SOURCE: "The Bare Bones: An Introduction," in Scared Stiff: Seven Tales of Seduction and Terror by Ramsey Campbell, Warner Books, 1987, pp. ix-xii.

[Barker is an English short story writer, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director known especially for the horror stories published in his popular six-volume collection, Clive Barker's Books of Blood (1984-86). In the following excerpt from an essay that was written in 1986, he commends Campbell for his ability to blend sex and horror in Scared Stiff.]

Death and the Maiden.

It's an eternally popular subject for painters, and in a sense for writers and filmmakers too. What does the image conjure? A woman, naked perhaps, or nearly so, gazing at us with horror (or, on occasion, with a sublime indifference) while Death stretches a rotted paw to touch her breast, or leans its worm-ridden skull towards her as if to ply her with kisses.

Corruption and sexuality in a marriage of opposites.

The motif is echoed whenever a movie monster takes beauty in its arms, or at least attempts to. Sometimes, of course, the Maiden keeps Death at bay; as often, she's claimed. Whichever, the sexual frisson generated by her glamour is increased tenfold by the presence of the foulness that shadows her.

But the drama of the image—with the Maiden representing innocence and life, and Death the joyless evil that threatens her—is only one aspect of a fascinating confrontation. There are countless sophistications of that theme, the most complex of them more readily rendered in prose, I believe, where the writer can describe both the outer and inner conditions of his characters, than in any other medium.

Stories that can show us the flesh in all its sensuality, then reveal the bone beneath; or uncover the decay as the heart of an apparently wholesome passion; that take us into the wildest realms of perversion, and into the fever of obsession. It's a fruitful area.

But for a genre that derives much of its power from the trespassing of taboos, horror fiction has been remarkably coy when it comes to talking of sex. In an age when characters in all manner of fiction have forsaken their blushes to fornicate, horror fiction clings to its underwear with a nunnish zeal.

There have been, it's true, many masterworks charged with eroticism (indeed there's an argument that says much of the genre is underpinned by repressed sexuality) but it has remained, for the most part, sub-text. We can take our werewolf with a touch of Freud or without. As long as he doesn't sport an erection (the werewolf, not Freud) as well as snout and tail, we can interpret the image shorn of its sexual possibilities.

For my part, I tend to be of the opinion that such willful naivete is perverse, and that art is best enjoyed, as it should be made, to the limit.

Turning a blind eye to what an image may signify—either because the interpretation distresses or confounds us—is not what good fiction should do, nor should it be the response it elicits. It's doubly regrettable, therefore, that so little horror fiction has taken the challenge of sexuality by the balls.

I've talked of this with writers and fans alike, and many of them evidence some fear that if the undertow of sexual meaning were made manifest the fiction would lose some of its power to persuade. I have argued in return that any fictional forum that requires a willful suspension of the reader's spirit of intellectual enquiry (as opposed to his disbelief) doesn't deserve to survive, and have put my pen where my mouth is (as it were) with sex in a number of my pieces.

Mr. Campbell has done the same, with great success. [Scared Stiff gathers] several stories of his that marry the horrific with the sexual. I don't use the word erotic here, for I think the sexual material in these tales serves a far more complex function than straightforward titillation.

For one thing, it is never a narrative aside—an overheated fuck before the horrors begin afresh—but rather a central and eloquent part of the story's texture. For another, the actors in these scenes (when human) are seldom the deodorized stuff of fantasy, but the same pale-buttocked, stale-sweated individuals we all of us greet each morning in our mirrors. Thirdly, and most pertinently, the sexual material is marked by Ramsey Campbell's unique vision, just as everything in his fiction is marked.

Most of you will know that Mr. Campbell has earned his considerable audience, and countless critical plaudits, by creating a world in which much remains unsaid and unseen, and the fear he creates is as much wed to our individual interpretation of what the prose is implying as derived from anything the author explicitly reveals.

This being the nature of his gift it might seem that graphic sexual descriptions—and believe me, graphic they are—would not sit happily with such obliqueness. Far from it. One of the delightfully unsettling things about these tales is the way Ramsey's brooding, utterly unique vision renders an act familiar to us all so fretful, so strange, so chilling. As elsewhere, his pithy prose responds to the challenge of reinventing experience with subtlety and resilience, never slipping into cliche, but always asking us to make fresh sense of the acts set before us.

And so we should, for sexuality is all too often the territory of the sentimentalist or the pornographer, too seldom that of the visionary. Yet it's a transforming act, literally. It remakes our bodies, for a time; and our minds too. For a little space we know obsession intimately; we are at the call of chemical instructions which sharpen our senses while at the same time narrowing our focus, so that our perceptions are heightened and refined.

Horror fiction has traditionally had much to say about all these subjects: transformation, obsession and perception. Sex, with its ecstasies and its petit mort; its private rituals and its public corruptions; its way of reminding us that all physical pleasure is rooted in the same body that shits, sweats and withers, is the perfect stuff for the horror writer, and there can be few artists working in the genre as capable of analyzing and dramatizing such territory as the author of [Scared Stiff].

As I said earlier, horror fiction has traditionally dealt in taboo. It speaks of death, madness and the transgression of moral and physical boundaries. It raises the dead to life and slaughters infants in their cribs; it makes monsters of household pets and begs our affection for psychos. It shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

And to that list of taboos I now add another list: the forbidden substrata of sexuality. The obsessions with parts and people we keep in our private thoughts; the acts we dream of but dare not openly desire; the flesh we long to wear, the pains we yearn to endure or inflict in the name of love.

[Scared Stiff comprises] fictions which unite subjects from both the above lists. In which the dead don't simply rise—they rise to fuck.

To some of you, these stories will seem portraits of Hell. But if you're honest, your dreams may tell you differently.

Who knows, maybe the Maiden hasn't been startled by Death at all; maybe that cold touch on her breast is what she's been waiting for all her life.