah, there was a guilt there: the ticking off of the days until the funeral, the pacing out of her mother's ritual removal from the world. Another seventy-two hours and the whole business would be done with, and she would be flying back to life.” In this passage, Barker has perceptively tagged our repressed, ambivalent sentiments concerning the death of a family member or other significant loved ones. When someone we deeply care for dies, frequently we all experience a galaxy of conflicting emotions ranging from anger to remorse to guilt to fear. We are uncomfortable with death because of its finality. We are equally uncomfortable with the social rituals of death—like funerals—because they seek to organize our emotions into socially acceptable patterns of action that endeavor to lead us away from grief rather than allowing us to confront it, to deal with it, and subsequently to conquer it. Clive Barker features in “Coming to Grief” a subtle, but nonetheless effective, criticism of the funeral business—in the loathsome guise of Mr. Beckett, the funeral home director—and how this business uses empty ritual and masked professional indifference to exploit people who are having a difficult time with the difficult process of coming to grief.

Interestingly, Miriam is not as impassive about her mother's death as she would like to believe. At one point early in the narrative Clive Barker tells his reader that, “Grief … had battened upon her and sapped her will to fight,” thus explaining in some measure Miriam's outward appearing emotional lethargy. Inwardly, however, Miriam's emotions are anything but lethargic. For example, while she is “Organizing the disposal of [her mother's] personal items,” she comes across some photographs of her father and herself when she was a child. The author writes that, “She could hardly bear to look at some of them. She burned first the ones that hurt the most.” Miriam's seeming indifference, the reader notes, as she proceeds with the business of burying her mother is an act, a sham, a mask that covers the seething emotions deep within her. It is a contrivance that nearly succeeds in protecting her from the terrible hurt, nearly, but not quite. Several times, as illustrated by her burning of the photographs (and later in the story by her nearly suicidal leap from the Bogey-Walk), the act falls apart when closely scrutinized. The sham is revealed for what it is; the mask cracks.

What is revealed by the author as lurking beneath Miriam's actions is her reluctance to confront her own mortality. Miriam creates a cognitive dichotomy for herself in “Coming to Grief.” At the one end of this dichotomy is her subconscious perception of Liverpool as being emblematic of death. It is the setting of her childhood fears of dying, the infamous locale of the Bogey-Walk. It is also the scene of her mother's funeral, which serves as a reminder of the prospect of her own impending and irreversible loneliness in life (i.e. over the loss of that part of her that needs her mother) without having the benefit of her mother's presence to comfort her. Finally, Liverpool is the place where, because of death, Miriam has to face the prospect of dying. She contrasts Liverpool (as the place of death and dying) with Hong Kong. While working in her mother's house, she thinks of Hong Kong, and of her husband and her life there. Barker writes,

In Hong Kong, she thought, Boyd would be on duty, and the sun would be blazing hot, the streets thronged with people. Though she hated to go out at midday, when the city was so crowded, today she would have welcomed the discomfort. It was tiresome sitting in the dusty bedroom, carefully sorting and folding the scented linen from the chest of drawers. She wanted life, even if it was insistent and oppressive.

Miriam indeed prefers life, with all its limitations and irritations, to the “tiresome” business of death. Death may be an absolute state, but it is a state lacking vitality, lacking motion. The “discomfort” of living is preferred by Miriam; the simplicity of death is not.

A narrative conflict in “Coming to Grief” centers on Miriam's battles with her own personal weaknesses. The weaknesses of the present, such as her inability to face death and her unwillingness to express her true feelings about her mother's funeral, are linked to the weaknesses of her childhood. Miriam's general fear of death and dying as a child are rolled up into one specific fear: the Bogey-Walk monster. The rational side of Miriam's nature attempts to explain the Bogey-Walk in rational terms. The quarry is nothing more than a quarry her adult mind tells her; there is no monster lurking there to trap the unwary. But her adolescent mind, framed in the stark, powerful hues of a child's vivid nightmares, is more attuned to the real actuality. Miriam becomes aware of the Bogey-Walk monster's existence in her dreams, which is entirely consistent with Clive Barker's belief that dreams and dreaming are noble, wonderful things, and that they allow us to enter worlds of imagination that nurture and strengthen us. In her dreams, Miriam visualized the monster as climbing the walls of the quarry to capture her. The author writes, “But in those dreams she always woke up before the nameless beast caught hold of her dancing feet, and the exhilaration of her escape would heal the fear; at least until the next time she dreamed.” By escaping the Bogey-Walk monster in her dreams, she symbolically escapes death, thus conquering it for the time being and “heal[ing] the fear” of dying. This triumph of life over death in the dream is the adolescent Miriam's temporary victory over her fears.

Of course, Miriam enacts in real life an escape from the Bogey-Walk monster. Near the conclusion of the story, as she is walking past the newly formed break in the red brick wall, she confronts—and is almost destroyed by—the monster of her childhood nightmares. It tempts her toward the edge with the image of her dead mother's face (“Horribly bloated to twice or three times its true size, her jaundiced eyelids flickering to reveal whites without irises, as though she were hanging in the last moment between life and death”) and nearly succeeds in drawing her over the cliff's edge. She is saved from death by an old, childhood friend, Judy, who is an admitted lesbian and who is also a nurturing person. By not succumbing to the Bogey-Walk monster, the adult Miriam finally triumphs over her fear of death and her even greater fear of her mother's absence. Her personal, epic confrontation with the image of her deceased mother, an image very much like a putrefying corpse, parallels Miriam's ultimate confrontation and acceptance of the physical reality of her mother's death. Miriam is able to come to grips with mortality and is saved from a fate worse than death (in the truest sense of the cliché) with her friend's much-needed help (“Miriam felt Judy's arms around her, tight; more possessive of her life than she had been”). Clive Barker thus implies in this concluding act of grace that one of those things stronger than death, stronger than fear, is friendship. We need the support of our parents while we are children, Barker might suggest to us; however, when we become adults and our parents pass away, emotional support may be (and must be) found in our circle of friends.

In the frightening scene that concludes the story—where the Bogey-Walk monster lures the “husband of the late Marjorie Elliot” to his death by enticing him with the image of his dead wife to leap into the quarry, in essence, encouraging him to destroy himself because of his grief—the reader finally learns that Miriam's monster exists, that it is not a figment of her childish imagination. Death is a fact of life waiting for its proper cue. And like the monster of Miriam's Bogey-Walk, it may hide for a time lurking in the recess of life's shadows, but eventually it will make itself known and exact its due.

In the story's other major confrontation, Miriam faces for the first time the body of her dead mother in the funeral home. The moment is a moving one. It is quietly emotional without being mawkishly sentimental. It is gentle without being affected and false, powerful without being stifling. Miriam represses the desire to “reach into the coffin and shake her mother awake.” She mentally wills her mother to wake up. She says “Mama” but once. Barker writes,

She took hold of the side of the coffin to steady herself, while the tears dripped off her cheeks and fell into the folds of her mother's dress.

So this was death's house; this was its shape and nature. Its etiquette was perfect. At its visitation there had been no violence; only a profound and changeless calm that denied the need for further show of affection.

Her mother, she realized, didn't require her any longer; it was as simple as that. Her first and final rejection. Thank you, said that cold, discrete body, but I have no further need of you. Thank you for your concern, but you may go.

Miriam's apparent indifference to her mother's death simply conceals a powerful apprehension: that her mother no longer needs her. As do we all, Miriam possesses that very real desire for a parents' affections, and when death forever robs us of their attention, we feel cheated, hostile, angry, or in Miriam's case, we pretend indifference. What really bothers Miriam in “Coming to Grief” is the anticipation of being alone in the world. She loves life (in part, out of a fear for the alternative), but a life where others—her children, her husband, her mother—need her. Being dead is the same as being alone, from Miriam's perspective, and she likes neither. She counters this unwanted apprehension of being alone during the course of the story with thoughts of Hong Kong and her family awaiting her return. She also learns to fight the feeling of loneliness with the help of her friend, Judy. Following her nightmarish confrontation with the Bogey-Walk monster, Miriam is comforted by her companionship with her friend. The author writes,

They stayed together through the night at the house, and they shared the big bed in Miriam's room innocently, as they had as children. Miriam told the story from beginning to end: the whole history of the Bogey-Walk. Judy took it all in, nodded, smiled, and let it be. At last in the hour before dawn, the confessions over, they slept.

Miriam's “confessions,” her telling of tales, is a cleansing experience for her soul in the truest of religious acts. The process of storytelling purges sin and evil (as Clive Barker also shows in his Books of Blood). It mends and makes whole what has otherwise been damaged or destroyed. And thus we see that even though “Coming to Grief” is a sad tale, though the story's atmosphere is melancholy in nature (a funeral dirge of sorts), it nonetheless offers a profound message of hope. Fear, death, loneliness: we are able to conquer all of these mortal ills, just as Miriam has conquered them, with the gentle guidance of a friend's hand or with the assistance of a loving spouse's support. For Miriam, her “coming to grief” opens the way for her “coming to joy,” with the anticipation of living life to its fullest extent.

