The Transgressive Legacy of Horror Master Clive Barker

Hendrix calls “The Hills, The Cities” the “most famous story in the collection.” His horror writer friend, Paul Tremblay, said he first read the story and burst out laughing, and then had to go back and read it again. He couldn’t believe you could write a story like that.

Hendrix agrees with Tremblay: “You don't see it coming, and it's this new monster of a city that fights and walks made of its inhabitants, it's so new, and Barker visualizes it in so much detail that you're like, ‘I never would've thought of that.’”

The human reaction to the city beast is that they either lose their minds and hide from it or want to join up with its monstrous march. Hendrix also loves that the story has a normal gay love story embedded into the plot where it wouldn’t feel complete without that part.

“It’s a no apologies gay love story about a couple that's vacationing together, and like all couples, they bicker, and they have sex,” Hendrix says.

“They think one of them thinks he's smarter than the other. One of them thinks the other one talks too much, and I remember talking to Hailey Piper, who's a queer writer, and she was saying to her, what was so important, is that Barker wrote those characters and was basically saying, ‘you can have the queer sex and monsters, or you don't get any monsters. The two go together. You get the story the way I want it, or you don't get the story.’” 

For many writers, gay and straight and across the spectrum, Barker’s story is revolutionary for being so ordinary and yet so mind-blowingly extreme in equal measure. That combination makes it so outside the norms of horror in the 1980s and pushed the genre forward.

Volume Two’s “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament” is about a woman who only discovers she has extraordinary powers when it drives her to the verge of suicide.

Barker said on his website what interested him most about Jacqueline “is the idea of characters who confront the ordinary, and find new meaning in the extraordinary, rather than simply finding some creatures or some forces that they must eradicate or exorcise in order to return to the norm that they had on page one.”

Barker's stories often end with scenes of revelation like this, where the main characters discover that the fantastical is better than the ordinary and not as frightening as when they started.

For Hendrix, “Jacqueline Ess” is a striking one that reveals new layers decades later. “I mean, that's a story that's so sexualin a real sense and physically grotesque that a lot of people really hold onto that one,” Hendrix notes.

Someone told Hendrix, as he was working on bringing Books of Blood back into a new 40th anniversary edition, that this story is reminiscent of the feelings from their youth.

“You see her body in this, and it's so mutable and malleable and shaped by how she feels because it's all about this woman whose body sort of mutates itself to whatever her lover's desire.” The other writer told Hendix that the story is what it feels like to be a teenage girl. “It felt like my body was out of my control, and it was always changing against my will and shaping itself into what other people wanted it to be.”

Going back to Barker’s old comments on the story, he noted that “many of the pivotal moments in our lives are very often rites of passage moments in which things are lost which can never be claimed again. Yet the territory ahead is, by virtue of the fact that it is new, also exciting and extraordinary.”

Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” is not your run-of-the-mill monster story, according to Hendix. The pivotal difference is the end of the story. The epic short story has a structure similar to Alien or The Thing from Another World, but uses a rural setting in Kent, England.

The tale was later turned into the 1986 film Rawhead Rex, which Barker wrote but then renounced after being unhappy with the direction and overall production.

“[Barker] doesn't do those endings that a lot of people in horror do, which is a non-ending, Hendrix says. “For Barker, he doesn't just bring up a monster and set it loose in the British countryside. He engineers its destruction, which is really hard to do in a short story.”

The other element that makes “Rawhead Rex” such a unique monster tale is that it has 14 point-of-view characters throughout the story.

“Everyone, from the monster to, I think, a dog gets a brief point of view section. It's like most people stick with one character's point of view per story. Barker just nimbly leaps from one to the next, and it's just perfectly timed to be the next person who moves the story forward. And again, that thing most people do in a novel and he just packs it into a short story. Hendrix also loves the language Barker uses in “Rawhead Rex.”

“It's so evocative and so precise, and it also doesn't shy away from really going there, by concerns about morality or good taste. Hendrix says you can smell this story.

I open up to a random page from “Rawhead Rex” to read it to Hendrix, and we chuckle and marvel at how gross Barker describes the monster surfacing from a field: “His head was breaking surface now, his black hair wreathed with worms, his scalp seizing with tiny red spiders. They’d irritated him a hundred years, those spiders burrowing into his marrow, and he longed to crush them out.”

Gives you the shivers.

“The Body Politic” is one of Barker’s most ambitious stories, Hendrix argues. “Everyone’s hands revolt against them and sever themselves from the wrist,” he enthuses.

“And on the one hand, there's this really funny kind of thing because the hands are all shouting revolutionary slogans with hand telepathy, and at the same time they're wreaking real violence. And people look at [David] Cronenberg movies and are like, ‘oh, there are new organs in this. It's all about the new flesh, and in the flesh makes it so literal and on the nose, you know what I mean? It's like, ‘forget humans, it's time for our hands to storm out and take over the world.’”

Hendrix says the concept is also a deeply rooted childhood fear that stays with you into adulthood. Everyone has had a brother or sister take their sibling’s hand and hit their own face before and giggle, “quit hitting yourself!”  

Hands are symbols of potential revolt and chaos in popular media and literature as well. “There's that famous short story that got made into a movie, The Beast with Five Fingers,” Hendrix remembers. “Oliver Stone wrote “The Hand” with Michael Caine in it about a killer hand.” 

Hendrix loves that Barker's story “The Body Politic” takes itself seriously and doesn’t just fall into a goofy tale about hands taking over the world. It’s more shocking and serious than its silly premise.

You can see Hendrix’s unique blend of humor and horror in his novels crawling out of this story’s primordial ooze.

The third major pillar of Barker is the Books of Blood, Hendrix notes. “I mean, it's six volumes. And he sort of wrote them all in one swoop, and I think they all appear between ‘85 and ‘86,” Hendrix says.” “And that was just a shot fired across the bow of horror to really make people sit up and pay attention because of how different it was.”  

The final and fourth thing Barker is known for is his paintings and visual art.

“Mick Garris is a good friend of his; he's collaborated with [Barker] on a lot of projects, and he says he's still painting, but he's never stopped,” Hendix notes. “His paintings are really striking and beautiful and grotesque…they're really part of his vision.”

“One of the most iconic [Barker stories] is "The Forbidden,” from Volume Five, which became Candyman (1992),” Hendrix says. The story mixes many of the Barker pillars above.

“It's one of those stories. I mean, it's a woman on a housing estate that's sort of dilapidated and fallen into ruin. She encounters this spirit of vengeance, this black man. And there's so much tension packed into this story. And I don't mean tension, suspense, I mean tension. She's a white upper-middle-class academic, and the spirit of revenge was a poor working-class black man.”

Hendrix goes on about the sexual tension between the story's two characters.

“She's attracted to him, and it almost transcends sex. I mean, I guess desire is sexual, but she's attracted to him because he's so different, and it's just such a good story.”

The story keeps getting new movie adaptations, and Hendrix thinks the movies hold up because they feel like a Barker story and keep the tension found in the original story.

The longer Barker’s career went on, the more his novels required a bigger buy-in to read just one book. Hendrix noted that many of them were part of a longer series and are more of a “marathon,” whereas his famous short stories are a “hard sprint.”

“The fact that he can sustain his imagery and his imagination and his storytelling ability through these vast novels is pretty staggering,” Hendrix says.

“And for me, the one that hits the perfect balance between Clive Barker Horror Writer and Clive Barker, Epic Fantasy Novelist, is his second novel, Weaveworld, which is about a hidden kingdom sort of woven into the fabric of a carpet that people are running after. I'm amazed there's not a Game of Thrones-sized TV series out for Weaveworld.”