[In the following excerpt, Joshi contends there are conceptual flaws in Barker's short stories and novels.]

CLIVE BARKER: SEX, DEATH, AND FANTASY

When Clive Barker's Books of Blood were published by Sphere Books in London in 1984-85, the world took notice. Hitherto known only as a dramatist whose plays had been performed but not published, Barker (b. 1952) accomplished a feat almost unheard of in publishing by having not one but six paperback volumes of his short stories issued by a major firm. At a time when even established authors in the field had difficulty in publishing collections of short fiction, Barker's achievement was more than unusual. Barker has now issued a novel, The Damnation Game (1985), a novella, The Hellbound Heart (1986), and three more novels, Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1989), and Imajica (1991), along with a short novel, Cabal (1988), a young adult novel, The Thief of Always (1992), and random other short stories. The Great and Secret Show, subtitled The First Book of The Art, was the first in a projected series of four or five novels. Barker has also attempted to write and direct films, with middling success, and has allowed his work to be adapted into comic books (or “graphic novels,” as they are pretentiously called), although he himself has had little to do with their conception or execution.

Early in his career Barker was lauded by Stephen King with the now famous tag, “I have seen the future of horror … and it is named Clive Barker.” In consequence, not only has Barker received generally more favorable reviews in the mainstream press, but higher expectations have been generated for his work than for popular bestseller material such as King's. And it is reasonable to demand greater literary substance from Barker, especially as he himself is not shy about claiming such substance for himself. But whether he belongs in the class of Blackwood, Dunsany, and Lovecraft (or of Shirley Jackson and Ramsey Campbell) is far from clear.

The keynote of Barker's early work is a frenetic mix of gruesome physical horror, rather conventional supernaturalism, and explicit sex. It would be untrue to say that Barker is aiming purely at shock value in all this, but it is also untrue to believe that he has the literary skill to raise this subject matter very much above the level of sensationalism. Barker is a writer of considerable imagination but extraordinarily slipshod style, conception, and execution. Like many writers, he has already written (or published) too much. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, of his voluminous work, perhaps only five or six stories from the Books of Blood and The Damnation Game are all that are worth reading.

What I find most interesting about Barker is his place in the history of weird fiction. He is in many ways a herald of the complete and possibly irremediable decadence of the field. He is the prototypical example of the tendency I have noted in my introduction: the failure to give a plausible account of supernatural phenomena. Everything in Barker is directed toward the level of pure sensation.

Let us consider “Sex, Death and Starshine.” Here we are asked to believe that ghosts of old actors are presiding over the final performance of a Shakespeare play at an old theatre about to be demolished. But Barker provides no rationale (not even one acceptable on supernatural grounds) for how the bodies of those old actors, and the living actors whom they kill, simply come back to life for this final curtain call. Consider the resurrection of Tallulah, an aged employee who has been at the theatre since its heyday 50 years before. She is killed by Lichfield, the leader of the band of deceased actors, but this is of no consequence: “She'd cool easily in the chill of the room, and be up and about again by the time the audience arrived” (BB[Books of Blood]1, 156). This single sentence encapsulates what might be called the fossilization of weird fiction: its transformation from an outgrowth of a philosophical position to a conventionalized genre in which certain events have become standardized because they have been used so often. Barker has no doubt encountered so many instances of the resurrection of the dead (in stories, novels, movies, and comic books) that he no longer feels the need to explain it—it simply provides an excuse for a certain type of frisson that is to be experienced as such without any thought of its plausibility or its philosophical or aesthetic purpose. In this case, we are evidently to be entertained at the prospect of witnessing a dead actress giving a still living director a blow job (he is amazed that she does not breathe during the process). It never seems to occur to Barker to wonder, if these particular corpses can be reanimated so effortlessly, why all corpses do not behave this way.

This identical problem mars another, later work, Cabal, and in such a way as to suggest that the absence of a rationale for the supernatural is not merely a technical failing on Barker's part but something that he feels is simply not necessary in a tale of this sort. Cabal rests upon the presupposition that there exists a place called Midian where only “monsters” (i.e., those who have apparently committed heinous crimes) are welcome. In fact, these monsters are simply the resurrected dead. How did this happen? A desperate man who thinks he has committed a series of murders seeks out Midian. Although he discovers that it is not on any map (C [Cabal] 32), he and other characters end up finding it relatively easily in the north of Canada. He is eventually gunned down by a pursuing posse of police but calmly walks out of the morgue for further adventures. Only toward the end of the novel do we get a faint rationale for how this could have occurred: he was previously bitten by one of the undead and was therefore “infected” (C 154). But this only pushes the question back one step further: how did the undead become “infected”? Is there something about criminals that causes them to come back from the dead? It is all entirely unaccounted for, and this short novel simply collapses from its own absurdity.

