Thoughts On Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Volumes 1 through 3

Clive Barker is the author that got me into horror. At the age of 10 I picked up a copy of The Thief Of Always and found it so unforgettable that I immediately had to go ask my mom what else like it was worth reading (in addition to pointing out I could find more Barker out there in the world, she let me borrow her Anne Rice collection as well as pointing me towards Stephen King, my first being Cujo). Learning about Barker’s queerness was fruitful ground for young me to process some feelings of my own, and given my current tastes in media writ large I think it’s safe to say I owe Clive quite a lot.

At some point in my teenage years I read the very first volume of the short story collection Books of Blood. I liked them, but never got around to the following volumes — until this year, due to happening across an omnibus of the first three collected. It is time to reread these, I decided, and think them through with a more developed critical apparatus than a closeted 10-15 year old has (not to discount the thoughts of closeted 10-15 year olds, I think we should do that less in general, but I’ve learned a few new ideas since then).

What follows is my thoughts on each short story contained within, in the order they appear in the books. I don’t plan to shy away from spoilers, but I don’t aim to flatly summarize the stories. Being on my ostensibly ttrpg centric blog it is worth saying that my thoughts are not going to be directly about ttrpg resonances, but Barker’s work has suffused my own such that all of what I say here is bouncing around in other ideas that I write. If you want to know if it’s worth reading before reading my own thoughts, the answer is yeah these whip ass please read them.

As I am discussing horror stories, some content warnings are in order: these stories deal in violence, gore, torture, suicide and self harm, body horror, racism, sex and sexuality, sexual violence, child abuse, misogyny and gendered violence, homophobia and transphobia, and piss. My discussion of them may touch on the same.

Volume 1

The Book of Blood
A fairly simple frame narrative. It’s short and unobtrusive and isn’t one I think about much after the fact, but it works as a lead-in that introduces Barker’s voice. It also introduces some recurring contents that show up in a lot of barker: people love to engage in con artistry that backfires ironically, people love to obsessively study fucked up events to their own detriment, and people are crankin their dang hogs. If nothing else, it sets the tone pretty well.

The Midnight Meat Train
God what a good title for a story. Masterful.
This is one that stuck with me from my childhood reading. I also happen to quite like the movie adaptation. What the movie sorta made me forget, in supplanting the written version, is how efficient the writing is. While the movie takes place over a longer period, the short story is a chronicle of one weird bad day. I love the transition from Thomas Harris style mundane-but-artful-and-ritualistic violence to the reveal of the nightmare deep time non-space foundations of the subway system.
It is interesting how the story positions itself to dodge the possible antisemetic conspiracy read of the story by making it clear that the killer Mahogany is himself an antisemite — interesting to then unpack the protagonist, identified as Jewish by Mahogany, being inducted into the role of the new killer. Also a direct reversal of blood libel in which the secret rites require a body be made bloodless. Also struck by the strange invocations of indigeneity — the “original American, whose home this was before Passamequoddy or Cheyenne” being Barker’s description of the being at the root of this all. I do think that the description of the beings partial form as the protagonist sees it is electric, beats almost any other description of a Lovecraft-adjacent chthonic entity I’ve encountered.

The Yattering and Jack
My least favorite of the Volume 1 stories. It’s a reasonably fun exploration of one core premise, “what if you could defeat a devil by being incredibly boring on purpose,” but it never reaches any particularly high points of writing. The climactic confrontation takes the form of what I can only call Christian Occult Slapstick. The description of what Beelzabub looks like is pretty cool. The phrase “by the balls of Leviticus, he was only a gherkin importer” is great.

