[In the following review, Morrison explores thematic and stylistic aspects of the short stories in the first three Books of Blood.]

In 1984, Sphere Books unleashed upon the unsuspecting world Clive Barker's Books of Blood, three volumes of tales by a writer heretofore unknown in the genre. Although traditional in form and style, Barker's stories are original, disturbing, and as discomforting as anything in contemporary literature. This collection heralds the arrival of a major new talent in horror fiction.

Some of the stories in Books of Blood are inventive variations on traditional themes. For example, “Son of Celluloid” and “Human Remains” are vampire and doppelganger stories, respectively; and “The Midnight Meat Train” is a zombie story that might give George Romero nightmares. But in works like “In the Hills, the Cities” and “The Skins of the Fathers,” Barker has created brilliant, pyrotechnic tales unlike anything else in the field. The power of his vision derives from the intensity of his consistently bleak world view, from his visceral, graphic horrors, from the thematic sub-texts that enrich many of his stories, and from his willingness to take risks.

SPLATTER, SEX, SICK JOKES

The first story, “The Book of Blood,” provides a frame for the collection. The set-up is almost trite. Simon McNeal, a cocky, twenty-year-old medium, is ostensibly helping a group of Essex University parapsychologists search for ghosts in a decaying, reputedly haunted house at No. 65, Tollington Place. In fact, McNeal is a con man; seduced by promises of wealth and notoriety, he is faking manifestations of the dead: noises, voices, ghost-writings on the wall.

The dead are not amused. To avenge their wounded egos, they inscribe their “testaments” on the naked, pain-wracked body of McNeal, who becomes “… their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies … the revelation of life beyond flesh, written in flesh itself.” In this neat and nasty turn on Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man (1951), McNeal's skin illustrations are etched in his own blood.

In this short tale we find most of the characteristics of Clive Barker's fiction: explicit sex and violence; a sprinkling of humor—usually verbal, often sick; a vivid, cinematic style; and a grotesque, nihilistic, yet fundamentally Romantic world view.

Barker's unrestrained imagination overwhelms realism, reason and rationality, creating a primitive universe that is relentlessly inimical to man, a dangerous place where the most innocent of actions can lead to the most horrible of consequences. Thus, in “Rawhead Rex,” when a farmer named Thomas Garrow, clearing his land one late September day, uproots a large stone from the sodden ground, he unleashes an ancient, incredibly vicious monster—“the Beast of the Wild Woods,” “the child-devourer”—which promptly lays waste to Garrow and his town.

The moral landscape revealed in Books of Blood is devoid of hope. This stance is the culmination of a tradition that stretches from the ironic, bleak stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu straight through hundreds of volumes of English ghost stories to the subjective, nightmarish masterpieces of Ramsey Campbell. “It's a vast, devouring world,” writes Oliver Vassi, the doomed lover of Jacqueline Ess in “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,”

… it's easy to believe the world means you no harm … But to think that the world is harmless is to lie to yourself, to believe in so-called certainties that are, in fact, simply shared delusions.

Oliver's philosophy is vivified by the events of his story. Jacqueline, a “burning Madonna” with “a Gioconda smile,” is disgusted with “the boredom, the drudgery, the frustration” of her life, and, at the beginning of the story, tries to kill herself. In the extremity of attempted suicide, she discovers within herself the psychokinetic power to wreak limitless physiological changes on the human form. (In one of Barker's characteristically gruesome set pieces, Jacqueline uses this killing gift to turn her boorish, sexist male physician, Dr. Blandish, into a woman!) Initially, she sees in this power the possibilities of a new identity and of liberation from a male-dominated world, and she sets out to learn how to use her “peculiar talent.” But in Barker's world, freedom does not come from mere power, however awesome. By the story's end, Jacqueline has become a whore, bereft of hope and consumed by self-hate, locked with Oliver, the one man who truly loves her, in an embrace of mutual annihilation.

Barker's apparent philosophy is again clearly stated in his most radical story, “Dread.” At the heart of “Dread” is Quaid, a sinister, sadistic student at an unnamed University. Quaid, with his “basilisk-like stare” and “vulpine” smile is a chilling personification of intellectual evil; he hovers over this tale—and over Books of Blood—“like a carrion-bird at the sight of some atrocity.”