Other stories in the Books of Blood also suffer from serious conceptual difficulties. “The Midnight Meat Train” is riddled with implausibilities of plot. Although Barker now spends much of his time in New York, it is painfully obvious that he had not been there at the time he wrote this story, since its account of horrors on the subway is full of transparent mistakes (there is no “Avenue of the Americas” line; one cannot hear conversation from one subway car to the next). These implausibilities, however, could have been acceptable if Barker had restricted the story to one of suspense in which a man going home late at night on the subway is attempting to escape a serial killer in the next car. But the story rapidly becomes preposterous when we are asked, with apparent seriousness, to believe that the serial killer is really feeding the bodies he kills to the “City fathers” (BB1, 47) who live in the bowels of the subway. Here again we are presented with the ludicrous proposition that these City fathers must eat human flesh to remain alive (BB1, 46)—why should this be the case?

The height of absurdity is reached when, at what is presumably meant to be the grand horrific climax, we encounter “the original American” (BB1, 48) who rules this band of cannibals. “It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in unison, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was iridescent, like mother of pearl, but it was sometimes deeper than any color Kaufman knew, or could put a name to” (BB1, 49). But Barker has failed to think out this conception adequately. What significance, political or otherwise, is intended here? Evidently the only object of this “original American” is to inspire physical disgust at its repulsive appearance. Barker is saying nothing of importance about the horror and decadence of the city, or of their causes.

Even some of Barker's better tales have flaws in conception, especially on the key issue of where and how the supernatural enters into the matter. “Son of Celluloid” is a powerful tale of a criminal who dies behind the screen of an old movie theatre and in some fashion causes the revival of the famous actors and actresses who enlivened that screen, but again the critical issue of how this is actually accomplished is not carefully worked out. Here is Barker's account:

The space however, like the air itself, had lived a life of its own in that fifty years. Like a reservoir, it had received the electric stares of thousands of eyes, of tens of thousands of eyes. Half a century of movie goers had lived vicariously through the screen of the Movie Palace, pressing their sympathies and their passions on to the flickering illusion, the energy of their emotions gathering strength like a neglected cognac in that hidden passage of air. Sooner or later, it must discharge itself. All it lacked was a catalyst.

Until Barberio's cancer.

[BB3, 8]

Cancer, I suppose, is one of the great horrors of our time, but that it makes the resurrection of Marilyn Monroe possible might strain anyone's credulity. The imagery and atmosphere of the story are highly effective, but, like so much of Barker, the tale is crippled by its ludicrous premise.

“Rawhead Rex” is the moderately entertaining story of a huge, nine-foot-tall creature who crawls out from under a rock in a field and rampages through the countryside; but the only account we get of the entity is from a human who has fallen under its influence: “‘There were things that owned this land. Before Christ. Before civilization. Most of them didn't survive the destruction of their natural habitat: too primitive I suppose. But strong. Not like us; not human. Something else altogether’” (BB3, 57). Barker evidently feels that this half-baked anthropology is sufficient. It is clear that the true aim of the story is simply to inspire disgust at the creature on account of its penchant for munching on innocent children:

It was half past eleven at night. Rawhead Rex lay under the moon in one of the harvested fields to the southwest of the Nicholson Farm. The stubble was darkening now, and there was a tantalizing smell of rotting vegetable matter off the earth. Beside him lay his dinner, Ian Ronald Milton, face up on the field, his midriff torn open. Occasionally the beast would lean up on one elbow and paddle its fingers in the cooling soup of the boy child's body, fishing for a delicacy.

Here, under the full moon, bathing in silver, stretching his limbs and eating the flesh of human kind, he felt irresistible. His fingers drew a kidney off the plate beside him and he swallowed it whole.

Sweet.

[BB3, 80]

One winces at this—not at what is being described but at Barker's fatuity in believing that such ham-fisted sadism can genuinely affect an adult reader.

It is already evident that much of Barker's work contains an element of political or social criticism, but it is equally evident that much of this is superficial in the extreme. “In the Hills, the Cities” contains, as Ramsey Campbell states in his introduction to the Books of Blood (BB1, xii), one of the more original monsters in horror fiction: a huge figure made up of thousands of human beings who practice for years to perfect the motions suitable for their respective places in the entity's anatomy. But the whole conception becomes trivialized by being used as a facile satire on the collectivist state: we are behind the Iron Curtain, where the “illusion of petty individuality was swept away in an irresistible tide of collective feeling” (BB1, 197). As if this passage, and others like it, were not enough, Barker feels the need to editorialize bluntly in order to convey his message to even the least astute reader: “Locked in their positions, strapped, roped and harnessed to each other in a living system that allowed for no single voice to be louder than any other, nor any back to labor less than its neighbor's, they let an insane consensus replace the tranquil voice of reason. They were convulsed into one mind, one thought, one ambition. They became, in the space of a few moments, the single-minded giant whose image they had so brilliantly recreated” (BB1, 196-97).

“Babel's Children” is an exercise in cheap political satire. It is a tale of a young woman traveling on an island off the coast of Greece and stumbling upon a group of aged individuals who are actually governing the world because elected heads of state are too stupid to do so. “‘We run the world. It wasn't meant to be that way, but as I said, systems decay. As time went by the potentates—knowing they had us to make critical decisions for them—concerned themselves more and more with the pleasures of high office and less and less with thinking. Within five years we were no longer advisors, but surrogate overlords, juggling nations’” (BB5, 89). After a time these people no longer rule the world by reason but merely by playing games of chance to determine the resolution of events. And when all but one of them die in an escape attempt, the woman is forced to take over their position. All this is presented in a somewhat lighthearted manner, but it cannot conceal the poverty of genuine and penetrating political insight that a story like this must offer.