CLIVE BARKER'S SHORT STORIES OF DARK IMAGINATION

The remainder of this [essay], as a summary of what has been discussed previously, will examine a number of important topics concerning Clive Barker's short fiction. First, Barker's own remarks about several of his short stories appearing in his Books of Blood will be explored, as well as Barker's generalizations about what his Books of Blood are intended to accomplish within the parameters of the horror genre. Second, an outline that summarizes the significant themes that appear in Clive Barker's short fiction will be developed, an outline that clarifies the artistic sophistication of his writing. Third, additional significant themes evident in Barker's writings will be compared to the work of three British literary giants of the past who wrote tales of dark imagination, including Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Mary Shelley (1797-1851), and Saki (pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916). Finally, Barker's literary corpus as a whole will be evaluated both inside and outside the formulaic confines of the horror genre, with the judgment being advanced that Clive Barker transforms and transcends the horror genre. He incorporates horror not as the end result of his craft, but as instead one of many narrative elements. I will suggest that Barker is not so much a horror fiction writer as he is a modern-day allegorist, a contemporary teller of morality plays (very much in the tradition of the fifteenth-century European allegorical plays in which human action is personified). Barker envisions good (i.e. well-crafted) horror fiction as being confessional in nature (the entire Books of Blood are a collection of confessions). His artistic roots are, in fact, quite European and quite apart from the heavily genrefied American publishing tradition, a tradition that fostered the overcategorization of fiction in dime novels and pulp magazines (the later being the medium of H. P. Lovecraft's weird fiction) of the past century in order to sell more conveniently fiction as a commodity. And finally, as I began this book's discussion of Clive Barker's short fiction with a comparison between Barker and Stephen King, so, too, will I conclude my analysis with another comparison between Barker and King, a comparison that argues the relative difference between Barker's inventional approach to writing and King's conventional approach and that highlights the flexible durability of the literature of the fantastique (since it equally allows both Barker and King into its fold).

While describing his affection for his story entitled “The Age of Desire,” Barker claims in his interview for the Winter 1987 issue of American Fantasy magazine that he tries not to duplicate other authors' efforts. He says that he “reads in the genre” a great deal, since by doing this he can avoid wasting his time “doing stuff which other people have already done better” (“British Invasion” 47). The reason why Clive Barker's short stories, novels, illustrations, and films seem so wildly inventive is because they are wildly inventive. He simply is not interested in traveling the well-worn path. He seeks instead to forage in new areas, to blaze his own, highly individual trail. We as his readers may become confused for a moment at the direction he takes us, but eventually we marvel at the new sights we see, the new landscape we travel, sights and landscapes that we've rarely, if ever, encountered before in the creative efforts of others. Those readers who cannot come to Barker's short fiction with an open mind, and those who come with rigid expectations to a slavish formula, will probably be disappointed with what they read. Barker does not want to indulge his reader by offering “convenient answers.” He says in his American Fantasy interview, “I don't want to get to the end of the [horror] story and get readers all charged up and then say, by the way, the solution to this really complex and difficult problem is a silver bullet or garlic. To me that's bad storytelling, unless you're doing a pastiche” (“British Invasion” 47).

In his short fiction, Clive Barker occasionally toys with pastiche. Referring to his tale “New Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Barker suggests his efforts at pastiche pay tribute to the original. His rendition of Poe (and of Poe's invention, the detective story) pays “homage to Poe,” and to Poe's imagination. Elsewhere in his Books of Blood, Barker recognizes the talents of other authors. He states, “there's story called “The Forbidden” … which has a nod and a wink to Ramsey Campbell. And there's a few Lovecraftian monsters that lurk around the corners in some of my stories, and certainly some stuff towards Arthur Machen. I mean I'm aware that I am in the company of brilliant writers” (“British Invasion” 47). In addition, Clive Barker imitates the spy thriller in “Babel's Children” and “Twilight at the Towers,” and roman noir in “The Last Illusion” and “Lost Souls.” “Lost Souls” also resounds with images of the Victorian Christmas ghost story, while “Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud” and “Revelations” both flirt with the traditional ghost tale. Yet when Barker mimics another story or another writer, his interpretation soon disembarks from the confines of simple imitation, in the process redefining the pastiche into complex parody or satire. If Clive Barker tinkers with the ideas of others, he does this either to challenge those ideas or to transform them into new ones, into new visions that express Barker's own unique voice. By the conclusion of his pastiche, he has often flipped it on its head, reversing conventions, formulas and expectations.

Barker identifies “Revelations” as being one of these flipped stories in which the heroes are monsters and the monsters are heroes. Barker says,

[In “Revelations,”] the evangelist is the monster and the ghosts, well Buck is sort of an unintentional hero and Sadie … I'm very fond of Sadie. I'm very fond of that story. Partly because it's got a sort of delicate humor to it, and also because it's got a very up ending. The evangelist is dead, the ghosts have found their place in the system, and Virginia is on her way to jail with a smile on her face. Which is great.

[“British Invasion” 48]

The problematic question of what type of fiction Clive Barker writes thus becomes an interesting debate when he injects healthy doses of humor and optimism into the horror formula. We see that Barker not only flips pastiche upon its head, but he also flips the entire horror genre, writing stories that are neither wholly horror nor wholly anything else. Barker himself fuels this debate when he claims that, “There are a lot of stories in the Books of Blood which simply aren't horror in any conventional sense. They're imaginative stories but not horror stories, and my commitment is to imaginative fiction; to worlds of the imagination” (“British Invasion” 45). Barker goes on to suggest that writing horror fiction, in part, fulfills his obligation to the “worlds of imagination,” but that horror is only one of many ways for him to access his imagination. He says, “I just want to write fantastic literature of various kinds, and some of it will be called horror” (“British Invasion” 45).

As noted, Clive Barker's desire to write fantastic literature is not limited to one medium. His work crosses media boundaries as easily as it does formulaic boundaries. For example, Barker incorporates material from his theatrical experience in his story “Sex, Death and Starshine.” He also envisions a close relationship between movies and his short fiction. In his interview conducted with Tim Caldwell for Film Threat magazine, Barker links the cinematic metaphor he creates in “Son of Celluloid” with the act of viewing films. He identifies this cinematic metaphor in “Son of Celluloid” as being a walking, talking cancer that performs movie star imitations; Barker reminds us that the chameleon-like cancer calls itself a “dreaming disease” in the story, and he argues that viewing movies is like having this dreaming disease (17). Barker's wild contrast between dreaming, a concept denoting marvelous things, and disease, a word generating negative images like corruption and death, is entirely consistent with how he frequently incorporates in his writing the similar contrast between the grotesque and the beautiful. Indeed, the entirety of Clive Barker's fiction is a “dreaming disease.” His writing establishes a medium of imagination that blends the unusual with the recognizable and that thus encourages the reader to join with the author in envisioning new worlds and new people, but worlds and people that seem familiar, and because of that familiarity allow us in our imagining to pierce the heart of our own reality with a powerful scrutiny.

Reality for Clive Barker, however, does not necessarily mean a physical truth. He is more concerned with psychological truth. In the Lupoff and Wolinsky interview published in the August 1988 issue of Science Fiction Eye, Barker relates the story about being “invited to address a science fiction class” in London, in which a student challenged him about the logical veracity of “In the Hills, the Cities.” This student identified himself as being a science fiction fan, and said that even though he liked “In the Hills, the Cities,” the story, he said, didn't “make sense.” He claimed that constructing a walking giant by tying together ten thousand people just, in the fan's words, “wouldn't work, they'd … fall over.” Barker learned that the science fiction fan would have been happier with the story if Barker had included a “spurious explanation,” like a force field that holds the giant together. Barker answered the fan by arguing a difference between the science fiction fan and himself. Unlike the fan, he is not interested in dealing with “artificial explanations” in his writing. Barker states in the interview,

What's important to me is to get it psychologically true, is to get it right on a dream level, is to get it right on a subconscious level, is to get it right on a Jungian level. If you get it right on that level, the inventing of the names of machines that will make this all plausible becomes academic. In fact, it almost begins to condescend to the reader. Because what it implies, to me anyway, is that the reader doesn't have the imagination or the breadth to actually say, “This idea makes sense to me, I embrace this idea. I do not need you to invent something from Doctor Who to make this work.”