… there was a bitter humour in his vision of the world. People were lambs and sheep, all looking for shepherds. Of course these shepherds were fictions. … All that existed, in the darkness outside the sheep-fold were the fears that fixed on the innocent mutton: waiting, patient as stone, for their moment.

Everything was to be doubted, but the fact that dread existed.

This grim world view is reflected in the physical landscapes of Books of Blood,” oppressive, threatening wastelands redolent with menace. Thus “Pig Blood Blues” is set in Tetherdowne, a grey, prison-like reform school that squats menacingly in a rank wilderness on “drought-hardened ground.” And much of “Hell's Event”—Barker's most overtly political story—takes place in a glittering natural ice cavern beneath London, a tunnel that plummets straight to the Ninth Circle of Hell.

Barker evokes these landscapes through vivid sensory images. His imagery is particularly potent in “Scape-Goats”—a lesser tale about four unlikeable young people who are shipwrecked near the Inner Hebrides. The island setting is certainly no paradise; it is a “vile, stinking, insane island,” enshrouded with thick, clammy mist. The beach is covered with “a slick film of grey-green algae, like sweat on a skull,” with slimy strands of seaweed, and

… the usual detritus washed up on any beach: the broken bottles, the rusting Coke cans, the scum-stained cork, globs of tar, fragments of crabs, pale-yellow durex. And crawling over these stinking piles of dross were inch-long, fat-eyed blue flies. Hundreds of them. …

If Barker's natural landscapes are bleak and decaying, his cities are even worse. The New York City to which Leon Kaufman comes in “The Midnight Meat Train” is “a slut,” “sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in her throttled passages.” The perpetrator of the atrocities is the Subway Killer Mahogany, whose “sacred duty” is the butchery of the city's inhabitants. But the monsters of this slaughterhouse, Mahogany and his ancient and horrible masters, are barely distinguishable from the human debris that chokes the city and its subways. To live in this “Palace of Delights” mankind must pay a price far higher than mere death, as Kaufman learns when his subway train unexpectedly detours deep into the bowels of the city.

DIALOGUES OF THE DAMNED

Through these landscapes wander Barker's spiritually destitute characters, persecuted by the omnipotent forces of evil that animate his cosmos. Characterization is not yet Barker's strong suit; most of his people are too unsympathetic or downright repellent to encourage identification. Often he gives us so little background they seem to lack a history. But he writes superb dialogue, and his most memorable creations—Gavin, the benumbed, narcissistic male prostitute of “Human Remains”; Richard Walden Lichfield, the regal “guardian angel” who oversees the spectacular last rites of the Elysium theater in “Sex, Death, and Starshine”; Birdy, the gutsy survivor who battles “the flesh behind the fantasy” of the movies in “Son of Celluloid”; all come alive through their speech.

Like Leon Kaufman, Gavin, and Birdy, most of Barker's “walking wounded” are victims, guilty of little more than ambition, curiosity, or a mild voyeuristic fascination with violence. Often they are doomed by mere happenstance, by the capricious malevolence of Barker's cosmos. This absurdist evil is the motive force in “In the Hills, the Cities.” The protagonists of this audacious tale—Mick, a 25-year-old dance teacher and Judd, his right-wing journalist lover—lose their way while on a “caravan through the graveyards of mid-European culture.” In the lonely, desolate hill country of Yugoslavia, Mick and Judd wander into “a corner of hell” where the twin cities of Popalac and Podujevo are waging an ancient, ceremonial battle, “the game of giants.” There is certainly nothing in the histories or actions of these “innocents” to justify their terrible fates. Characteristically, the relationship between Mick and Judd is barren, redeemed only momentarily by loveless sex. They lack emotional bonds that might enable them to cope with the incomprehensible. Mick and Judd can find solace only in the arms of horror and death. As the gargantuan, crumbling tower of flesh that once was the city of Popalac lurches towards them, they watch, “rooted to the spot”:

They knew this was a sight they could never hope to see again; this was the apex—after this there was only common experience. Better to stay then, though every step brought death nearer, better to stay and see the sight while it was still there to be seen. And if it killed them, this monster, then at least they would have glimpsed a miracle, known this terrible majesty for a brief moment. It seemed a fair exchange.