“The Forbidden” is the one story in Barker's work that seems to promise a somewhat more interesting and subtle social commentary. Here a middle-class woman working on a thesis on graffiti enters a ghetto seeking source material. Instead, she encounters vague rumors of a horrible murder that took place there recently. She has trouble verifying the account, and her friends scoff at her and think she has been taken in by a hoax or fabrication. But as the woman becomes more and more acclimated to her ghetto surroundings, she comes to find her friends effete and smart-alecky. She has undergone a slow cultural transformation. “Nor was it simply the presence of so many people that reassured her; she was, she conceded to herself, happy to be back here in Spector Street. The quadrangles, with their stunted saplings and their grey grass, were more real to her than the carpeted corridors she was used to walking; the anonymous faces on the balconies and streets meant more than her colleagues at the University. In a word, she felt home” (BB5, 29). She meets the Candyman, a figure who embodies the rumors that come out of the ghetto. Eventually she succumbs, in a scene that poignantly combines horror, pathos, and bitter cynicism:

Perhaps they would remember her, as he had said they might, finding her cracked skull in tomorrow's ashes. Perhaps she might become, in time, a story with which to frighten children. She had lied, saying she preferred death to such questionable fame; she did not. As to her seducer, he laughed as the conflagration sniffed them out. There was no permanence for him in this night's death. His deeds were on a hundred walls and ten thousand lips, and should he be doubted again his congregation could summon him with sweetness. He had reason to laugh.

[BB5, 37]

The story continually wavers between mundane fear (fear of rape or murder) and metaphysical fear. It is one of Barker's few early successes.

From a slightly different perspective, sociopolitical considerations enter indirectly through the dismal, grim, and generally lower-class settings and characters of the majority of his tales. Is Barker saying that horror only affects such areas and such figures? This presupposition is very strong. As he writes in The Damnation Game:

Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned. In an earlier age Pandemonium—the first city of Hell—stood on a lava mountain while lightning tore the clouds above it and beacons burned on its walls to summon the fallen angels. Now, such spectacle belongs to Hollywood. Hell stands transposed. No lightning, no pits of fire.

In a wasteland a few hundred yards from a highway overpass it finds a new incarnation: shabby, degenerate, forsaken. But here, where fumes thicken the atmosphere, minor terrors take on a new brutality. Heaven, by night, would have all the configurations of Hell.

[DG [The Damnation Game] 327]

Accordingly, Barker's settings include prisons (“Pig Blood Blues,” “In the Flesh,” “The Body Politic” in part), seedy hotels (“Revelations”), and the ghetto (“The Forbidden”). Among his characters are sadists (“Dread”), ignorant and uncouth townspeople (“The Skins of the Fathers”), criminals (“Son of Celluloid”), pornographers (“Confession of a (Pornographer's) Shroud”) prostitutes both female (“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”) and male (“Human Remains”), young thugs (“The Inhuman Condition”), oily fundamentalist preachers (“Revelations”), and the like.

But it would be too comforting to imagine that horror never strays beyond the prison or the ghetto, and some of Barker's most powerful tales are those in which middle-class characters are drawn inexorably into what Bruce Springsteen has called the “darkness on the edge of town.” We have already seen this mingling of class in “The Forbidden.” “Confession of a (Pornographer's) Shroud” also effects this union, involving an accountant who unwittingly works for a group of pornographers and loses his wife, children, and ultimately his life as a result. This is, however, not the end but the beginning of the story: in some unexplained fashion the accountant's spirit remains alive (Barker's offhand comment that “There was still a will to revenge in him” [BB3, 99] is wholly useless as a plausible rationale) and actually animates his shroud into a human form. The influence of M. R. James's “‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad’” is very obvious, and Barker makes no secret of it: his remark that “He'd seen what freak creases could do, making faces appear in a crumpled pillow” (BB3, 104), precisely echoes James's climactic statement whereby the invisible entity in his story reveals a “face of crumpled linen.”¹ Nevertheless, the story, although merely a tale of revenge, is effectively grim. We will see later, in The Damnation Game, that even the wealthiest of us are not immune from the intrusion of horror emerging from the depths of history and of the underclass.

As it is, one of the most interesting features of Barker's work is a powerful mix of sex and death in such a way that the one leads to the other, and vice versa. In Barker there is an intimate connection between sex, violence, and death. As he wrote with some pungency in The Damnation Game: “It wasn't difficult to smudge sexuality into violence, turn sighs into screams, thrusts into convulsions. The grammar was the same; only the punctuation differed” (DG 153). It is interesting that one of the most wholesome sexual passages in all his work occurs toward the opening of “In the Hills, the Cities,” in which we are given a lengthy, explicit, and powerful vignette of homosexual love between two male companions. The heterosexuals in Barker's tales rarely act with such honesty and purity.