[15]

Clive Barker's point is an intriguing one because it reveals his expectations of his audience. Barker wants his reader to meet him half way, so to speak; he wants him or her to employ imagination in order to appreciate better highly inventional stories of imagination. Imagination may be stifled, Barker suggests to us, by an overdependence upon narrative particulars. In other words, Barker doesn't want us to lose sight of the major issues he's discussing in his fiction because we are searching for other irrelevant trivia. He is an “idea” author, not a “device” author. In fact, Barker sees his work as being anti-mechanistic, which locates him outside the formulaic limitations of science fiction (a genre defined by its reliance upon gadgets and scientific plausibility) and thus places him securely within the much larger parameters of fantasy. His literary sensibility is much more attuned to Mary Shelley's novel of dark Gothic imagination, Frankenstein (often incorrectly cited as the first modern example of science fiction), than to the efforts of Jules Verne or Hugo Gernsback, the former identified as being the most significant person to popularize science fiction in both Europe and America before the turn of the twentieth century, and the latter credited with successfully bringing science fiction to the American pulp magazines during the 1910s and 1920s. Verne, Gernsback, and their following articulate in their writings a powerful adherence to realism. Though they would undeniably also argue that their fiction is highly imaginative, nonetheless the school of Verne and Gernsback upon close scrutiny looks something like the school of Realism (that also initially flourished approximately the same time as did early modern science fiction), where characters and setting must demonstrate some sort of primary association to an empirical reality. Clive Barker's writing, conversely, looks more like the fiction of the English Romantic Movement (circa 1770-1848) with its sense of social progressivism and the transcendental; specifically, Barker's writing resembles the Gothic novels of Mary Shelley and William Beckford—after all, the Gothic novel as practiced by Shelley and Beckford found its roots in the Romantic Movement, and, in fact, is little more than an exaggerated branch of Romanticism. As were the Romantics and their Gothic descendants, Barker is concerned in his fiction of the dark fantastique with an investigation into the function of evil (read: close-mindedness, mean-spiritedness) that impacts the individual or the individual's society at one level, and at another level he is interested in exploring the dynamic range of the forces of our imagination, people and places that are paradoxically beautiful and grotesque concurrently. These twin areas of artistic interest, though manageable within the Romantic's worldview, differ sharply with the concerns of the literary realists, the hard-core science fiction enthusiasts, which hence explains why Barker's young critic experienced difficulty with “In the Hills, the Cities.” He was looking for the type of litter wedged between the city/giant's toes, while Clive Barker was instead relating to the rest of us the city/giant's dreams (or the dream of the city/giant).

A SURVEY OF MAJOR THEMES IN CLIVE BARKER'S SHORT FICTION

Many authors writing within the horror genre today are producing works that lack a larger artistic unity. For the most part, these authors are primarily concerned with simple entertainment, with providing their readers with a moment's diversion, and by inference, concerned with writing commercially successful fiction. They display no true inner voice, no message that speaks something important and something essential to us. They simply are offering a commodity that they hope delivers some measure of financial return for their investment of time. They are in the business of selling the scare, pure and simple.

This may sound like a “put-down” of ninety percent of the horror genre's writers, or like the reductionist observations of a critic gone wild, but neither is the case, really. The paperback horror novel is actually no worse than the paperback western or the paperback romance or the paperback mystery. All popular fiction possesses a rather uncomplicated commercial purpose (as perhaps does the entirety of fiction, both high and low), and the authors of this fiction should not be condemned out-of-hand because what they do has so singular a commercial motive. After all, a number of so-called canonical authors we revere today as being foremost among the artistic elite—such erstwhile literary giants as Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910), to name just four prominent examples—were motivated in large part to write to make money. And yet artistic integrity and commercial success need not be mutually exclusive concepts. They don't necessarily need to work in opposite directions and are frequently most rewarding when they work together in unison. The marriage of art and money in contemporary literature does not seem to pose a problem when one is discussing Joyce Carol Oates or Kurt Vonnegut. But bring up the names of Dean R. Koontz or John Saul or Anne Rice or (that most horrid of best-selling heretics) Stephen King, and the reception within the community of critics is quite frigid indeed. Perhaps this sad state of affairs should not be surprising. Historically, the horror genre has been one of the most suspect in the literary critic's mind because it seeks foremost to entertain its audience, and if that's not bad enough, to accomplish this entertainment via the reader's gut, rather than his or her mind. It's tough for the horror writer to break out of the “genre ghetto.”

Clive Barker is one of the few to have escaped the horror “ghetto.” Contrary to the attacks leveled against the horror tale, and contrary to the majority of authors who write horror fiction, Clive Barker in his work endeavors to establish a sound artistic voice and cohesive thematic unity. And the fact that he has achieved a certain degree of critical respect for his literary endeavors, while also experiencing a great measure of commercial reward, is a testament to his ability to defy both the falsely perceived aesthetic limitations of the genre and the deep-rooted prejudices of the critic. Barker goes for his reader's viscerals and mind with equal dexterity.

The following outline, then, as illustration of Clive Barker's complex yet wholly integrated story-telling skills, offers a brief summary of the major narrative themes in Barker's short fiction. The titles of the nine themes are: 1) “Text as Metaphor”; 2) “The Game and Game Playing”; 3) “The Deceptiveness of Appearances”; 4) “The Beautiful and the Grotesque”; 5) “Heightened Senses”; 6) “The Messiah Figure”; 7) “The Critique of Institutional Authority: The State”; 8) “The Prison (or Trap) Setting”; and 9) “The Feminist Critique.” This list is neither inclusive nor comprehensive, but it does reveal the author's ability of communicating to his audience, through the entire corpus of his writing, a number of coherent and fully integrated philosophical views about life and death and imagination and the evils of banality.

TEXT AS METAPHOR

For Barker, text has significant meaning as a complex metaphor in his writing. It expresses for him the power of creative thought and is a physical representation of his own love for books and all that books embody, such things as magic and imagination. One of Clive Barker's messages to his readers in his fiction is that the telling of stories—as a specific narrative element of the text—is both a cleansing act, where old sins are purged (much like confession, in a religious sense), and an act of creation, where miracles are engendered. Barker also equates text images with how his characters survive their respective confrontations with good and evil. If, on the one hand, the Barker protagonist is literally able to read correctly the writing upon the wall, then he or she may expect not only to triumph, but also to benefit from the acquired knowledge. In “The Book of Blood,” Mary Florescu, for example, by interpreting the writing carved upon Simon McNeal's body is able to decipher images of wonder and amazement that lie beyond and behind our otherwise mundane everyday experiences. McNeal himself, who was once a reprehensible individual, becomes a walking miracle after the dead use his tortured body as the medium for the telling of their stories. Barker suggests to his reader as well that the object or the person who bears a textual reference also most likely possesses some type of subtextual design that is equally significant when deciphered. If, on the other hand, the Barker protagonist is unable or unwilling to interpret the meaning of texts, then he or she is damned, destroyed. Because Helen Buchanan in “The Forbidden” is not able to identify in time the deadly meaning lurking behind the Spector Street Estate graffiti, she becomes victim to the Candyman's nasty, fatal embrace. Clive Barker, then, with his writing and in his writing has become a spokesperson for writing, and for the importance of literary empowerment. The relationship between texts and the reading of those texts generates power, and magic. All his characters (and we as his audience) can touch magic by tapping into the power of reading.

THE GAME AND GAME PLAYING

Several tales in the Books of Blood feature the game or game playing as an integral part of the story. Because of his duplicitous game playing, Simon McNeal in “The Book of Blood” is punished by those dead spirits that he pretends to have contact with for his arrogance and for his disrespect. Jack Polo in “The Yattering and Jack” plays an elaborate game with a demon from Hell. The stakes are high—life and death (and perhaps even more importantly, the integrity of Polo's family). On the surface, the contest of wills between Jack Polo and the Yattering may seem humorous, but underlying the humor is a grim, ugly battle. The type of game played in “Hell's Event” seems simple enough, a foot race, but as in “The Yattering and Jack” the context behind the game reveals Hell as being the contestant opposing the continued well-being of humanity. The stakes of the game are about as high as they can get—the end of the world. Thankfully, humanity wins this particular race and thus postpones the apocalypse for the time being. In “The Inhuman Condition,” Karney's game, the unraveling of a simple puzzle in the form of a knot, is seemingly less grand than that in “Hell's Event,” but it is by no measure less significant. By untying the knotted cord, Karney unknits and reknits the age-old conflict between science and religion, in which each is fighting for total dominion over possession of humanity's knowledge. The wealthy, insane Gregorius plays a game of hide-and-seek with Satan in his Xanadu-like New Hell, discovering at the conclusion of “Down, Satan!” that he has become a great deal like that which he so desperately sought, that he himself has become the Devil incarnate. Both “Babel's Children” and “Twilight at the Towers” establish a specific relationship between game playing and politics. Barker portrays political games in these stories as being, at times, respectively obtuse or silly; however, they are equally deadly and far-reaching in their impact on others. Ultimately, the game, Barker suggests to us in his short fiction, is a useful narrative device by which he can critique the actions of individuals or institutions. The process of playing games discloses both the strengths and weaknesses of human character, and of inhuman character. It highlights during the process of play an ideal conflict where dramatic action is enhanced, and where the personalities of characters are more fully delineated.