Pig Blood Blues
I am astonished that this is one that I didn’t remember. I had a great time with it. The multiple layers of word games going on with who or what is a “pig” is compelling itself, and the characterization of the evil institution that those word games are layered over is fantastic. I found myself really keying into the ways that sublimated queerness constantly saturates the story. Neil Redman, the primary character and an ex cop, is haunted by the possibility of homosexual companionship but only exists in a position of cruel authority where that manifests as a self-disgust for his protectiveness of hurt children, fearing that to recognize queerness in the self and another younger person is necessarily pedophilia, or will be recognized as such by others in the institution that empowers him such that he will lose what power he has. The missing Hennessey and bullied Lacey (who prompt Redman’s discomforting thoughts) exist in what is to me a very recognizable world of teen queerness, comraderie turned desire between young people for whom many possible futures of gay or trans expression exist feeling crushed into shapes legible to the normative institutions around them, that defines them as a particular type of young man before sorting them into desirable or undesirable categories within that. It all comes to a head in the descriptively compelling climax where the supernatural crushes all these possibilities into an obliterative singularity: a ritual murder as an act of castration that is also cannibalism and fellatio.
The parts about what the juvenile delinquents are getting out of movies is a little hokey.
I can tell that I’ll be thinkin about this one a lot.

Sex, Death, and Starshine
I had a fun time with the big turn to encompass all the characters in what initially seemed like the source of horror that instead turns into the liberatory, but it relies a little much on a misogynistic perspective character who makes the overall story feel misogynistic in construction in a way that isn’t significantly complicated by the turn. A reasonably neat thing to read without much of the feeling of menace I hope for in horror.

In The Hills, The Cities
This is the story I remembered most vividly from my teenaged reading, and for good reason: god damn what a good thing to read. The particulars of the quarreling gay couple feel so real to me, so recognizably the product of being in and around similar scenarios in the real world. One could justifiably nitpick the divide in the writing of western and eastern characters, but the strength of voices of the perspective characters as the full scope of just what the hell is going on comes into view allow me to easily forgive that. Incredible stuff and if you were to read just one thing from the collection, I’d argue that it should be this one.

Volume 2

Dread
This one ends much stronger than it starts, I think! The meat is all in the point where the cool jigsawesque mastermind suddenly becomes the perspective character and the subject rather than object of horror. I’m a little sour on the writing of the one woman, though I think the distinct voices involved in describing her are a step better at making the misogyny clearly seated in the perspectival it still is a shame that two different modes of that are dominant. My least favorite in book 2.

Hell’s Event
Feels very of apiece with The Nattering And Jack, in that it presents a Christian occult world encountering a mundane event, though this one is a few steps more menacing and a few less slapstick. Some great descriptions of physicality, a pretty cool vision of hell and what lives in it. Barker’s writing of race feels a lot more rote than when he tackles sexuality (which makes sense he’s a gay white man), a white South African as an agent of hell being defeated by a black runner who comes to recognize him for what he is is a very clean and didactic moral universe that I think is then both interestingly and oddly complicated by the actual act of violence that prevents hell’s triumph, making the victory not a personal success but the active downfall of the enemy, and by what the stakes of the contest are: the fall of democracy, implicitly but non-specifically into some sort of fascism/totalitarianism – positioning liberal democracy as a thing enshrined in stasis until toppled by nothing short of a cosmological evil sits weirdly.

Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament
There’s gender in this one! Very complicated gender. It’s a Carrie-style “woman gains powers at a transformative point in her life” story that consciously places that tranformative moment in the 30s, distant from the essentializing of puberty as the most impactful of these moments. Jacqueline’s ascent to monstrous power comes from a moment of despair at the normative heterosexual dynamic that tends to loom in the future of the more common puberty-as-powers story.
Race appears discomfortingly again: a mans eyes are pulled at by Jacqueline’s powers, making him resemble a “monstrous Oriental.”
Jacqueline’s despair at the calcifying of her life, coupled with her powers being the conscious reshaping of flesh, inevitably resonates with transness. Also notable in this regard is the way that her recurring lover Oliver Vassi has his reputation obliterated within conservative social circumstances by association, and his journey into seeking comfort in the discovery of the world she inhabits. This ends up being a complicated resonance throughout the story: Jacqueline herself holds some remarkably gender essentialist views, but rather than feeling like this closes off the trans reading, I found it to complicate it in productive ways: when Jacqueline Ess kills her doctor (a doctor she does not chose to have and finds intensely condescending), by forcibly resculpting the doctor’s body to have breasts and buttocks, her internal monologue of “You’re not a woman, you don’t look like a woman, you don’t feel like a woman–,” while certainly evoking a frustration that is real and reasonable for a cis woman experiencing medicalized cruelty, also struck me as possibly inward facing — suggesting either a (familiar to me) dysphoric moment of transfeminine self hatred producing a bitterness and desire to lash out that the monstrous powers allow for, or alternatively a transmasculine frustration at misrecognition by one who refuses to see a peer (notable that one of Ess’s later lovers is explicitly asked to teach her ways of wielding power in a way that the story understands as the domain of the masculine).
Vassi and Ess finally experience death/release/ in a moment when the sex act becomes penetrative for both partners.