“The Age of Desire” is perhaps Barker's most powerful story. Here a man is given a drug that so stimulates his sexual desire that everything becomes seductive:

Aroused beyond control, he turned to the wall he had been leaning against. The sun had fallen upon it, and it was warm: the bricks smelt ambrosial. He laid kisses on their gritty faces, his hands exploring every nook and cranny. Murmuring sweet nothings, he unzipped himself, found an accommodating niche, and filled it. His mind was running with liquid pictures: mingled anatomies, female and male in one undistinguishable congress. Above him, even the clouds had caught fire; enthralled by their burning heads he felt the moment rise in his gristle. Breath was short now. But the ecstasy?; surely that would go on forever.

[BB4, 132]

The sociological message here is clear—a commentary on the complete sexualization of our minds and our age. As one character remarks, “‘All our so-called higher concerns become secondary to the pursuit [of sex]. For a short time sex makes us obsessive; we can perform, or at least we think we can perform, what with hindsight may seem extraordinary feats’” (BB5, 136). Later it is said of the drugged patient: “His back ached, his balls ached: but what was his body now?; just a plinth for that singular monument, his prick. Head was nothing; mind was nothing” (BB5, 140-41). It is clear what we have become: “The world had seen so many Ages. The Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything. For the fires that were being stoked now were fiercer than the innocent world suspected. They were terrible fires, fires without end, which would illuminate the world in one last, fierce light” (BB5, 136).

Other stories on this theme are rather less successful. Two are feminist in their suggestion that men are useless encumbrances in the entire process of birth, life, and death. In “The Skins of the Fathers” we encounter bizarre monsters who have impregnated a woman in a small desert community. The intimation is that these creatures have created all earth life: “The creatures who were his fathers were also men's fathers; and the marriage of semen in Lucy's body was the same mix that made the first males. Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men” (BB2, 147). But this transparent reversal of the myth of Eve's creation from Adam is presented too bluntly to be effective, and the story rapidly devolves into an exercise in bloodletting. Somewhat better is “The Madonna,” in which a loathsome monster called the Madonna, the “Virgin Mother” (BB5, 66), is shown to give birth without the need of men. A male character who has had intercourse with her wakes up one day to find that he has become a woman. But what is the true point of the story? It is never made clear. “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament” (BB2) may be mentioned in this connection, as it deals with a woman who, purely through the power of her will, is capable of physically destroying human beings, usually men. If anything, the story hints at the superior strength of women, but beyond this it seems to lack direction and focus.

“Dread” is less obviously sexual, but, as Barker's most effective non-supernatural story, it carries a clear message about men's habitual abuse of women. A philosophy professor decides to carry out an experiment on a bright young female student whom he perhaps considers too challenging to his intellectual supremacy: he subjects her to hideous torture whereby she, a vegetarian, is locked in a room with a gradually rotting piece of meat as her only means of sustenance. She eventually succumbs and eats the rancid flesh. Powerful as this conte cruel is, it is ultimately no more than a tale of vengeance, as a man on whom the professor attempts a similar torture comes back to kill him. The story aims at profundity by means of pseudophilosophical discussions on the nature of fear, but these in the end don't amount to much.

The Hellbound Heart also attempts a union of sex and death, but the result is clumsy and superficial. Frank, a jaded and unruly wastrel, stumbles upon a curious box (“How had he first heard about Lemarchand's box? He couldn't remember. In a bar maybe, or a gutter, from the lips of a fellow derelict” [NV (Night Visions) 218]). This box summons up mysterious creatures called Cenobites who promise him unheard-of pleasures. But Frank, in his limited way, conceives of these pleasures purely sexually. He pays for his misconception, suffering a nameless fate that nearly obliterates his body. He survives, after a fashion, only because he spilled his semen in the room he was occupying: “Dead sperm was a meager keepsake of his essential self, but enough” (NV 220). When Julia, married to Frank's brother Rory but secretly in love with Frank, moves into the house Frank occupied, she eventually detects his presence. She finds that he requires copious amounts of blood to reanimate himself, and promptly poses as a prostitute to lure unwitting Johns into her house so that she can kill them and feed their blood to Frank, who gradually dons bone, flesh, and skin once more. All this is an entertaining mix of sex and death (rather more effective in the film version directed by Barker, Hellraiser, with its fine special effects), but ultimately no broader conclusions are drawn. Is sex our destroyer or our salvation? What significance does Julia's pseudoprostitution have? Once again the tale lapses into a story of adventure and revenge, as the Cenobites exact punishment-upon Frank for trying to escape their clutches.

A serious deficiency in Barker's work is a very naive good versus evil morality that renders many of his characters one-dimensional. He makes many pretensions toward mainstream writing by elaborate character portrayal, and this occurs even in his Books of Blood: most of these tales are not so much short stories as novellas, which might, at least in theory, allow for such characterization. But both his heroes and villains are flat and wooden. He has a penchant for depicting vengeful small-town policemen (“The Skins of the Fathers,” Cabal), amoral criminals (“Cleve knew in his heart he was a leopard born and bred. Crime was easy, work was not”—“In the Flesh” [BB5, 104]), and diseased psychopaths (“The Life of Death”). And those evil Europeans who have come to disturb the peace-loving natives in the Amazon in “How Spoilers Breed” are marked for destruction from the beginning. Les Daniels has rightly referred to this sort of scenario not as tragedy but as melodrama:² this is not what adults want to read. In other cases, Barker's attempts at fleshing out his characters in a short story or novelette seriously disfigure the unity of the work: the meandering interludes depicting the sorry state of Jerry Coloqhoun's love life in “The Madonna” are entirely irrelevant to the central plot of the story.