THE DECEPTIVENESS OF APPEARANCES

Frequently in Barker's work, people or places are not what they appear on the surface. False appearances mask the good and evil (most often evil) that lie beneath that surface. Clive Barker's love of metaphor manifests itself in this thematic device. His interest in masking and then unmasking the surface appearance of things allows him the opportunity of creating a wide range of metaphoric images that comment upon the nature of reality and of our often flawed perception of it. A number of Barker's tales feature settings that conceal either bright magic or black mystery. With “The Forbidden,” “The Madonna,” and “In the Flesh,” commonplace settings—respectively, a housing project, a dilapidated pool and bath house, and a prison—are, in reality, the residences of demons or angels. Barker's short fiction is populated throughout as well by people harboring secret selves. Mary Florescu is unaware in the beginning of “The Book of Blood” of Simon McNeal's actual duplicitous nature. Karney is initially unaware in “The Inhuman Condition” of the tremendous power that the derelict Pope hides beneath his unwashed exterior, while in “The Life of Death,” an otherwise seemingly ordinary woman is the carrier of the new black plague and is the walking embodiment of death itself in the modern world. Those characters who are deceived by false appearances in Barker's stories at least experience great terror, and, at worst, experience death. Yet those who are able to penetrate false appearances are more likely not only to survive, but to become stronger individuals in the process. Miriam, for example, in “Coming to Grief” does not submit to the monster falsely bearing her mother's face (though she is helped by her childhood friend), and consequently does not submit to death. She is strengthened by her ordeal at the Bogey-Walk. She regains control of her life because of her confrontation with the chameleon-like monster. Mr. Elliot is not as fortunate as Miriam. He is deceived by the Bogey-Walk monster into thinking he is seeing his departed wife, Marjorie, and soon joins her in death.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GROTESQUE

One of the wildly inventive aspects of Clive Barker's short fiction is the paradoxical contrast he develops between the beautiful and the grotesque. In several of his tales, ugliness is good and beauty is evil; or the wondrous is made wondrous by images of the grotesque; or inner moral strength and virtue are housed in the body of a monster. Barker enjoys incorporating opposing physical, spiritual, or visual characteristics because he continually desires to challenge his reader's conventional expectations. Thus, after startling us with portrayals of good and evil (or more important, of some unique blending of good and evil), he directs us away from the boundaries of convention into a new direction, a direction where he encourages us to re-examine those important things in life that we otherwise ignore or take for granted. In “Sex, Death and Starshine,” Barker counterpoises the hideousness of death with the beauty of artistic perfection. Lichfield and his troupe of actors are the walking dead, yet these actor/zombies are more committed to theatrical art and the correct performance of that art than are their human counterparts. Barker blends the humorous with the grotesque in the story “Dread” when he portrays the transformed Stephen Grace as an axe-wielding murderer done up in a clown's costume. Lurking behind the beautiful face in “Human Remains” is either the intellectually vacuous, narcissistic, male prostitute Gavin, or his vampire-like doppelgänger. In each instance, Barker shows us with this character and with this creature how beauty without substance is both an empty beauty and an evil beauty. Near the conclusion of “The Body Politic,” Barker interjects a scene into the story that is quite bizarre—the rain of amputated hands following Charlie George as he leaps from the hospital roof—and is seen by the nurses and hospital patients who witness the event and perceive it as being wondrous, miraculous. Magic and terror are not mutually exclusive concepts, Barker implies with this moment; they might be the flip sides of the same coin. Evil done to mankind is what the amputated army of hands promise in “The Body Politic.” Good done to womankind is what is promised in “The Madonna.” The Madonna creature is described as being visually freakish, shockingly incongruous. In direct contrast to this grotesque appearance, the Madonna is the physical symbol of female procreative power. To the chagrin of the male characters in the story, the Madonna is not only able to birth the children of dreams (who are also grotesque looking), but she is able to produce gender transformations.

She changes Jerry Coloqhoun and Ezra Garvey from men into women, turning them from silly, pathetic, victimizing males into women who are, after the metamorphosis, not too unlike the Madonna.

HEIGHTENED SENSES

The senses play an important role in Barker's writing. His fiction resounds with a love of sensory images. He is very skilled at providing detailed descriptions of scenes and characters that are easily visualized in the mind's eye. We see and smell terror when he wants us to. We hear beauty. We touch magic.

In several of his short stories, the physical senses have an even more important role as a thematic motif. Mary Florescu in “The Book of Blood,” for example, because of her unexpected contact with the supernatural, develops otherworldly senses. Barker utilizes meta-sensual images in “Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud” in discussing Ronnie Glass's interesting transformation (from man into ghost), intending them to act as a means to access the sublime (or the tragic, or the comic). Barker's somewhat humorous, somewhat hideous depiction of what happens when the ultimate aphrodisiac drug escapes the confines of the laboratory setting in “The Age of Desire” relies in large measure upon the detailing of the hapless Jerome's abnormally exaggerated senses (which inflame his lust), senses that make him a dangerous sexual freak. Images of shadow and darkness frame the narrative action within and without the confines of the Pentonville prison setting from “In the Flesh.” What inmate Cleve Smith witnesses or can't witness—because it is obscured by thick, mysterious, frightening shadows—enhances the stark, dramatic tension of the plot.

Tactile impressions of heat, water, and humidity, as well as fantastic visions of beautifully grotesque women and their children, are symbolic of women and the procreative power of women; their use reinforces Barker's intention in “The Madonna” to create a profound feminist allegory. Indeed, perception (both visual and intellectual) is crucial for Barker. In order to see the subtext of life, in order to see the reality beneath the surface appearance, in order to see the miraculous, in order to see the romance in life that is obscured by the debris of everyday banality, one must have a perceptively acute eye that can observe clearly in Heaven and in Hell, and in the world that lies in between.

THE MESSIAH FIGURE

There exists in much of Barker's writing a healthy dose of social satire. He frequently criticizes various secular and religious institutions that in his view negatively affect the way we live our lives. In particular, Barker is fascinated with the workings of religious fanaticism and how fanaticism manifests itself in the Messiah figure. Interestingly, Barker's scrutiny of the Messiah figure in his short fiction appears to be somewhat ambivalent. He writes about good and evil Messiahs, but the unsavory variety seems to crop up more often in his work than the other, and this might suggest that fanaticism, though it may be something that enriches our existence or something that may destroy us, more often than not is something we should avoid. The Messianic Quaid from the story “Dread” preaches a new religion of terror, and definitely is a distasteful character. The insane Dr. Welles in “The Age of Desire” (like Quaid) represents the evil side of our nature in that he wants to propagate a new age not of simple perverted sexual desire, not of a manic scientific mindset, but a new age of havoc and ruin, an age of the black plague's reappearance in the world. In “The Skins of the Fathers” and “Lost Souls,” Barker caustically suggests that the modern world does not act charitably toward prospective young Messiahs, since the Messianic children in each tale are either destroyed by a narrow-minded and intolerant secular society (as seen in “The Skins of the Fathers”), or by a narrow-minded and intolerant Church (as seen in “Lost Souls”). When the State and the Church assassinate these aspiring prophets, Clive Barker is suggesting that when the offspring of the truly divine are murdered by institutional society, then institutional society is effectively maintaining its mind-numbing control over people by stifling their ability to touch the miraculous, to experience imagination in its most wondrous form, to worship the divine.

THE CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY: THE STATE

Elsewhere in his short fiction, Barker attacks secular institutional order. “Hell's Event” provides a biting satire of politics, claiming that politicians are in league with the powers of Hell (which explains a great deal, Barker would tell us). “The Body Politic,” as its title might imply, is a parody of political terminology. It also critiques political social movements and the senseless ideological rhetoric that accompanies violent revolution. Barker moves from criticizing politics to lampooning the police state in “Rawhead Rex” and “The Age of Desire.” Both stories feature policemen who are something less than heroic, who are, in fact, ignorance-loving incompetents acting to impede justice rather than working to protect it. Barker negatively portrays the related areas of world politics and political espionage in “Babel's Children” and “Twilight at the Towers.” He sees both as subverting the personal freedoms of the individual. Governments, Barker suggests, are only interested in gaining power and in the maintenance of power, abandoning all sense of ethical decency in their blind, greedy pursuit of that power. In addition to a serious question about the morality (or lack of morality) in how governments govern in several of Barker's tales, the corrupt legal system is placed under close scrutiny in “How Spoilers Bleed,” with Barker coming to the conclusion that the law is manipulated by those in authority in order to subvert social justice and that the phrase “legal rights” is an oxymoron. Barker contends in “How Spoilers Bleed” that legal rights and moral rights are mutually exclusive terms. Business as an unethical institution also attracts Barker's attention. In “Coming to Grief,” he examines the hypocrisy of the funeral business and how this business exploits the grief of others (by trivializing emotion and by ritualizing how we confront—or fail to confront—death in our culture). All in all, Clive Barker regards secular institutional authority as being antithetical to the interests of the individual. It also tends to stifle imagination in our lives by attempting to enforce silly rules and senseless regulations. If left unchecked, if left unexamined, the State in Barker's short fiction is a vicious brute, dogged in the extreme, and extreme in its attack upon individual liberties. The organized mind—the cop, the bureaucrat, the spy, the businessman—as agent of institutional authority, according to Barker, is uncomprehending of magic, is destructive of wonder, and is flagrantly insensitive to our basic intellectual and emotional needs.

