CLIVE BARKER, SPLATTERPUNK, AND THE NEW DECADENCE

What's going to come out of those people who think that Night of the Living Dead isn't enough?

—Robert Bloch, Faces of Fear

In the 1970s and '80s, horror fiction flourished in an environment of permissiveness it had never known. The maturation of popular fiction content in general in the postwar years, coupled with the unofficial sanction of frank descriptions of adult situations and physical horror in the fiction of Stephen King, freed writers from the inhibitions that had limited creative expression even in the crudest pulp fiction. Horror fiction's sharpening focus on human vulnerabilities led many writers to explore the full gamut of weaknesses of the flesh.

The publications of Clive Barker's six Books of Blood in 1984 and 1985 marks a turning point in contemporary horror, as a phenomenon if not as fiction. The stories in these collections offer gruesome, gory, and graphic treatments of mostly familiar horror themes: monsters in the subway (“The Midnight Meat Train”), avenging ghosts (“Confessions of a [Pornographer's] Shroud”), Frankenstein's monster (“The Age of Desire”), the native curse (“When Spoilers Bleed”), the animated disembodied hand (“The Body Politic”), the unnatural survival of the past into the present (“Rawhead Rex”). However, their variations are inventive and ironic, reflecting a literary sensibility that is both self-conscious of horror's literary tradition and determined to subvert or transcend it.

Barker's horrors are decidedly physical—they include a variety of imaginative eviscerations, mutilations, and translations of flesh, blood, and bone—but the physical serves a specific aesthetic function in his fiction. As the interface between the ordinary world and the phantasmagorical worlds of monsters and menaces that abut it, it is the most conspicuous of many different boundaries that his stories explore: between the flesh and spirit, life and death, human and inhuman, pain and ecstasy, sex and romance, delight and dread. Violations of these boundaries are often remarkably repulsive, and their spectacular display, although never gratuitous, can be excessive. But in many of Barker's tales characters who submit to them, or take control of them, achieve a kind of liberation. “In story after story,” Michael Morrison writes,

Barker transfigures, re-sexes, de-evolves, or reintegrates the corporeal form into bizarre, post-human configurations that are often barely recognizable as once having been man or woman. Character after character willingly—sometimes jubilantly—sheds the familiar contours of the human for the shapes of nightmare and so gains entry to a new life and, perhaps, a new community.¹

It is partly because Barker uses the tropes of horror to envision a realm beyond them that his fiction cannot be read like the stories of Stephen King or Dean R. Koontz, which attempt to make sense of extraordinary horrors in the context of the everyday. Barker's narratives often have the tone of fables or parables in which symbolic pageants are taking place. Indeed, after one of his finest evocations of the otherworldly, The Hellbound Heart in Night Visions 3, Barker turned almost entirely to the fantastique, a unique distillation of horror, magic realism, and mythic fantasy into mainstream narrative.

Barker's fiction helped to demolish the few remaining constraints on horror's content, and horror in the 1980s and '90s is characterized by increasing explicitness, as writers in the competitive trade market determined to bring a fresh approach to themes began levering out the sexual subtexts of their fiction and exploring taboos ranging from cannibalism to pedophilia. A number of writers proclaimed this the true terrain of the horror story, none more loudly than the splatterpunks. Promoted as the cutting edge of horror fiction, splatterpunk fiction—which purported to fuse the graphic violence of splatter films and the nihilistic attitude of punk rock music—was the product of the first generation of writers nurtured on horror fiction of the Stephen King era. Its level of hardcore gore had been anticipated in the work of Guy N. Smith, Shaun Hutson, and even James Herbert, whose pulpy tales of rampaging mutant vermin and insatiably bloodthirsty supernatural monsters had been pilloried in England as “nasties.” It arose in direct response to the quiet horror of dark fantasy, whose subtle merging with the mainstream some writers deemed a betrayal of horror's unique attributes, and its totem was the flesh-eating zombie of George Romero's cult film Night of the Living Dead, adopted as a symbol of the brutality and moral anarchy of modern life. Splatterpunk was not necessarily more violent than other types of horror, but its willingness to show what more-traditional horror fiction left to the imagination and the creativity its writers lavished on their descriptions of physical horrors produced some of the most vivid fiction of the era.

In the hands of its ablest practitioners, splatterpunk fiction achieved stylishness, if not virtuosity. David J. Schow's application of hip, contemporary, hard-boiled narrative to the concerns of the urban horror story yielded some of the most provocative, hard-edged horror fiction of the 1980s, much of it collected in Red Shift and Lost Angels. John Skipp and Craig Spector's cinematic vision brought unity if not coherence to the ungainly meld of horror, science fiction, and doom-metal lyricism in their splatter-rock epic, The Scream. Yet much of the audacity of splatterpunk fiction was in its style, rather than its substance. The majority of writers who attempted it did not share its much-vaunted cynical worldview, and their fiction, some of which can be sampled in Skipp and Spector's Book of the Dead anthologies, attempts to make up for its failed radical conception with exuberantly disgusting imagery.