Miraculously, however, all this changes in The Damnation Game. In some fashion or other, Barker has here produced a sparklingly flawless weird novel that redeems all the absurdities of his earlier Books of Blood and all the verbosity of his later novels. What is more, it fulfills the conditions of an actual weird novel, or at least avoids Thomas Ligotti's criticism of the average weird novel as merely a mystery or suspense tale with horrific or supernatural interludes. The Damnation Game has indeed been conceived as a weird novel, and the supernatural manifestations are of such a sort as to require novel length for their proper realization.

The first thing that strikes us about this work is the pervasiveness of the game motif. We have already seen indications of its fascination for Barker in The Inhuman Condition (the knots whose resolution releases the horror), and we shall see it later in The Hellbound Heart with its mysterious box that must be decoded to unleash the Cenobites. Here, however, it structures the entire novel. Joseph Whitehead, a petty thief and gambler preying upon the ruins of postwar Warsaw, hears of a mysterious figure, Mamoulian, who has never lost at cards. Moreover, those who play against him and lose often meet hideous deaths. Whitehead, his curiosity piqued (and also perhaps offended by this challenge to his own prowess at games of chance), seeks out Mamoulian (or is perhaps led to him), challenges him to a game of cards, and wins (or is perhaps allowed to win). Years pass, and Whitehead returns to England. It transpires that, as a result of his victory over Mamoulian, he has gained spectacular wealth, power, and prestige. But now he increasingly senses that Mamoulian is after him in order to exact some sort of revenge, the purpose of which Whitehead cannot clearly ascertain.

The crucial point in the novel is the exact nature of the “game” that Whitehead “won” from Mamoulian. Marty Strauss—who, although merely an ex-convict hired by Whitehead to be his bodyguard, becomes the focal character of the novel—is made aware of the means by which Whitehead accumulated his fortune:

Life was a random business. Whitehead had learned that lesson years ago, at the hands of a master, and he had never forgotten it. Whether you were rewarded for your good works or skinned alive, it was all down to chance. No use to cleave to some system of numbers or divinities; they all crumbled in the end. Fortune belonged to the man who was willing to risk everything on a single throw.

He'd done that. Not once, but many times at the beginning of his career, when he was laying the foundations of his empire. And thanks to that extraordinary sixth sense he possessed, the ability to preempt the roll of the dice, the risks had almost always paid off. … When it came to knowing the moment, for sensing the collision of time and opportunity that made a good decision into a great one, a commonplace takeover into a coup, nobody was Old Man Whitehead's superior. …

[DG 48]

This is not mere rhetorical praise for a business genius; it is all meant literally, as Strauss begins to sense. “Suppose Whitehead could put his finger on the wheel anytime he wanted to, so that even the petty chance of a fox running to the right or left was available to him? Could he know the future before it happened—was that why the chips tingled, and fingers too?—or was he shaping it?” (DG 141). The game Whitehead “won” from Mamoulian was the control of chance. As Mamoulian once told Whitehead, “‘All life is chance. … The trick is learning how to use it’” (DG 230).

But how did Mamoulian himself gain this quality? He is merely a human being, albeit with superhuman powers. He scoffs at Whitehead's query toward the end as to whether he is the Devil: “‘You know I'm not. … Every man is his own Mephistopheles’” (DG 348). We finally learn of Mamoulian's past through Whitehead's daughter Carys, a “sensitive” who can probe people's minds. She ultimately summons up the courage to enter Mamoulian's mind and finds that, as a sergeant in the army, he was nearly executed before a firing squad when “‘Chance stepped in on your behalf’” (DG 309), as a monk who rescues him remarks. This monk teaches Mamoulian all he knows: how to resurrect the dead, how to “‘take life from other people, and have it for yourself’” (DG 309), and how to control chance. Mamoulian kills the monk, so that this knowledge is his alone, but later he realizes that the monk really wanted to die once he had passed on his information (the influence of Melmoth the Wanderer is very obvious here). And what does Mamoulian himself want if not the same thing? “‘Don't you see how terrible it is to live when everything around you perishes? And the more the years pass the more the thought of death freezes your bowels, because the longer you avoid it the worse you imagine it must be? And you start to long—oh, how you long—for someone to take pity on you, someone to embrace you and share your terrors. And, at the end, someone to go into the dark with you’” (DG 311). Whitehead is that person whom Mamoulian wants to accompany him in death, but Whitehead has cheated him.