THE PRISON (OR TRAP) SETTING

One institution in particular which seems to manifest itself often in Clive Barker's short fiction is the prison. Barker uses images of prisons or traps to dictate the tone and setting of several tales and to underscore dramatic tension. Prisons are emblematic of persecution. They embody the physical (and sometimes the mental) tyranny of banality, the persecution of the socially disenfranchised. An individual's triumph over the trap, the escape from the prison, when rarely (if ever) enacted suggests to us an escape from cruelty and despair. The domestic prison setting of “The Yattering and Jack” encourages us to sympathize with the plight of the Yattering, a demon trapped by his mission to torment Jack Polo, and who is thus tormented in return, being nearly driven insane by the horrors of the suburban lifestyle and by Polo's pretended indifference. In “Pig Blood Blues,” Tetherdowne, or the Remand Center for Adolescent Offenders, is little more than a prison for children. The young boys are entrapped at Tetherdowne by a system indifferent to reform, and more importantly, by a looming supernatural evil (a new, wicked religious cult, in fact) powerful enough to possess even the adult authorities of the system. The fear of returning to prison ironically traps the monstrous Barberio, the escaped convict from “Son of Celluloid,” into metamorphosing into a vicious monster of cinematic images. “In the Flesh” features an actual prison for its setting in which Barker scrutinizes how inmates cope with day to day life. He features an afterlife prison in the story as well, in which he shows us the punishment (and the redemption) awaiting those who murder others. The activities of the one prison are framed by the generally unperceived existence of the other. Together, they allow Barker to demonstrate how characters react with the prospect of entrapment by an uncaring, antagonistic legal bureaucracy or of an otherworldly entrapment where sins committed in life serve to chain people to those sins in death. Helen Buchanan experiences another type of prison in “The Forbidden,” a prison hypocritically intended to be a humanitarian social welfare housing project called the Spector Street Estate (a housing project that is anything but humanitarian or social), where the inmates are poor families and where the jailers are ignorance and violence. Helen herself is eventually trapped by the supernatural warden of this welfare prison, a serial killer known as the Candyman. Her punishment, decreed by the Candyman at the conclusion of the story, is death.

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE

A great deal of what's to be found in the horror genre tends to be sexist in nature. For the most part, women are rarely granted an equal footing with men in regards to intelligence or courage, and often they serve no better purpose in the horror story than being the damsel in distress. As evidence, note the cinematic parade of “slasher” films where sexually promiscuous women are violently murdered by a male slasher figure; intriguingly, however, Carol J. Clover in her book, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), suggests a feminist interpretation of the slasher film that is more sympathetic to the roles women assume in these movies. Nevertheless, for the most part, the tradition of horror has not been kind to women through the years. As the genre evolved from its distant Gothic origins, two general types of female characters have emerged. The first type comes to us from Horace Walpole (1717-1797) and his short novel The Castle of Otranto (1764/1765), which is commonly thought to be the first modern example of the Gothic story. In this novel (and the many others that imitated it), women are passive, domestic creatures, who are in need of men's protection and moral reverence, as nicely illustrated in Walpole's narrative of Hippolita and Isabella. These women are subservient to men, victimized by men, then perhaps rescued by men. The second type of Gothic—the romantic (or woman's) Gothic—was first popularized by Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), and the literary tradition as it descends from Radcliffe does show a greater, more active involvement in the genre by women authors, who write about women for women. Radcliffe's most famous novel is The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), in which she features, instead of the male protagonist common to the Walpole model, a female protagonist named Emily St. Aubert. However, Emily is little better than Walpole's Hippolita or Isabella. Regrettably, Radcliffe's heroines in many ways are just as encumbered by the restrictions of social conventions as are Walpole's female victims. And the disciples of Radcliffe—popular women authors such as Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) with her romantic Gothic novel, Rebecca (1938)—have done little to change the situation.

Clive Barker, on the other hand, has adopted a strong feminist stance in much of his writing. Several of his short stories document the victimization of women by men; they also depict the strong feminist response to this victimization. In “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,” the female protagonist of the story is tormented by the men in her life, until she discovers a tremendous supernatural power within herself that she then uses to antagonize her antagonists. As in “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,” “The Madonna” also portrays a conflict between men and women where women triumph (physically and symbolically) over their male oppressors. The gender battle lines are even more clearly drawn in “Rawhead Rex”—where men are representative of destruction, chaos, and death, while women are representative of order and of life. In the epic conflict which ensues, the power of woman triumphs, and the evil harvest king is defeated by the earth mother queen. Closely related to Barker's feminist stance is his use of strong female protagonists. “Scape-Goats,” “Revelations,” “Babel's Children,” “The Life of Death,” and “Coming to Grief” all emphasize female protagonists who are intelligent, compelling, and realistically courageous in their actions. In fact, Clive Barker seems to create some of his best ideas while working within the woman's point-of-view. Indeed, more than any of his contemporary male peers writing in the genre, Barker—as one of the major authors today of the fantastique—is profoundly sensitive to women's issues.

CLIVE BARKER AND THE BRITISH TRADITION OF THE FANTASTIQUE

Our discussion of the major themes readily evident in Clive Barker's short fiction continues in this section as we examine Barker's use of: 1) “The Faustian Pact Tale”; 2) “The Tale of Transformation”; and 3) “The Joke as Narrative Motif.” In the W. C. Stroby interview published in the March 1991 issue of Writer's Digest, Clive Barker, by implication, places himself within the British tradition of fantasy that includes as some of its authors Bram Stoker, C. S. Lewis, J. M. Barrie, J. R. R. Tolkien, H. G. Wells, and Mary Shelley. Referring to the large number of British writers who have also written tales of dark imagination over the years, Barker adds that “the list goes on” (27). He tells Stroby,

I read those books [of science fiction, horror fiction, and fantasy fiction] as forbidden pleasures, never was taught them in school, never heard them celebrated from the mouths of educators whom I admired. So it took me three or four years after I started writing to get past the fact that this was a forbidden form—not even forbidden, that gives it too much mystique, but just a disparaged fiction—to realize that this was where my strength lay and that these forms of fiction could be extraordinarily vital and rich. And I wish to God someone had said that to me.

[27]

In part, Barker is discussing in the above passage how the literature of the fantastique in England is the literature of protest, and the literature of intellectual rebellion. And as such, because of its profound anti-establishment flavor, historically it has failed to achieve a comparable artistic recognition with the school of literary Realism: as invented in the novel and practiced by the likes of Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding.

Though the Romantic movement in England and Europe enjoyed a substantial measure of critical success in the genre of poetry—such as that received by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats—for some reason, the Gothic novels which were an offshoot of this same Romantic movement engendered considerably more scorn from the critics, despite their popularity with the mass readership. John Langhorne's review of Walpole's Castle of Otranto published in the February 1765 issue of the Monthly Review, though fairly complimentary of Walpole's novel, is nonetheless generally indicative of the literary critic's disregard of the artistic merits of the Gothic imagination. Langhorne wrote, “Those who can digest the absurdities of Gothic fiction, and bear with the machinery of ghosts and goblins, may hope, at least, for considerable entertainment from the performance before us: for it is written with no common pen” (Sabor 71). Exotic invention was then perhaps more palatable in the guise of poetry, or maybe the Gothic novels of the time were too deeply rooted in folklore and in a culture indigenous to the lower classes. Perhaps Langhorne's “ghosts and goblins” suggested a repulsively common entertainment that was more emotional in its appeal than intellectual, and thus more suspect to the educated elitist. Whatever the reasons, for the European literary critics the fantastic imagination worked throughout the nineteenth century in poetry, but not in prose. And this is the artistic, historical context that fostered the prejudice against fantasy that Barker identifies in his Writer's Digest interview.

Ironically, the embryonic Gothic imagination in America was better tolerated than in Europe. It was, in fact, the impetus that inspired much of what was published throughout the literary era known as the American Renaissance. During the relatively same period in the nineteenth century, while the Gothic in Britain was little more than a guilty pleasure of the English middle-class reader, in America the psychological Gothic tale was the narrative form of choice of such talents as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. It, unlike the European Gothic, was the fiction of the culturally elite, written by the New England elite for the New England elite. It was rarely challenged as being sub-standard or sub-literate, as was its European cousin. Though Americans appeared more comfortable with stories of dark imagination than did their British counterparts, this is not to say that horror and dark fantasy were beaten into total oblivion in Europe. Instead, the authors of the fantastique disguised what they wrote. Some of the finest British horror, for example, was not written by horror writers. Instead, it was written by authors—like Barker himself—who were not limited by the strict confines of genre expectations, and who, in fact, were more mainstream (and thus more acceptable in the eyes of the London Times literary critic) in their overall approach to their craft. Rather than being the focus of their stories, horror was only one narrative element from among many that they selected to construct their tales.