The Skins of the Fathers
This story contains an element that I was astonished and delighted by, and will notably recur in a later story: a monstrous being from prehistory with a huge erection sees a car and immediately decides it needs to kick the hell out of it. I was hooting and hollering with joy at this.
Weird Gender again, though ultimately less interesting than Jacqueline Ess to me: the binary used to be not man and woman but woman and demon, men being an aberration that led to the downfall of a primordially idyllic age. A child can be created that has the opportunity to undo this, but will be subject to neglect, cruelty, and the threat of sexual violence by the men he could supplant.
A little heavy on the hicksploitation for me, and the comparison of the humans war party to movie cowboys, and thus the “divils” they pursue to indigenous americans, sits weirdly and badly in a way similar to The Midnight Meat Train’s similar move.
A guy gets yanked into the sky by an airborne devil-creature while he’s having sex and just zooms into the sky while cumming.
A thing that sounds a lot like Pyramid Head gets described here, and the humans throw a grenade at it.

The New Murders In The Rue Morgue
Clive what the hell.

Volume 3

Son of Celluloid
Solidly fun in a way I don’t have a ton of commentary on. “I am a dreaming disease” is a line I’m gonna be spinning in my head for a while!

Rawhead Rex
Prehistoric horny nightmare monster vs car round 2 happens in this one, this time more explicitly framed as an old power demonstrating dominance over modernity. It feels like a real escalation in explicit grodiness from the rest: graphic child deaths, the villain reminiscing on really brutal sexual assault, evil priest pissplay. I found the sense of pagan mythical menace overtaking a very banal village to be compelling, and I like that the outcome of the monster beating up the car being that it learns how gasoline works and forms a plan around using it. Rawhead is a good monster: the want to be worshipped while performing his cruelties lends itself to great stuff, and the descriptions of his mannerisms hit a lot of great menace.
Gender again: the once radical and cop hating, but now boring, dad character has to not only brandish an icon of but try to embody pregnant womanhood to drive Rawhead back.

Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud
“What is the experience of physical embodiment for a sheet ghost” is a pretty cool idea. I think this one lands the slapstick in a better balance with the menace I enjoy than The Yattering And Jack, as well as being a rerun at the most boring guy present being the one who is actually dangerous.

Scape-Goats
The least memorable of volume 3 to me, and maybe of the whole collection. While there is some convincingly spooky stuff going on with the setting and the ending, I never really found myself bought into the lives of the characters involved.

Human Remains
Another contender for my favorite. It feels like a lot of the recurring ideas I mentioned keying into in the frame narrative click perfectly into place here: con artistry and research into the horrific intrude on the main characters life from multiple angles until it unravels. The story never settles for the exploration of a conflicted queer experience being wholly explicit or implicit and instead manages to thread both of those needles in a way that I found really compelling. The Barker racial imaginary resurfaces here to provide a black pimp as a minor antagonist who menaces Gavin, the protagonist — justified in his reasons, the story seems to think, since Gavin’s doppelganger did injure a man that the pimp is dedicated to guaranteeing the safety of, but also ending up as just a disposable body to establish the monster of the story.
I really like when the monster gets to talk about its conception of its self and how it feels about its life-thieving embodiment! That’s the good shit!