“He squandered all my teachings, all my knowledge, threw it away for greed's sake, for power's sake, for the life of the body. Appetite! All gone for appetite. All my precious love, wasted!” Marty could hear, in his litany, the voice of the puritan—a monk's voice, perhaps?—the rage of a creature who wanted the world purer than it was and lived in torment because it saw only filth and flesh sweating to make more flesh, more filth. What hope of sanity in such a place? Except to find a soul to share the torment, a lover to hate the world with. Whitehead had been such a partner. And now Mamoulian was being true to his lover's soul: wanting, at the end, to go into death with the only other creature he had ever trusted. “We'll go to nothing …” he breathed, and the breath was a promise. “All of us, go to nothing. Down! Down!”.

[DG 312]

The portrait of Mamoulian is extraordinarily complex, inspiring at once horror, pathos, and awe. For the one and only time in his writing Barker has abandoned his good versus evil dichotomy to present a rich and intricate conflict of wills. There is no flaw in The Damnation Game: its structure is perfect, its characters substantial and fully developed, its style pure and clean (he must have had a good copy editor), and its denouement powerful and satisfying. Although it is part horror story, part historical novel, part mainstream novel, and part detective story, the supernatural premise structures the entire work.

With Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, and Imajica Barker is attempting to do something very different. Perhaps irked by the charge that he writes only about gruesome physical horror, Barker in these novels seeks a union between imaginary-world fantasy and supernatural horror. The union is reasonably successful in Weaveworld; much less so in The Great and Secret Show and Imajica. What is still more curious is that the fundamental theme of the first two works is really very much the same, and one wonders why Barker needs two very hefty novels (and the prospect of at least three more sequels to The Great and Secret Show) to expound a theme that is not intrinsically interesting—or, at any rate, one that Barker does not treat in a very interesting manner.

This theme is the power of art and the imagination: this is all that both these novels are about. In Weaveworld we encounter an elaborately woven carpet endowed with magical powers: it contains an entire realm of entity within its substance. It quickly becomes clear that the Weaveworld is nothing but a symbol for art. “Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, each subtly different from its neighbor. The effect was not overbusy; every detail was clear to Cal's feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if banded together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border; others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there” (W [Weaveworld] 32). And the Weaveworld itself, full of wondrous landscapes and bizarre but enchanting creatures, is also a transparent symbol for the power of the imagination to transform the ordinary into the magical. As is stated toward the end, “Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn't reside there. It resided in the word, which was the mind spoken” (W 428).

Once this symbolism is established, however, nothing in particular is done with it. Instead, we lapse again into a good versus evil paradigm where some cardboard villains—the oily salesman Shadwell, the evil policeman Inspector Hobart—attempt to gain control of the carpet either for personal gain or in order to rule the Weaveworld. Two young people, Cal and Suzanna, with assistance from various cute denizens of the Weaveworld, come to the carpet's rescue and save it from desecration. Indeed, the last two-thirds of the novel are nothing more than an adventure story relating the battle for the possession of the carpet. All symbolism pertaining to the Weaveworld and its appurtenances is ignored.

The remark in Weaveworld that the basic “story” of the weave is “‘about being born, and being afraid of dying, and how love saves us’” (W 348), however platitudinous it may be, seems to be the fundamental message of The Great and Secret Show, subtitled The First Book of The Art. Here we are involved with a mysterious “dream-sea” called Quiddity, which appears to us at three critical junctures of our lives: “‘It's a dream of what it means to be born, and fall in love, and die. A dream that explains what being is for’” (GSS [The Great and Secret Show] 211). The whole of this interminable and tiresome novel involves the attempts by various good or evil persons to gain control of Quiddity, which again is nothing more than a symbol for our imaginations.

He no longer cared what words were most appropriate for this reality [Quiddity]: whether it was another dimension or a state of mind was not relevant. They were probably one and the same anyhow. What did matter was the holiness of this place. He didn't doubt for a moment that all that he'd gleaned about Quiddity and the Ephemeris was true. This was the place in which all his species knew of glory got their glimpses. A constant place; a place of comfort, where the body was forgotten (except for trespassers like himself) and the dreaming soul knew flight, and mystery.

[GSS 566]

And when we put together statements like this with other remarks such as “‘The real mystery—the only mystery—is inside our heads’” (GSS 211) and with the assertion that one of the villains wants to “‘own the dreamlife of the world’” (GSS 344), there is little doubt as to the nature of Quiddity. But the brutal truth is that Barker has not made this conception interesting enough to sustain a novel of such enormous length, much less the three or four projected sequels he has in mind. If he really carries through his threat of writing four books the size of this one on a theme he presents with such a poverty of interest and complexity, then he may have made the greatest mistake of his career.

Perhaps affected by the poor response to The Great and Secret Show, Barker has temporarily (and one hopes permanently) abandoned the continuation of The Art and written another imaginary-world fantasy. Imajica, however, is as beset with conceptual difficulties as its predecessor. And its gargantuan length (it is by far the longest of his novels) painfully emphasizes its diffuseness and lack of focus and makes one wonder whether, in discarding supernatural horror for pure fantasy, he has not made a disastrous aesthetic decision.