This theme—that the sting of death is preferable to the enervating awfulness of life—runs like acid through the horror fiction of Clive Barker. In stories like “Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud,” only the violent dead are free. This wry, heavily ironic tale is the saga of Ronald Glass, a straight-laced accountant who is framed as a pornographer and then tortured and murdered by the head of a vice ring. The spirit of Glass returns, a grotesque, murderous parody of Casper the Friendly Ghost, hungry for vengeance. Only in his living death does Glass find joy and freedom:

He existed in mutiny against nature, that was his state; and for the first time in his life (and death) he felt an elation. To be unnatural: to be in defiance of system and sanity, was that so bad? He was … resurrected in a piece of stained cloth; he was a nonsense. Yet he was. No one could deny him being, as long as he had the will to be. The thought was delicious; like finding a new sense in a blind, deaf world.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

The paradox that the only life worth living is to be found after death infuses one of Barker's finest tales, “Sex, Death, and Starshine.” This romp of the dead is set in the Elysium, an old, decaying Redditch theater. A cynical, embittered director named Terry Calloway is trying to save his production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, a truly Sisyphean task. Terry must contend with Hammersmith, the Elysium's hostile, mercenary manager; with Diane Duvall, a dim, thunderously inept soap opera queen whom Terry has been forced to cast as Viola; and with a cast that neither understands nor gives a damn about the play. But these are the least of Terry's problems: although he does not know it, his will be the last production at the Elysium, a command performance for the reanimated corpses of the actors and stage hands who, in better days, loved and cared for the theater.

The living and the dead of the Elysium embody alternate possibilities of existence, and Barker leaves no doubt which is to be preferred. On the one hand, the dull grey horror of life is expressed by Tallulah, an elderly woman who has looked after the theater and its box office since she was 15. Her life is “a slow and joyless march through a cold land. There were mornings now, stirring to another dawn, when she would turn over and pray to die in her sleep.” Terry and his actors are less aware but no better off, playing vacuous roles and pointless games of “sex, booze, and ambition” as they age and decay like the theater itself.

The dead, however, are genuine, vibrant, and full of conviction. They are led by the corpse of Richard Walden Lichfield, former trustee of the Elysium and husband to the beautiful, talented (and dead) actress Constantia, whom Lichfield considers a more suitable Viola than the dreadful Diane Duvall. Lichfield is a wonderful character: witty, urbane, and animated by his love for the theater. He and his shambling troop of corpses are determined that their “temple of dreams” shall “die a good death,” which indeed it does in Barker's spectacular climax.

“Sex, Death, and Starshine” closes with a marvelous scene of Lichfield and his merry band standing by a motorway, preparing to “imitate life” for a very special audience:

… their new public, awaiting them in mortuaries, churchyards, and chapels of rest, would appreciate that skill more than most. Who better to applaud the sham and passion and pain they would perform than the dead, who had experienced such feelings, and thrown them off at last?

Death has granted Calloway, Tallulah, and a few other lovers of the theater surcease from life, and freedom to indulge their art. Lichfield, addressing his traveling players, succinctly summarizes Barker's theme: “To you, who have never died, may I say: welcome to the world!”

MARVELOUS MAYHEM

Many of Barker's stories contain scenes of spectacular chaos, scenes that actually mitigate somewhat the effect of his grey physical and moral landscapes and his nihilistic philosophy. After the unremitting bleakness of such tales as “Scape-Goats,” “Dread,” and “New Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the gleeful carnage of the death of the Elysium theater, the marauding destruction of “Rawhead Rex,” the assault on the town of Welcome, Arizona by a horde of capering demons in “The Skins of the Fathers,” and many other set pieces in Books of Blood come almost as a relief.

Barker's uninhibited mayhem sets his work apart from that of his contemporary Ramsey Campbell, who is nonetheless closest among modern horror writers to Barker's world view. But Campbell's nihilism is undiluted. Both have, for example, written stories about haunted cinemas. But, although their stories reflect a common view of the world, they differ enormously in intent and execution. Campbell's “The Show Goes On” (in Dark Companions, 1983) is an almost surreal psychological horror story, while Barker's “Son of Celluloid” is an extravagant, extroverted exploration, of several themes, including film performers' need for adulation, the dangers of confusing fiction and reality, and the cost movies exact from their viewers.

In “The Show Goes On,” urban paranoia and childhood memories merge in the mind of a lonely Liverpool shopkeeper who is searching for thieves in the long-disused cinema behind his store. Characteristically, Campbell constructs his subjective tale from subtle, taut images rather than from overtly horrific scenes. Nevertheless, this nightmare of barely-heard, ominous sounds and half-glimpsed, menacing shadows is profoundly disturbing.

