Throwback Thursday: Riding the Midnight Meat Train with Clive Barker
In the mid-1980s Stephen King famously proclaimed, “I have seen the future of horror; his name is Clive Barker.” This was back when effusive praise from the notoriously blurb-happy author really meant something—the equivalent of Emperor Palpatine announcing that he was stepping down and promoting Darth Vader to head Sith.
That gobsmacky declaration was all the convincing I needed to dive in, and I quickly discovered I felt right at home in the fetid waters of Barker’s stylish, grotesque madness. I devoured an array of short stories, novellas, novels, graphic novels, and films filled with elegantly horrible characters and fantastical nightmare environments. I immersed myself Barker’s work with a near-religious fervor, an impressive feat for an atheist—and a fitting one, considering the author’s preoccupation on the Hells we all make for ourselves.
Though he’s unquestionably a legend, these days Barker seems like an artifact from an earlier era, or perhaps a casualty of the end of the ’80s horror boom. But after battling a serious health issue and veering somewhat away from his roots in recent years with the dystopian YA series The Books of Abarat series, he’s set to plunge back into the bloody heart of darkness with the upcoming release of The Scarlet Gospels, a landmark new work that will further explore the terrible legacy of his most famous creation, Pinhead, marking his return to the genre with a fury. That makes it a perfect time to dig deep into his gory oeuvre for something you may have overlooked.
Books of Blood, Volume 1
Between 1984 and 1985, Barker released six volumes in this blood-soaked short story collection. While all are solid, showcasing a writer extremely comfortable generating stylish horror while wallowing in mounds of viscera, Volume 1 that still plays like a greatest hits album. Barker casts a wide thematic net, from the opening salvo of the titular piece, a flesh-carved haunted house tale that serves as a connective link across the series, to “The Midnight Meat Train,” about a New York subway train that serves as a rolling delicatessen for an underground community of mutants. He veers off the traditional horror path with “The Yattering and Jack,” a darkly comic story about a pesky minor demon who mercilessly torments a downtrodden pickle salesman. “Pig Blood Blues” is a moody twist on the ghost story, while “Sex, Death and Starshine” takes place during a troubled production of Twelfth Night, in which the doomed acting troupe ultimately delivers a truly one-of-a-kind performance. The merciless imagery in the closing story, “In The Hills, The Cities,” in which two remote Yugoslavian villages create towering giants made up of thousands of their owns citizens lashed and strapped together, has stuck with me for years.
The Hellbound Heart
This is the novella that first brought us the Cenobites, those sadomasochistic pleasure-as-pain-loving creatures from “across the Schism” made famous by the Hellraiser films. Here, Barker introduces the mystical, dangerous Lament Configuration puzzle box, and the endless torment and inescapable suffering it unleashes on the sex-obsessed Frank, a guy whose sole mission in life is the ultimate sensual experience (in Barker’s world, that’s not likely to be as pleasant as it sounds). It may be a slim read, but Barker saturates the work with a gruesome, poetic beauty—one of the few authors who can make the most vile imagery seem both lyrical and sobering. Nearly 30 years later, this novella retains it place as a modern-day horror classic.
Cabal
In this one, Barker flips the playing field by making the monsters the good guys, following of a race of creatures whose mythical domain is threatened by the arrival of a troubled human. Written like a particularly grim Grimm’s Fairy Tale, the book’s inventive, disarming qualities were overshadowed somewhat by the fiasco that was the wobbly 1990 film adaptation, Nightbreed, which Barker wrote and directed himself. Despite his best efforts, the film was neutered by excessive studio pressure, turning the original theatrical release into a confusing, tentative mess that pales in comparison to the bad dream tapestry of the novel. On top of the fantastic premise, Barker’s ability to manufacture elaborate, rich subcultures—here, a disfigured humanity resides in the underground enclave known as Midian, under the rule of a mad deity—never fails to startle.
The Great and Secret Show
Published in 1989, this just-shy-of-Stephen-King-length novel found Barker officially moving away from gory horror into the realm of dark fantasy. As the proposed first installment of the Book of Arts trilogy, The Great and Secret Show barrels hard and fast into a modern-day apocalyptic battle of good versus evil, centered on a pair of highly evolved former humans fighting to either protect or destroy a mystical realm, with the safety of all of humanity on the line. The battle takes place over decades, largely inside the borders of a small California town, whose inhabitants (more specifically, their deepest dreams, secrets, and fears) are unwillingly drafted into service as soldiers in the spiraling war. This is Barker in full-on epic mode, with a deep pool of well-written, flawed characters awash in his stylishly mutated mixture of sex, power, neo-religion, and violence. While the Book of Arts never made it past book two (Everville, released in 1994) this inaugural installment holds up as a fine example of sprawling apocalyptic fantasy.
Have you ventured into Barker’s darkened realms?