Splatterpunk was loud, confrontational, and for a brief period of time as controversial in horror circles as its counterpart, cyberpunk, was in science fiction. But though it became a label applied (and often misapplied) to the work of a number of writers whose fiction featured extreme situations—Schow, Skipp, Spector, Richard Christian Matheson, Philip Nutman, Ray Garton, Joe R. Lansdale—it never achieved the cohesiveness of a movement, and its aesthetic of flamboyant grue proved self-limited. It did call attention, however, to the interrelationship of horror fiction and horror film. The popularity and marketability of contemporary horror fiction is due in no small part to successful screen adaptations of its iconic works, among them Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and Carrie, all of which cultivated a mass audience that helped to put horror—Stephen King in particular—on the national bestseller lists. In turn, film aesthetics have infiltrated the work of several writers, most notably Richard Christian Matheson, whose terse, gnomic short stories (Scars) are redolent with techniques of cinematic cutting and pasting, and Kim Newman, whose short fiction (The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters) and novels (Anno Dracula, Bad Dreams) freely incorporate film heroes, heroines, and villains into the fictional reality of their worlds.

While splatterpunk helped to jolt horror out of the stasis that had set in with the proliferation of formulaic fiction for mass market horror lines and the increasingly unoriginal hybridization of genre themes in novels aimed at the trade bestseller lists, it also legitimized the use of shock tactics to assault rather than disturb readers. The rising levels of violence, visceral displays of misanthropy and sociopathy, and exploitation of child abuse, domestic violence, and other sensitive themes in much horror fiction of the 1990s is the unavoidable trickle-down from the floodgates splatterpunk briefly opened—likewise, the preoccupation with and explicitness of sexual themes and situations. The late 1980s and 1990s are the era in which erotic horror became a popular subgenre, and while a few markets for such fiction, such as Ellen Datlow's Alien Sex and Lethal Kisses anthologies, gathered stories that attempt to work sexual anxieties in the age of AIDS into provocative horror fiction, others, notably the Hot Blood anthologies (1989-) and offerings from publishers devoted to pornographic and semipornographic horror (Masquerade, Rhinoceros, Richard Kasak, and a number of fledgling specialty press publishers) published stories that merely titillate or offend, reinforcing the very taboos they purport to break. Although some writers, including Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, and Lucy Taylor, have confronted the challenges that frank themes pose and turned them into powerful, if sometimes off-putting, undercurrents in their tales of transgressive lifestyles shaped by the culture of horror, many others have made sexual explicitness the foundation of a neo-decadent horror subliterature.

Note

1. Barker, Clive. Books of Blood. 6 vols. Sphere, 1984-85. Vols. 1-3 reprinted with corrections and some rewriting as a boxed set by Scream/Press, 1985. Retitled U.S. reprints by Poseidon include In the Flesh (vol. 4, 1986), The Inhuman Condition (vol. 5, 1986), and Cabal (1988), which reprints vol. 6 with a short novel, Cabal, published separately in the UK.

   Before the publication of these groundbreaking collections, Barker was known in England primarily as an avant garde playwright, some of whose theatrical pieces have since been collected in Incarnations (1995) and Forms of Heaven (1996). These 29 novellas and short stories embrace some of the Grand Guignol excesses that distinguish his dramas. In an informal nod to Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, Barker loosely frames the stories as narratives written by the dead on the skin of a boy as punishment for his spurious claim of psychic rapport. The stories vary widely in theme and tone, and are united only by their uninhibited blending of comedy, fantasy and horror and their shrewd use of physical and sexual vulnerability as channels for supernatural horrors.

   Overtones of classic horror fiction echo through “Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud,” which revisits M. R. James's “‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad,’” and “New Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a reworking of Poe. “The Yattering and Jack,” in which a man is pestered by an annoying demon, and “Son of Celluloid,” which features a movie house infested by a cancer that brings cinematic characters to life, are slapstick comedies with a grotesque edge. By contrast “Rawhead Rex,” in which an excavation accidentally exhumes a ravenous monster of English legend, and “The Inhuman Condition,” which chronicles the fate of several juvenile delinquents who discover that the derelict they have abused and robbed is a being from another dimension with uncanny powers, are hardcore horror stories whose visceral imagery anticipates the splatterpunk movement of the late 1980s. Some of the gorier stories are leavened with insightful social criticism. “The Forbidden,” set in a crimeridden housing project stalked by a serial murderer who calls himself the Candyman, and “The Midnight Meat Train,” which transports a Manhattan subway rider to an underworld governed by supernatural beings, feature monsters that are physical embodiments of urban decay and violent crime. “Twilight at the Towers,” in which werewolves have the requisite split personalities to serve as double agents in the Cold War, is an astute political satire. Other stories are allegories that straddle the boundary between fantasy and horror. In “The Body Politic,” hands suddenly develop a collective consciousness and decide to liberate themselves from the bodies to which they are enslaved. “In the Hills, the Cities” features two gargantuan simulacra formed from the bodies of people who have sacrificed their individuality to be incorporated into larger, nationalistic entities. Some of the stories are plotless excursions in gore that show the weaknesses of Barker's discursive, sometimes over-long novels. However, most combine sensitive characterization with inventive horrors to evoke a sense of worlds of terror and ecstasy from which human beings are separated only by the boundary of the flesh. Compare the short fiction of David J. Schow and the novels of John Skipp and Craig Spector.