There's no denying Clive Barker's use of the horror genre as a form of artistic and ideological protest against the school of Realism (or more correctly, against the mainstream), but I would also argue Barker's connection to the legitimate British literary heritage, a heritage of fantasy equally as important as the American. This section, then, intends to trace three additional major themes in Barker short stories to specific works of literature written by three significant British authors—Christopher Marlowe, Mary Shelley, and Saki—works that are difficult to pigeonhole as genre fiction, yet nevertheless house a core of dark imagination beneath their otherwise respectable appearance. The time frame involved in this brief survey ranges from the Elizabethan through the Edwardian periods.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS, AND THE FAUSTIAN PACT TALE

In a book entitled Horror: 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (first performed in 1594, and first published in 1604) is ranked as the top entry, though technically speaking, Doctor Faustus is not a “book” in the sense that a novel is a book. Clive Barker wrote the entry entitled “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus” (which was later reprinted in Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden), in which he discusses the appeal of Marlowe's play, and in which he defines Doctor Faustus as an essential story. In Barker's own words, he describes the essential story, “It is not that the old stories are necessarily the best stories; rather that the old stories are the only stories. There are no new tales, only new ways to tell” (“Tragical History” 11).

The specific essential story that interests Barker in Doctor Faustus is the Faustian pact tale. Sylvan Barnet recognizes a religiously conservative theme in Marlowe's play, a didactic conservatism that “teaches us to adhere to traditional Christian behavior rather than to practice the unlawful things that exceptional minds give themselves to” (viii). Barker identifies this Christian conservatism in his analysis of Doctor Faustus as the fall of an “ambitious man, brought down through an excess of pride, or curiosity, or half a dozen other sweetly human qualities” (“Tragical History” 12). Barker's attraction to the Faust legend is thus understandable because much of what Clive Barker writes celebrates emotional passion and intellectual excess, which are to what Faust's ambitions ultimately lead him. For Barker, Faust is a type of tragic hero who envisions himself as a rebel, much as Barker envisions his own writing as an act of rebellion against and challenge to the status quo. Barker is also fascinated by Faust's quest for forbidden knowledge, the vulnerable mortal seeking to know and control divine (or demonic) forces, and who, conversely, despite his magnificent efforts is the one controlled by those forces, the one destroyed by his aspirations and his flawed pride. Again, Clive Barker's artistic interest in this particular aspect of Doctor Faustus is understandable, since many of Barker's characters search for forbidden knowledge of some type. Often, Barker's characters possess sinister ambitions or mask shadowy recesses within their psyche. They frequently thirst for that which is just beyond their reach and are damned for having the thirst in the first place. Noble evil (or ignoble goodness) is a paradox that Barker is most interested in writing about. He fashions moral paradox to motivate better his characters' actions in their quest for knowledge. Barker further identifies the relationship of the Faustian pact story, the horror story, and the essential story in the following passage,

[The pact] story [as an essential story] will survive any and all reworkings, however radical, because its roots are so strong. That far-sighted backward glance I spoke of earlier [in the essay]—the one that leads back to the rocky place—shows us in the Faust tale one of the most important roads in all fantastic fiction. At its center is a notion essential to the horror genre and its relations: that of a trip taken into forbidden territory at the risk of insanity and death.

[“Tragical History” 13]

Clive Barker incorporates the Faustian pact story in several of his Books of Blood stories, as well as in his novella The Hellbound Heart, and in his first novel, The Damnation Game. “The Yattering and Jack” highlights the consequences of making a bargain with Hell and the attempt to renege on that bargain. Jack Polo must suffer for the sins of his mother, for it was she who made the infernal pact. Like Daniel Webster from the Stephen Vincent Benét tale, Polo successfully beats Hell at its own game. The Faustian pact story also appears in “Hell's Event.” Gregory Burgess, a distinguished Member of Parliament, is in actuality an agent for Hell, having sold his soul for political power. With Burgess, Barker is satirically illustrating the evil self-interest that underlies the motives of a number of politicians, and the evil of politics in general. Burgess is punished for his perverted ambitions, and he is damned as well as dead at the story's conclusion—a just fate, Barker implies in the story, for the duplicitous politician. Young Billy Tait from “In the Flesh” makes a pact with his dead grandfather, Edgar Tait (who is the story's equivalent of Lucifer), for the promise of supernatural power. What the naïve Billy doesn't know about the nefarious Edgar is the maleficent reason that compels his grandfather to share his secrets. Billy is ultimately doomed in his bargain and must pay a terrible price for his foolishness. The lure of forbidden knowledge, as it tempted Billy Tait, tempts the magician Swann in “The Last Illusion” as well into selling his immortal soul in exchange for the ability to perform real magic. Then, disappointed with the bargain, Swann spends the remainder of his life showing the power of magic to be trivial, thus antagonizing his fiendish masters into retributive action. Swann is similar to Jack Polo from “The Yattering and Jack” in that each character endeavors to trick Hell into terminating the conditions of the pact instead of terminating them. However, Swann's physical body is already dead as “The Last Illusion” opens (murdered by the demonic Mr. Butterfield; score one for Hell), though his soul may still be saved from the diabolical tortures planned for it. To enact this salvation, the private investigator Harry D'Amour is recruited, the designs of Hell are thwarted, and Swann escapes his punishment.

MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN, AND THE TALE OF TRANSFORMATION

The atmosphere of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is undeniably bleak; it even has moments of genuine terror. As the editors of Horror: 100 Best Books have correctly identified, Doctor Faustus is a first-rate horror tale. And yet, why did Elizabethan audiences—who, though more broad minded and tolerant than their distant medieval relatives, were still profoundly superstitious in a religious sense—not reject such a fantastic story? Why did they not outright condemn the play as blasphemy? Part of the reason why Marlowe got away with the horror story of Doctor Faustus is that he effectively disguised it by making it look like something other than a horror story. Marlowe—as expert storyteller—knew that his audience was fascinated with magic and evil and demons from Hell (as were the readers of Dante's and John Milton's epic poetry, and as are horror film audiences today), and that's exactly what Marlowe gave them. But he packaged his horror story as moral allegory. He flirted with scary, blasphemous things in his play, yet he also presented a conclusion that judiciously punished the people who sought these scary, blasphemous things. His audience entered the realm of cultural taboo in Doctor Faustus, looked at it, thought about it, and then was led back to the social norm in the end, seeing sinners properly punished (lest it look too inviting) and God glorified over Satan. The threat of damnation made nice, frightened, cooperative men and women of his play's viewers. Indeed, Doctor Faustus is fundamentally dressed up as a cautionary tale. Mary Shelley successfully follows this same tradition in her most famous novel. However, unlike Doctor Faustus, Frankenstein is not an effective horror story; it's not even mildly frightening. It is undeniably a Gothic novel in its use of setting, and it obviously originates from Walpole's model. But Shelley's effort is much less terrifying than, say, Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796), or even the Walpole original. Rather than generating horror for the sake of horror (or shock for the sake of shock, as did Lewis and Walpole), Frankenstein is Shelley's rather tame, sometimes slow-moving debate about revolutionary knowledge, specifically about what constitutes forbidden wisdom. As in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a story about the sin of human pride gone wrong, and of mortal humanity tragically seeking that which is (and must remain) God's divine province. Marlowe is simply more frightening in the way he discusses sin than is Shelley.

The subtitle of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus, thus suggesting to her readers that the novel's narrative focus should be on the creator rather than the monster. We know from our Classical sources that Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give to humanity and was punished for his theft. Shelley intends there to be a thematic connection between the scientist Frankenstein and Prometheus, the metaphoric “fire” in question being the secret of giving life to lifelessness. Unfortunately for Shelley, history has shown her audience through the years to be decidedly more attracted to fire than the bringer of fire. The monster, and not the creator, has sparked and inflamed our imaginations. Regrettably, however, those readers of Frankenstein drawn to the novel expecting Boris Karloff will be disappointed; Shelley's monster is certainly less horrifying than the Universal Studios' version, yet infinitely more interesting in that he is such an atypical character, such an inventive combination of Adamic figure, melancholy philosopher, pitiful murderer, and persecuted freak. He, rather than Frankenstein, offers the fully realized Romantic ideal, the tragic, yet noble, Byronic figure. Victor Frankenstein himself is little more than a melodramatic protagonist, an arrogant sap and a fool who gets what he deserves. His monster, on the other hand, is both tragic and sympathetic. Nothing quite like him was written before Shelley's novel, and he represents—as does no other aspect of her story—the novel's great genius.

If, then, Frankenstein's monster is the proper focus of our attention in Shelley's non-horror, horror novel, then one of the more important aspects of the monster's story is the tale of transformation, and this is specifically where Barker's own short fiction philosophically and artistically connects to Shelley. The monster basically undergoes three significant types of transformation in Frankenstein: 1) a physical transformation, where the monster's body is physically re-born (via Frankenstein's science) from lifeless clay to living tissue; 2) an intellectual transformation, where the monster's intellect evolves from being a tabula rasa to becoming that of a sophisticated savant; and 3) a moral transformation, where the monster's new soul, which at first is good and devoid of sin, changes into something evil—a murderer's soul—because of his persecution and because of his maniacal desire for a mate like himself. The tale of transformation is what, in part, makes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein one of the great works of dark imagination, and Barker, in his own fictional efforts, seems to mine the same literary fields as did Shelley.

