Thoughts On Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Volumes 4 through 6

Finishing up the reading and thought collecting started here.

The omnibus of the second half was unfortunately not a very well made book. The cover has a pixilated quality to it, a story appears out of order compared to what various online sources say it was placed originally (I choose to review the stories in the order in my copy), the text bleeds or fades in some spots, and there are a number of errors that suggest a copy and paste job without a pass afterwards to make sure everything worked right. If/when I decide to read these again I hope to seek out the individual volumes with Clive’s own art on the cover, on account of liking that art a lot.

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

Volume 4

The Body Politic
Incredible opening story. There is a way to cynically take it as a parable about the evils of revolutionary violence, and if someone told me that this was their takeaway I would have to admit it was fair, but I found the commingling of disability anxiety with the horror of feeling out of control of ones own body to dovetail with the recognition of classed violence from below in a generative way. Also just a great deliverer of powerful sentances: I’m gonna be thinking about the closing line a lot. Does a fixation on insurrectionary theory by a sapient severed hand count as the same type of obsessive study that I noticed cropping up so often in the first half?

The Inhuman Condition
An alright story, most interesting to me in how it seems like a test run at a lot of the ideas in The Hellbound Heart (as adapted into Hellraiser). A knotted rope rather than a puzzlebox, a compulsion to study and solve, a shitty man fleeing a variety of supernatural entities the puzzle-object frees, harm done to a brother a huge part of the originating act that is revealed. I continue to enjoy when barker describes a fucked up creature.

Revelations
An interesting entry in the Gender Stuff that has shown up across both halves of this collection. Obviously hinges on religious fundamentalism as an axis on which gender relations turn, which colors the read more favorably in its acknowledgment of the social, but is sort of hovering around the idea that masculinity contains some intrinsic urge to sexual violence or domination that may be inescapable. As someone who tends to paranoid readings of gender essentialism it left me turning some ambiguities over in my head. The ghost who killed her husband coaching a new abusive-husband-murderer on her mistakes so that her protege can play the misogynistic expectations of the forces that would punish her, on the other hand, was a grim delight. Some real “good for her” shit.

Down, Satan!
A mere four pages and mostly delivering some fun tone. Its alright! I like a fucked up hellcity built by man. Between some details of this and another later story I wonder if Clive had The Immortal by Borges on his mind but that’s as likely to be because The Immortal by Borges is on my own mind.

The Age Of Desire
Sexual violence is the primary subject of this story, and while I found it hard to read on that basis it is to Clive’s credit that he is trying to do something with it. The question of intrinsic masculine urge to sexual violence arises again, and it is a bold move to make that exact horror be something that the perpetrator himself has to sit in as he alternates between libidinal violence and misery at the acts he has been made to do by the horny-jekyll-and-hyde drug he has been administered. I’m reminded of some of the more deliberately provocative Delany I’ve read as well as questions of when one should and should not feel shame at non normative sex acts, whether a violation can be revelatory despite or because of its breach of human social sanctions, and what that means for the psyche of a victim as they try to navigate the aftermath — this applies here almost entirely to men subject to sexual violation. A lot rides on whether you read the drug as a manmade aberration or as something that strips back the facade over the inherent – I could go either way depending on the day.

Volume 5

The Forbidden
Famously adapted into the very good movie Candyman (1992), a favorite of mine. I knew that the short story was a very different thing, set in London housing projects rather than Cabrini-Green in Chicago, and that race did not have the same primacy, but I hadn’t realized just how much that ingredient was absent: I believe the only specifically raced individual is a Pakistani man who appears in one sentence to be a shop attendant from which main character, Helen, makes a purchase. Other ingredients that make it into the movie are in full force though: it’s a really artful story about the irony of misery tourism, the way that a privileged outsider inserting herself into the world of the “less fortunate” produces the conditions under which those less fortunate feel they must perform the ritualistic “proof” of their evil, to drive out or destroy the condescending intruder. The invocation of pattern-making is great: Helen driving herself into a frenzy at repeat phrases, repetition in graffiti, the way that the urban legend she is chasing is being game-of-telephoned through the network of those she encounters. Less thrilling alas is the Candyman himself, alas. While I love his explanation of his own existence, the big-coated scrawny white Jeff-The-Killer-OC style guy truly suffers in comparison to Tony Todd’s performance in the movie.

