Books Of Blood Vol 1

INTRODUCTION by Ramsey Campbell

THE CREATURE HAD taken hold of his lip and pulled his muscle off his bone, as though removing a Balaclava.’ Still with me?

Here’s another taste of what you can expect from Clive Barker: ‘Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city’s thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.’

You see that Barker is as powerfully visionary as he is gruesome. One more quote, from yet another story:

‘What would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?’

I quote that deliberately, as a warning to the faint-hearted. If you like your horror fiction reassuring, both unreal enough not to be taken too seriously and familiar enough not to risk spraining your imagination or waking up your nightmares when you thought they were safely put to sleep, these books are not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re tired of tales that tuck you up and make sure the night light is on before leaving you, not to mention the parade of Good Stories Well Told which have nothing more to offer than borrowings from better horror writers whom the best-seller audience have never heard of, you may rejoice as I did to discover that Clive Barker is the most original writer of horror fiction to have appeared for years, and in the best sense, the most deeply shocking writer now working in the field.

The horror story is often assumed to be reactionary. Certainly some of its finest practitioners have been, but the tendency has also produced a good deal of irresponsible nonsense, and there is no reason why the whole field should look backward. When it comes to the imagination, the only rules should be one’s own instincts, and Clive Barker’s never falter. To say (as some horror writers argue, it seems to me defensively) that horror fiction is fundamentally concerned with reminding us what is normal, if only by showing the supernatural and alien to be abnormal, is not too far from saying (as quite a few publishers’ editors apparently think) that horror fiction must be about ordinary everyday people confronted by the alien. Thank heaven nobody convinced Poe of that, and thank heaven for writers as radical as Clive Barker.

Not that he’s necessarily averse to traditional themes, but they come out transformed when he’s finished with them. ‘Sex, Death and Starshine’ is the ultimate haunted theatre story, ‘Human Remains’ is a brilliantly original variation on the doppelganger theme, but both these take familiar themes further than ever before, to conclusions that are both blackly comic and weirdly optimistic. The same might be said of ‘New Murders in the Rue Morgue’, a dauntingly optimistic comedy of the macabre, but now we’re in the more challenging territory of Barker’s radical sexual openness. What, precisely, this and others of his tales are saying about possibilities, I leave for you to judge. I did warn you that these books are not for the faint of heart and imagination, and it’s as well to keep that in mind while braving such tales as ‘Midnight Meat-Train’, a Technicolor horror story rooted in the graphic horror movie but wittier and more vivid than any of those. ‘Scape-Goats’, his island tale of terror, actually uses that staple of the dubbed horror film and videocassette, the underwater zombie, and ‘Son of Celluloid’ goes straight for a biological taboo with a directness worthy of the films of David Cronenberg, but it’s worth pointing out that the real strength of that story is its flow of invention. So it is with tales such as ‘In the Hills, the Cities’ (which gives the lie to the notion, agreed to by too many horror writers, that there are no original horror stories) and ‘The Skins of the Fathers’. Their fertility of invention recalls the great fantastic painters, and indeed I can’t think of a contemporary writer in the field whose work demands more loudly to be illustrated. And there’s more: the terrifying ‘Pig-Blood Blues’; ‘Dread’, which walks the shaky tightrope between clarity and voyeurism that any treatment of sadism risks; more, but I think it’s almost time I got out of your way.

Here you have nearly a quarter of a million words of him (at least, I hope you’ve bought all three volumes; he’d planned them as a single book), his choice of the best of eighteen months’ worth of short stories, written in the evenings while during the days he wrote plays (which, by the way, have played to full houses). It seems to me to be an astonishing performance, and the most exciting debut in horror fiction for many years.

Merseyside, 5 May 1983