Numerous characters in Clive Barker's short fiction, like the monster in Frankenstein, undergo some manner of physical, intellectual, or moral transformation. Simon McNeal and Mary Florescu from “The Book of Blood” are each radically transformed—the one physically, the other intellectually, both spiritually. In “Pig Blood Blues,” boy becomes pig, in the process becoming cult leader; in “Sex, Death and Starshine,” the living die, then are re-born into a more perfect, a more aesthetic state-of-being. With “In the Hills, the Cities,” giants walk the earth, giants whose frames are composed of the innumerable bodies of otherwise simple townsfolk. Normal Stephen Grace in “Dread” changes into an abnormal axe-murderer; victimized Jacqueline Ess in “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament” changes into formidable victimizer; Phillipe Laborteaux's ape in “New Murders in the Rue Morgue” changes into something closely resembling a human; and the criminal named Barberio in “Son of Celluloid” changes into cinematic vampire. Ronnie Glass from “Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud” physically transmutes from man to ghost, as does Frankie in “Scape-Goats.” In “Human Remains,” a young male prostitute named Gavin completes his metamorphosis into a soulless echo of humanity, and the echo, in turn, assumes Gavin's former role. A knotted cord in “The Inhuman Condition” transforms into the riddle of evolution; and people's hands in “The Body Politic” transform into a murderous army of revolutionaries, rebelling against their former bodies. Immaterial ghosts become material briefly in “Revelations.” A religious fanatic morally evolves into the mortal equivalent of the Devil in “Down, Satan!” A human guinea pig in “The Age of Desire” becomes an inhuman sexual freak. A prison inmate from “In the Flesh” changes into a murderous smoke-like creature; killers and victims are made into the stuff of folklore and legend in “The Forbidden”; men are made into women in “The Madonna.” A woman dying of disease becomes Death incarnate in “The Life of Death,” inflicting upon others the unwanted gift of the plague. Imperialistic Europeans from “How Spoilers Bleed” change into the semblance of rotting fruit before they die of a supernaturally infectious jungle rot. Werewolves are made into agents of espionage in “Twilight at the Towers,” while a master illusionist becomes a master magician, becomes dead, then becomes saved in “The Last Illusion.” And finally, Miriam's moral transformation in “Coming to Grief” makes her a stronger person in the end, a person toughened by death enough to confront death squarely.

More than any other thematic device evident in Barker's fiction, the tale of transformation is the most prevalent, and obviously the author's favorite. Clive Barker's frequent use of transformation as a narrative motif reinforces his philosophical connection to the Mary Shelley school of Gothicism, and to the larger school of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Barker is enamored with telling stories of magical metamorphoses because these changes represent for him the defeat of the commonplace and the celebration of imagination. Imagination, for Barker, is change, is a crucially needed change if we, as humans, seek to improve our lot in life. Barker recognizes that physical, intellectual, and moral transformations are the stuff of life itself, and of death. Those characters who are better suited for change, those characters who are not disillusioned nor destroyed by change, in a Nietzschean sense become stronger in the process, more magical and more divine than what they had previously been or previously known. Even the act of Clive Barker writing his tales of the fantastique involves several levels of metamorphosis. At the most basic level, the author transforms words and sentences into meaningful texts. At another, more abstract level, these texts are read, and interpreted as a philosophic dialogue between the author and the reader. At a final level, this philosophical dialogue becomes a part of the reader's own imaginative process, so that, returning full circle, the product of Barker's imagining motivates us into imagining, and we are each inclusively changed by the catalyst of our imagination.

SAKI'S “THE UNREST-CURE,” AND THE JOKE AS NARRATIVE MOTIF

Perhaps the British author who Clive Barker resembles the most in his short fiction is Saki. Like Barker, Saki is a true craftsman of the written word, where each sentence, each scene, and each character are carefully devised for the precise effect, and, in addition, like Barker, Saki in his exquisitely wrought short stories relies heavily upon the joke as narrative device. For both Barker and Saki, the joke serves as an effective means by which people and people's attitudes may be closely examined and satirized. A representative tale from The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) entitled “The Unrest-Cure” nicely illustrates how Saki employs the joke as social satire, while also outlining the points of comparison between Saki's and Clive Barker's work. Basically, Saki's “The Unrest-Cure” attacks complacency and routine—in the guise of J. P. Huddle and his sister—by making fun of these traits, as do many of Barker's stories. “The Unrest-Cure” also attacks the conventions of organized religion (as well as its prejudices and its hypocrisies). A number of Barker's tales criticize organized religion, including (as a sampling) “The Midnight Meat Train,” “Pig Blood Blues,” “Rawhead Rex,” “Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud,” “Revelations,” “Down, Satan!,” and “Lost Souls.” Both Saki and Barker see the bureaucracy of organized religion as being silly, or self-serving, or just downright vicious. “The Unrest-Cure,” lastly, elevates the trickster figure—a character named Clovis, who also appears elsewhere in a number of Saki's other short stories—to a heroic level. Clovis represents Saki's “voice” in the narrative, and through Clovis, Saki is more effectively able to parody that which needs parodying in the Edwardian upper-middle class. Clive Barker, though he doesn't employ a specific persona who is consistently featured in a variety of adventures, nevertheless, as does Saki, frequently assumes a character's point-of-view in the story in order to comment specifically about our modern day foibles.

Saki's so-called cruelty in his stories has often been unfortunately misunderstood. His critics, uncomfortable with his seeming delight in constructing the bitingly caustic joke in his fiction, attempt to draw biographical connections to an unhappy childhood (hence, the explanation for the unhappy child protagonist in a number of his stories) or to a repressed homosexuality. Auberon Waugh, writing in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Chronicles of Clovis, would like us to view Saki's humor as “a lonely cry for pity and understanding,” so that we, as “normally kind-hearted” readers, will not feel too guilty for enjoying his stories (xii). This remark not only condescends to Saki's immense storytelling abilities, but it also takes that frustratingly familiar critical stance that anyone who writes about the dark side of human nature must necessarily be part of that same dark side. Barker's fiction is most definitely not a “cry for pity and understanding” (nor, I suspect, is Saki's). Instead, it is an assault against that which Barker finds malevolent (or marvelous, or both) in our society, and in us. The joke, as Saki and Barker well know, is a way in which cruelty may be instructive.

Indeed, there is a serious didactic element to Barker's use of humor. “The Book of Blood” and “Dread” each have characters who play cruel practical jokes, and who, as a consequence of playing jokes, in turn become the butt of even crueler jokes. Simon McNeal from “The Book of Blood,” for example, pretends that he is a psychic capable of communicating with the dead. He is making fun of something that should not be made fun of; he is mocking a powerful social taboo. Offended by McNeal's sense of humor, the dead decide to play their own joke on McNeal, transforming the pretend storyteller into a literal (and a more precise) teller of tales. The deranged Quaid in “Dread” plays an even more vicious variety of practical joke on Cheryl Fromm and Stephen Grace. Ostensibly conducting scientific research about the emotion of fear, Quaid is instead merely enacting his own sadistic fantasies at the expense of innocent others. With Stephen Grace, Quaid goes a bit too far in his joke, becomes trapped by it, and dies because of it. Two Books of Blood short stories that take the joke to an extreme are “The Yattering and Jack” and “Hell's Event.” Barker decimates the stereotypical domestic Christmas setting in “The Yattering and Jack” with slapstick images of homicidal turkey dinners, spinning Christmas trees, and the silly antics of an intellectually slow-as-molasses demon, who humorously vents his hellish rage (a rage that should make the strong tremble in fear) upon simple house pets. “Hell's Event” is less outrageous, but no less comical; the story takes the apocalypse and turns it into a sporting event, poking fun at both religion and sports in the process. The tale also has some fun making fun of politicians. As evidenced in the above-mentioned examples, the levels of sophistication of Clive Barker's narrative jokes are great, ranging from the merely amusing to the outrageously farcical, from light to grim humor. Sometimes Barker develops his jokes throughout the course of the entire narrative, one amusing event stacked upon another until it all becomes burlesque. Other times, Barker focuses his attention upon word play. In many of his short stories, for example, he puns in order to attack clichéd expressions, to mock expectations, to lampoon conventions of communication. One of his stories in particular, “The Body Politic,” takes word play to the limit, ridiculing the trite language of political movements to such an extent that the story itself becomes one huge pun. Barker's love of the word (and the symbolic context of language) is most evident in his love of puns; they provide the careful reader of Barker's fiction many entertaining moments of amusement.

CLIVE BARKER AS ALLEGORIST

The domain of the dark fantastique is flexible enough to accommodate equally the likes of both Stephen King and Clive Barker. It permits each author to prosper in his own unique fashion, and it rewards each with a substantial devoted following. In fact, King and Barker frame the opposite ends of the fantastique. Their efforts detail radically different approaches to the writing of their craft. Both approaches work well; they both share the same basic realm of Gothic imagination, yet they also express an artistic point-of-view that is quite distinct from one another.