It would be tedious and unprofitable to examine the plot of this shambling behemoth of a novel. Suffice it to say that we are dealing with one John Furie Zacharias, a womanizer and painter of forgeries who proves to be the hand-picked “Reconciler” of the Five Dominions. The Fifth Dominion is the Earth, and the other four exist in some wholly undefined relation to it. Opposing him is an ancient society called the Tabula Rasa, which wishes to maintain the barriers between this Dominion and the others, but is wiped out with surprising ease by the Autarch Sartori, the ruler of the Second Dominion who comes to Earth to establish his dictatorship here.

Barker's supporters (like those of Stephen King) are fond of referring to the “epic” imaginative sweep of this novel, as if mere bulk is sufficient to give a work an “epic” quality. The fact is, Barker's imagination (or sense of logic) fails at key points: in defining the relationship between the Dominions; in distinguishing one Dominion from another; in depicting a plausible means of traveling between Dominions (one character, evidently speaking for Barker, announces, “‘I don't fully understand the mechanisms that carry us over. … I'm not sure anybody does completely’” [I (Imajica) 333-34]); and, most significantly, in specifying what a “Reconciliation” of the Dominions will actually mean. This last failure is critical: with readers kept utterly in the dark about the nature, purpose, and effect of Zacharias's quest, the novel cannot even gain any sense of dramatic tension as to whether the reconciliation will or should come about.

There is some suggestion of a conflict between reason (now preeminent in the Fifth Dominion) and magic. In referring to the attempt by one minor character, Chant, to cross Dominions, the narrator remarks, “… the power to do so, which was usually—and contemptuously—referred to as magic, had been waning in the Fifth since Chant had first arrived. He'd seen the walls of reason built against it, brick by brick” (I 24). But beyond such fleeting mentions, very little is made of this. One wonders, in any event, what purpose will be served by the Reconciliation, since—aside from sundry odd-looking animals and quasi-human beings—the other Dominions seem just as mundane as our own. “A sizeable part of him wanted to exit this Dominion once and for all. Take himself off to Yzordderex and set up business with Peccable; marry Hoi-Polloi despite her crossed eyes; have a litter of kids and retire to the Hills of the Conscious Cloud, in the Third, and raise parrots” (I 74). This passage also reveals Barker's uncanny knack of creating the most ungainly imaginary names I have lately run across in fantasy fiction.

Along the way various other themes and motifs are thrown out, but in such a haphazard and confused way that they fail (if I may say so) to be reconciled into a unified whole. There are innumerable archly pretentious descriptions of sex (between man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, and man and some third gender from one of the Dominions) with the suggestion that sex has some transcendent power or function associated with the Reconciliation, but one never knows what it is. There is a half-baked parody of feminism in the notion that the goddesses of the other Dominions are imprisoned or killed by the “God of Gods” (I 294), Hapexamendios; there are suggestions that the spirits of all the dead people in the world will somehow return once the Reconciliation takes place. And on and on and on. Once again Barker has bitten off more than he can chew: he does not have either the philosophic vision or the narrative skill to unify these diverse threads, and the novel peters out ridiculously at the end. One can only hope that he does not intend a sequel to this ambling leviathan.

A curious aspect of Barker's supernatural work is that the horror revolves wholly around the physical harm that may come to human beings. There is no sign of Lovecraft's “cosmic” vision, whereby human events are seen against the vast backdrop of the uncaring universe, nor even much of an indication that harm to the physical body may not be the apex of horror. No doubt Barker, by consciously tailoring his work to “mainstream” criteria regarding the importance of human relationships, imagines that this limiting of perspective might render his work more acceptable to the general literary community, but the end result is simply a narrowness of vision and conception. Even his most “cosmic” monster—the huge entities in “In the Hills, the Cities”—is made up of human beings. And even this impressive spectacle suffers from a bathetic anticlimax as Barker remarks at a key point in the narrative, “Was there ever a sight in Europe the equal of it?” (BB1, 207). “Rawhead Rex,” although not human, is simply a giant somewhat larger and stronger than a human being; even in The Damnation Game all the characters are simply human or (as with Anthony Breer, a loathsome individual resurrected from the dead by Mamoulian) perversions of the human. In Barker's later work it is certainly suggested that the mind controls the body and that therefore the horrors of the mind surpass those of the body. But, firstly, we are still dealing with a human perspective and, secondly, there is still vastly more harm done to the characters' bodies than to their minds or spirits or imaginations.

And yet, Barker reveals himself (in the many interviews he has given and in the critical essays and introductions he has written) to be a surprisingly articulate and stimulating spokesman for weird fiction in general and for his brand of weird fiction (explicit, physically extreme horror) in particular. Even here, however, I have some problems. He speaks repeatedly of the need for weird fiction to be grounded in “metaphysics.” We live, Barker feels (surely correctly), in a world where the “banal” reigns supreme—in television, in newspapers, in most of our daily lives. Accordingly, weird fiction must be “confrontational” and “subversive,” waking us up from our listlessness and lethargy (SE [Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden] 202-3). I believe he is on firm ground here, but I am not convinced that his own fiction actually embodies these principles. (This is what used to be called the gap between intention and achievement, before intention was banished from critical theory.) Barker criticizes Stephen King for his all too frequent good-versus-evil scenarios wherein the monster is portrayed as a “pure other” that must be extirpated for the good of the world (SE 74-75), but we have already seen that Barker has himself fallen into a very similar pattern in some of his own work, notably Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show. Perhaps Barker expressed his views most clearly and succinctly in a 1988 interview:

I'm not just writing to horrify, I'm writing to disturb, excite and subvert. Those functions are best served by the clearest possible views of the imagined scenes. I never cut to shadows—never cut away the moment of maximum revelation. What is revealed can be a moment of transcendence or disgust or self-comprehension or all three. It can be erotic, it can be funny, it can be foul. Those ambiguities and paradoxes are best arrived at if you show all there is to see.