The Madonna
This is a forcefem story I could imagine being written right now and circulated among not-out/just-out-of-the-closet transfems, plus or minus a few weird period specific things (which aren’t even out of the question honestly). It’s just in the realm of a little too gender essentialist in a way thaty might be on purpose: the main character, a shitty guy who feels trapped in life and takes it out on his domestic partner, is legible to me as being a rapist in a way the book seems a couple steps behind acknowledging — but this quality is ultimately one of many qualities shed when this character (gendered as “he” throughout) observes a community of weird girls who hang out nude in the abandoned pool building he wants to use in his scam, the squidbabyaliens they raise together, and the benevolent ancient creature that has allowed them to form this community. The elder god dips him in some forcefem goo, and he feels liberated by the new possibilities open in life and destruction of old social shackles, even as his partner rejects the new embodiment. Interesting that the other forcefemmed character in the story, the rich and dangerous man being scammed, finds himself despairing and ultimately unable to live with his own transformation: he already wielded power he was content with and wanted for little, in a very classed way.

Babel’s Children
Profoundly odd. I ultimately don’t find the political vision of it has to be especially insightful, but it’s compellingly weird. I found the main character’s desire to comprehend what the hell was up, and her interior expressions of that, to be some of the most compelling in Clive’s repetition of the ironically punished obsession.

In The Flesh
This one whips ass! The aspiring evil wizard twink who the main character has to figure out the deal of as they live in a jail cell together is a delight to me. This happens to be the other story calling Borges’s The Immortal to mind for me: the purgatorial city containing every room a murder has ever happened in, with its absurd architecture, inhabitants obscured by the main character’s ignorance and/or wandering a barren exterior, feels very evocative of the ancient city of the Borges story. This is particularly pronounced in the way the main character himself is unhinged in time by the discovery, and thus becomes himself an inhabitant of the city inevitably, though through different mechanisms.

Volume 6

The Life of Death
This one pulls some very effective fakeouts, as the reader is encouraged to interpret a weird guy as the supernatural grim reaper in a way that the main character also comes to, until the realization that he is in fact just a weird creep in a very mundane way. Gender Stuff looms large again with the main character’s uterine cancer and surgery. She spends a lot of time furious about the ways she is seen as less whole for this event in her life. Circles some interesting ideas about depth and shallowness of performed understanding of death, compelling to me, an Annoying Goth.

How Spoilers Bleed
This one is astonishingly racist! Bad job, Clive. The colonizers are constantly figured as villains, but in a way common to the tribal revenge exploitation genre of horror it never manages to make the indigenous people and their supernatural curses actually be characters beyond monster as horror mechanism, and any nonwhite character outside of the tribe also suffers in lacking character beyond mechanisms to drive the white colonizers into their traps. Easily my least favorite of the whole 6 volume short story collection.

Twilight at the Towers
Spy fiction in divided cold war Berlin about a CIA guy recruiting a disillusioned soviet asset in berlin while wrestling with the way this process exacerbates his own disillusionment with his own agency. This takes a wild swerve into werewolf fiction. I really liked it: the unraveling of what is actually up with the agents involved was a great time. I also like the discovery of weird werewolf community illegible to the intelligence forces that wanted to use them: surprise surprise, I’m a furry after all and I like when the metaphorized otherness causes a break with nationalism.

The Last Illusion
Barker is real good at describing fucked up body horror demons. The main character of Harry D’amour (who I know appears in other books) is sorta a cartoonishly heterosexual dumbass in a way that I recognize as a detective genre staple but I ultimately liked everything around him. Earlier stories like The Yattering and Jack from volume 1 and Hell’s Event from 2 feel crystallized into something more precisely interesting here. Valentin the queer coded heroic sidekick who betrayed hell itself is an all timer guy. I haven’t seen Lord of Illusions (1995), the movie adaptation, but I really gotta get on it: I’ve heard it’s pretty good.

The Book of Blood (a postscript): On Jerusalem Street
A fairly perfunctory but perfectly fine wrap up of the frame narrative from volume 1. No strong feelings.