In his autobiographical article entitled “On Becoming a Brand Name” that discusses his rise from obscurity to the status of best-selling author, Stephen King proclaims that he is a “brand name” writer, the “Green Giant of what is called the ‘modern horror story.’” He defines a brand name author as, “one who is known for a certain genre of popular novel” (15). King's willingness to identify himself as the producer of a market-sensitive commodity does his honesty about his writing justice, yet it also reveals how securely his fiction is tied to his understanding of the commerciality of literature, and how typically part of the current American publishing scene he is.

Stephen King and Clive Barker are each preeminently successful fantasists. Each, as mentioned in the first chapter, are recognized by their peers, their audiences, and the critics as two of the foremost of today's horror fiction writers. Yet the one author is comfortable with the designation of horror fiction writer, while the other is not. King writes to fulfill his reader's and his publisher's expectations. Clive Barker does not. King follows (and frequently imitates) what has worked well within the strict confines of the horror genre as established by the recent past (and has even written a detailed analysis of the genre's immediate history, Danse Macabre, in which he demonstrates his formidable knowledge of what has preceded his own work). Barker defies formulaic conventions, undermines expectations, and continually tests the limits of his publisher's willingness to experiment. Both King and Barker are very skilled at what they do; they just go about it from opposite ends. For the most part, Stephen King sees genre fiction as being a good thing. Clive Barker does not. Stephen King has co-opted the commercial prerequisites of the horror genre. He has adapted—and has certainly thrived by—the dictates of the literary marketplace. He has directly or indirectly profoundly reinforced with his “brand name” reference the ability of the industry to designate for the author artistic standards of conduct. King greatly empowers his readers and his publishers with the ability to determine the direction of his work. And he has done all these things while still writing some of the very best popular fiction being published today.

Returning to an earlier notion developed in the first chapter of this study, Clive Barker is very British (read: very non-traditional and very suspicious of the horror genre tag) in his approach to writing fantasy, while Stephen King is very American (read: very traditional and very comfortable with the horror genre designation). King is more intimately part of the recently evolved American business of publishing for profit than is Barker. The American publishing scene, when it made the transition from cottage industry to mass media business during the latter half of the nineteenth century, also made what was previously not condemned as being sub-standard literature—the Gothic horror story—and turned it into something that sold immensely well and that became reviled by the American critic as artistic trash. When the Gothic narrative was packaged as genre fiction (in order to be sold for profit), it lost respect in this country as a legitimate art form. And as the American popular press became even more commercial around the turn-of-the-century, as genre became even more codified as the essential medium of the dime novel, the pulp magazine, and the paperback best-seller, then genre fiction—like the horror story—became ensconced as “lowbrow” entertainment.

In Europe and America during the nineteenth century, the tale of horror was not understood to be the sole province of the unwashed masses. It was more integrated (as was discussed in the previous section) throughout the total literary culture of the period than it is today. But as our culture itself began to organize along vertical lines rather than horizontal, the Gothic horror story—as commercial entertainment—toppled to the bottom of the artistic hierarchy. What was once highbrow in American literature became lowbrow. Lawrence W. Levine argues in his study, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, that the notions that define high, middle, and low culture in our society are primarily determined by the prevailing ideology, the definitions of which are constantly in flux rather than permanently fixed. Levine also goes on to say that during the nineteenth century, American culture was a more “shared” experience than it is today (8-9). He states,

What I mean, in referring to a shared culture, is that in the nineteenth century, especially in the first half, Americans, in addition to whatever specific cultures they were part of, shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendants were to experience a century later.

[9]

I would argue that American fiction was fragmented into Levine's designations of high and low culture (what I would phrase “elite” and “popular”) about the same time as the entertainment print mass media began to establish its dominance over how the business of publishing was conducted in this country, a time frame encompassing the Civil War to World War II. Even the hardcover novel, once the sole domain of the cottage industry book seller/book publisher, by the end of the nineteenth century defined its success in commercial, rather than artistic, terms with the advent of concept of the “best-seller” (Tebbel 180). As each segment of the mass media handled genre fiction—the dime novel from approximately 1860 to 1910; the pulp magazine from approximately 1910 to 1950; and the paperback book from the late 1930s to the present—it was attacked more vigorously by Levine's newly evolving cultural elite. By the time Stephen King inherited the distinction of being one of the top best-selling authors of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the damage caused horror fiction by its very popularity with a mass audience was complete. King's tremendous success engendered mistrust and dislike by the literary critic. And yet, King found solace in his sales figures, comfort in his multimillion dollar contracts, protection from the stabbing barbs of the hostile New York Times book reviewer. The American Gothic horror novel, with King's defiant assistance, is now both successful and vilified. It has relinquished the hold it once enjoyed upon the American literary imagination of the nineteenth century (as outlined in the previous section). It has become primarily concerned with cheap thrills, with the scare, with shock value, because these things sell to a large audience.

If the European Gothic novel was intellectually suspect during the nineteenth century, it never added to that problem the additional problem of being commercially suspect as well. The British authors identified in the previous section did not have to combat the equivalent of the contemporary American commercial press. The British did have their “penny dreadfuls,” but these never defined the standards of the entire British publishing industry. Having not been cursed (or blessed, depending upon your perspective) with a dominant commercial press where the financial bottom line reigned supreme, authors like Shelley and Saki were given a much freer hand in writing fantasy, in incorporating fantasy as part of their larger narratives, in utilizing dark fantasy for something more than mere shock-for-shock's sake entertainment. And this is where Barker again differs fundamentally from Stephen King. Barker wants to transform the horror genre, King wants to enforce it.

Clive Barker makes known his dislike of popular genres in the following statement,

Genre makes a most reliable noose; a man could strangle himself a dozen times attempting to separate the threads of one fictional form from another. It's true that both publishers and booksellers make the process seem easy, dividing Romances from Thrillers from Science Fiction from Horror Fiction, as though these definitions were self-evident. To slicken the process still further, many authors actively strive to produce work that merely echoes previous pieces (their own, or other people's) thus offering little challenge to the generic status quo.

[“FT Forum” 3-4]

What is obvious, finally, in our comparison between King and Barker is that King endeavors to entertain his readers, while Barker wants to instruct them. Clive Barker's creative efforts, like Christopher Marlowe's and Mary Shelley's and Saki's and a handful of others, are didactic in nature, and the subject of their instruction is Mystery. Indeed, Barker's writings are similar to the European mystery plays where sin is examined and divine passion is revealed to an audience. Like these mystery plays, Barker balances reality with fantasy, subjectivity with objectivity. He employs fanciful concepts to explain that which desires to become fanciful. Barker is a modern-day allegorist. His fiction, as I hope I have illustrated, is replete with subtextual references. It contains extended metaphors, complex structures of socio-political references, ideas crammed with double meaning, rich symbolic narratives that reveal the world to us, while concurrently mystifying it. First and foremost, Barker strives to teach us in his writings, to show us how to approach imagination, embrace imagination, revere imagination. Barker is less the horror fiction writer, and more the instructor. If we read Barker's short fiction carefully, we may become enlightened by his instruction.

In leaving our analysis of Clive Barker's short fiction, a scene in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) reminds me of Barker's Books of Blood. At the end of the tenth chapter of Wilde's novel, Lord Henry Wotton gives Dorian Gray a “yellow book” (yellow representing to the Victorian mind evil, corruption, death). This book comes to define Dorian's descent into decadence as being equally as important in Wilde's narrative as is Dorian's magical portrait that records his every wrinkle and sin, while leaving the picture's subject eternally young and beautiful. This book is but another attempt on the part of the depraved Lord Henry to corrupt further the morally declining Dorian Gray. Wilde writes,

After a few moments [of reading] he [Dorian Gray] became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

[155]

Dorian's initial experience with Lord Henry's book of forbidden knowledge is the quintessential metaphor for the Gothic itself. Power, albeit dark power, is revealed to Dorian, a power that fundamentally and forever alters the course of his life. Dorian is eventually consumed by this power, his life forfeited in the bargain, yet power he does possess for a brief time, the power of moral transformation, of altered perceptions of life and death, of the knowledge of gods and devils. The book has force. It has vitality. It has the ability to affect reality. It sparks desire and thought, divines or obscures the truth, makes profound change.

Wilde's sinister book-within-a-book is closely analogous to Barker's texts-within-texts. For Barker, the book symbolizes magic. It represents dreams and nightmares and the entire realm of human thought existing in-between. The book for Barker is the medium of instruction. It is the medium of confession. It is the place where people, living and dead, tell their tales, and are cathartically purged during the telling (as we are perhaps cathartically purged during the listening). It is the source of redemption, the dictionary of inspiration, and the encyclopedia of ingenuity. Wilde's rendition of the efficacy of the book and of the process of reading the book, however, only shows the negative side. Barker approaches imagination from both the dark and the light, since both qualities are essential components of the human condition (and of divinity). Wilde's book is only dark, while Barker's books disclose the totality of our experience, and of our dreams. At times, Barker's message is grim, but equally it is hopeful. At times, Barker writes of horror and of death, but equally he writes of love and fellowship. At times, Barker shows us ugly demons, but equally he shows us beautiful angels.

Most certainly, Clive Barker's Books of Blood—as well as his other uncollected short fiction—are his generous gifts to imagination, and we are most thankful for the fine presents.

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