Barker's tale, on the other hand, is a graphic, grotesque comedy about a vampiric monster born of the cancer of an escaped cop-killer who takes refuge in the back of a seedy, decaying movie theater. This truly revolting creature is given life by the vicarious emotions of the thousands of movie-goers who have attended the Movie Palace over the years, “pressing their sympathies and their passions on to the flickering illusion, the energy of their emotions, gathering strength like a neglected cognac …” The creature can assume human forms—Peter Lorre, John Wayne, and Marilyn Monroe make cameo appearances—as well as the many shapes of nightmare. And it can distort the reality of its victims, on whom it feeds both literally and psychically. “The Main Feature” in this bizarre tale is a wildly imaginative, often gross confrontation between the monstrous parasite and two humans: Ricky, the theater manager, and an overweight employee named Birdy.

Although Barker's carnage is more vivid (and disgusting) than Campbell's introverted obsessiveness, it is less unsettling. “Son of Celluloid” is an exceptional story, but not a haunting one; it does not linger in the mind as does “The Show Goes On.” This contrast is not restricted to these two tales; in spite of its violence, Barker's writing thus far lacks the deeply disturbing psychological overtones of Campbell's.

MANIC WIT

As a counterpoint to the spectacle, a rich current of manic wit runs through many of the stories in Books of Blood. Like the carnage, these comedic elements alleviate slightly the tales' grim tone. Barker's wit ranges from wild slapstick to subdued word play, but his humor is always at the expense of the human characters. The funniest of Barker's stories is “The Yattering and Jack,” in which a “lower demon” meets his match in Jack J. Polo, a wily gherkin dealer. The war of wits between the demonic practical joker and “a no-account, one of nature's blankest little numbers,” contains scenes worthy of Max Sennet, including a pitched battle between Jack and a half-cooked Christmas turkey:

… The bird inside [the oven] had apparently no intentions of being eaten. It was flinging itself from side to side on the roasting tray, tossing gouts of gravy in all directions. … Headless, oozing stuffing and onions, it flopped around as though nobody had told the damn thing it was dead, while the fat still bubbled on its bacon-strewn back.

But “The Yattering and Jack” is atypical in mood and tone; in most of Barker's stories, the wit is subdued, heavily ironic, and primarily verbal. In “Pig Blood Blues,” for example, Barker toys with the euphemism pig for policeman; the protagonist is a former cop whose name, Redman, is an anagram of remand, which is also the name of the “Center for Adolescent Offenders” where the story takes place. Even in so dark a tale as “Human Remains,” in which Gavin, a cynical, narcissistic male prostitute, meets an apt if starkly horrific end, occasional puns lighten the mood. At one point Gavin is threatened by a sadistic pimp named Preetorius: “Allow me to rearrange your face for you. A little crime of fashion.”

Barker is also a merciless satirist. In “Sex, Death, and Starshine,” he describes Diane Duvall, the soap-opera-queen-turned-Shakespearean-actress:

With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid every nuance the playwight would insist on putting in her way. It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Calloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine.

Since Barker's satire is always directed at humans, they usually compare quite unfavorably with his monsters. The “gorgeous array” of “vast and monumental creatures” that come to Welcome, Arizona to claim their changeling son in “The Skins of the Fathers,” are far more sympathetic and full of joie de vivre than the “impressive array of mean-minded, well-armed people” who live there. The sheriff of Welcome is one of Barker's most scathingly drawn characters, a “hick town Mussolini” who exudes an “atmosphere of hand-me-down machismo.” In this and other stories, Barker leaves little doubt who the real monsters are.

Volumes 1-3 of Clive Barker's Books of Blood have already made their mark on the field of dark fantasy; at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention, Stephen King remarked that the name of the future in horror fiction may well be Clive Barker. And we shall soon hear more from Barker. His first novel, The Damnation Game, is forthcoming from Weidenfeld in September, 1985, and Volumes 4, 5, and 6 of Books of Blood are due from Sphere in June. Several of the stories in the first three volumes have been sold to Limehouse Productions, for whom Barker is also working on a horror film entitled Underworld.

All this is good news for the genre. Barker's stories are consistently ambitious, original, and skillfully rendered. His work is as provocative, powerful and well-crafted as any fiction being written today.