[SE 77]

This sounds good in theory, but in practice I fear that repeated doses of mere physical horror do not excite terror or disgust as much as … boredom. Barker says in a cocksure fashion that “What you can't do to most of the images in my books is ignore them” (SE 202). Well, yes you can, since after a while they all start sounding the same. The only solution for someone in Barker's position is either to increase the dosage (as in The Damnation Game and his films) or to opt for a different mode of writing altogether (as in Weaveworld and its successors). In a sense I can understand and even sympathize with Barker's impatience with the subtlety, indirection, and suggestiveness of much traditional weird fiction, which can on occasion lead to excessive obscurity (Robert Aickman) or tameness (some of M. R. James and most of his disciples). But Barker's own frenetic pyrotechnics have drawbacks of their own. I defy anyone to read his “The Midnight Meat Train” and then T. E. D. Klein's “Children of the Kingdom,” and not come away with a vastly greater impression of the horrors that may dwell on the underside of New York City from Klein's tale than from Barker's. Klein cannot possibly be accused of pulling any punches—his denouement is as horrifying as anything I have read in modern literature. It is simply that his tale is written with an elegance, meticulousness, and atmospheric tensity that Barker can only dream of. Indeed, Barker at times disingenuously makes a virtue of his carelessness in conception and style, as if such a thing is somehow inextricable from in the message he is trying to convey:

I'm an inclusionist. … Whatever is going through my head at a given time goes into the mix. … I don't think of myself as a slick artist. I think I'm kind of clunky in lots of ways. I don't actually mind the clunkiness. It's part of what I am. … I think everything I've done is rough-hewn. If it were not rough-hewn, I'd actually be simplifying it, I'd often be taking out paradoxes, I'd often be taking out contradictions, I'd often be taking out a kind of richness. Which would be highly regrettable.³

Barker may not be “slick,” but this is just about the slickest defense of clumsy, ill-conceived writing I can think of.

What, in the end, is the verdict on Clive Barker? The honest truth is that, with the sole exceptions of The Damnation Game and a handful of stories, the entirety of his work is marred by poor conception and construction, slipshod writing, excessive violence that serves no aesthetic purpose, and, in general, simply a lack of depth and substance. His later novels make vast pretensions to profundity but fail utterly to deliver on the promise. If Weaveworld effects a fairly convincing union of horror and fantasy, then he has seriously erred in embarking on what appears to be an interminable multinovel series with The Great and Secret Show, which exhibits a complete lack of focus, direction, or purpose. If Barker truly is, as Stephen King claimed, the “future” of horror, then the field is in deep trouble.

Notes

1. Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, 1931), p. 148.

2. See note 9 [in The Weird Modern Tale].

3. Stephen Haff, “Clive Barker: Spokesman for the Strange,” Other Dimensions No. 1 (Summer 1993): 3.

Bibliography

A. Primary

Books of Blood, Volume 1. London: Sphere, 1984. New York: Berkley, 1986. [BB1]

Books of Blood, Volume 2. London: Sphere, 1984. New York: Berkley, 1986. [BB2]

Books of Blood, Volume 3. London: Sphere, 1984. New York: Berkley, 1986. [BB3]

Books of Blood, Volume 4. London: Sphere, 1985. New York: Poseidon Press, 1986 (as The Inhuman Condition). [BB4]

Books of Blood, Volume 5. London: Sphere, 1985. New York: Poseidon Press, 1987 (as In the Flesh). [BB5]

Books of Blood, Volume 6. London: Sphere, 1985. [BB6]

Cabal. London: Collins, 1988. New York: Poseidon Press, 1988 (with Books of Blood, Volume 6). [C]

The Damnation Game. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985. New York: Ace/Putnam, 1987. [DG]

The Great and Secret Show. London: Collins, 1989. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. [GSS]

“The Hellbound Heart.” In Night Visions 3 (with Lisa Tuttle and Ramsey Campbell). Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1986. New York: Berkley, 1988 (as Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart). [NV] Separate publication New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1991.

Imajica. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. [I]

The Thief of Always. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Weaveworld. London: Collins, 1987. New York: Poseidon Press, 1987. [W]

B. Secondary

Brown, Michael, ed. Pandemonium: Further Explorations into the Worlds of Clive Barker. Forestville, CA: Eclipse, 1991.

Haff, Stephen. “Clive Barker: Spokesman for the Strange” [interview]. Other Dimensions No. 1 (Summer 1993): 2-8.

Jones, Stephen, ed. Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden. Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991. [SE]

Winter, Douglas E. “Clive Barker.” In Faces of Fear. New York: Berkley, 1985, pp. 207-20.