It’s worth pausing first of all to consider what a Clive Barker-ish title that is, combining as it does his love of the grand and awesome, of secrets, and of the theatrical. And as the “Great and Secret Show” is a thing glimpsed, in dreams, three times in every human life, which fuels the very meaning of those lives, it’s obvious he’s talking about the nature of reality itself, Clive Barker style: great, and secret, but also a show. (Though also: a show, but great and secret.)

Started in late 1987 (when he’d just released his major calling card to the world, Hellraiser), and planned as the first in a trilogy, The Great and Secret Show was published in 1989. A US-set equivalent to the UK-set fantasy-horror of Weaveworld, it could, then, be seen as a creative and commercial gambit to capture more readers. Certainly, it was the first of his novels to sell more than a million copies.

The story starts in 1969, in the dead letter room of the Omaha Central Post Office, where the nobody-ish Randolph Ernest Jaffe is given the job of sorting through the undeliverables. He’s supposed to be checking for valuables to share among the post office staff, but becomes fascinated by hints of a secret knowledge and power being rumoured across America. Although it has many names—“The Final Great Work… The Forbidden Fruit… da Vinci’s Despair… The Finger in the Pie”—the best overall term for it is the vaguest yet most promising: the Art. He’s a dowdy nothing of man, but Jaffe has always had a secret desire to be King of the World, and the Art, he thinks, is how to do it. He sets out on a quest to learn the Art. (Though first he murders his boss. Jaffe is not this novel’s hero.)

It leads him, eventually, to an abandoned town in a New Mexico desert, where Kissoon, the last of a group dedicated to preserving the Art, is hiding in a self-made time-loop. Kissoon offers to teach Jaffe the Art, but something about the deal is a little off, and Jaffe flees. One of Kissoon’s comments, about his not being evolved enough—he’s “too much of an ape”—sets him on a new path. Teaming up with an evolutionary biologist (and mescaline addict), Richard Wesley Fletcher, the pair start work on a project combining “Alchemy, biology, and metaphysics in one discipline”: the creation of a substance called the Nuncio, which accelerates evolution. But by the time it’s done, Fletcher has come to realise Jaffe’s intentions are no good. Both take the Nuncio and become transformed (Jaffe renames himself “the Jaff”—a crucial difference to himself, I’m sure), and they lock in battle. Eventually they’re caught in an impasse, deep in a cave beneath the Californian town of Palomo Springs.

A few years later, heavy rains have caused a temporary pool to form over the cave, and a heat wave leads four young women to go swimming. Sensing a means of continuing their battle by other means, the Jaff and Fletcher reach up and plant something in these women, which causes them to single-mindedly seek to get themselves pregnant, whereupon their children will be the children of the nunciates Fletcher and the Jaff. The novel proper begins when Howie Katz, the now grown-up son of one of these women (and so, the “son” of Fletcher) returns to Palomo Grove and instantly falls in love with Jo-Beth McGuire, “daughter” of the Jaff and meant to be his deadly enemy. (Fortunately—or not fortunately—she has a twin brother, Tommy-Ray, who proves more loyal to his power-mad father.) And so, the battle is set to recommence, in a modern-day small Californian town.

The Great and Secret Show is, essentially, a fable about imagination, as it’s battled for by the twin forces of fear (the Jaff, who creates an army of “terata”: living fears drawn from his victims) and dreams/hopes/fantasies (Fletcher, whose counter-army is made of “hallucigenia”: living fantasy figures drawn from people’s desires). Behind all this, Barker sets up a myth of the dream-ocean Quiddity, where we swim every night. There is an island in this ocean, called the Ephemeris, on which dreamers land three times in their lifetime: “At birth, at death and for one night when we sleep beside the love of our lives…” On this island, they get to see the Great and Secret Show itself, and this, somehow, heals them, and preserves their sanity against an often harsh reality.

But the Jaffe wants to use the Art to enter Quiddity on his own terms, and take control. (Aside from overweening ambition, he doesn’t have specific plans. I assume, like other merely power-hungry figures of the real world, he basically just wants to exercise power for its own sake, to seize what he can seize, and claim it all for himself, even if he doesn’t understand its true value.) The threat is real, then—he’s going to unleash insanity on all humankind—but vague. And perhaps Barker knew such a vague threat wasn’t enough to power what he intended as a trilogy, so there’s another, and greater, danger. Across the dream-sea, on the far shore, is the realm of the Iad Orobouros, and the moment the Jaff opens a doorway into Quiddity, these incomprehensible Lovecraftian beings start their lumbering way towards our world. The size of mountains, and seemingly made of insects (though this could just be the appearance of their harbingers), their appetite is: “For purity. For singularity. For madness.”

I have to say that, for me, The Great and Secret Show didn’t really take off, on this re-read, until the opening of part six (of seven)—and so, at page 405 of nearly 700. Before that, I felt Barker wasn’t really telling the tale as he usually did, more just sort of getting through the plot points. (It’s evidently a thoroughly plotted-out novel.) I couldn’t help but picture him working on other projects at the same time, and perhaps knowing he had to get this contracted novel written, and perhaps not quite being in the right frame of mind. The trouble is, I think this matters more for Barker than other writers. Because he’s combining the realistic and the often boldly fantastic in a characteristic way, he really has to make it work, and that, it seems to me, comes about through his style of storytelling (showmanship might be a better term, for Barker) as much as plot or character. When he’s not 100% there, it can all seem a little too wild and weird to be really engaging. Barker himself said it was “a very tough book to write”, which makes me wonder if it just wasn’t flowing. But, on the other hand, there’s this, from an interview with David J Howe (from 1989, when the book was first published):

“Barker admits it was a conscious decision not to use the same intricate, detailed style of the previous books, but to attempt a lightness of touch to compliment the wide breadth of narrative that it encompasses…”

(Both of these quotes, and more about the book, from the official Clive Barker site.)

To give an example of where the story isn’t being fully told, there’s a scene where reporter Nathan Grillo steps out of the shower and has a conversation with his boss. He’s given a new assignment and sets off. It’s never stated that the two are talking on the phone, and I only realised at the end of it that this must have been the case. It just seemed Barker hadn’t properly set the scene, as though he was working off his plot summary and not really telling the tale.

Fortunately, in the final three hundred pages, this changes. Barker starts writing as his old self again and the novel really works for its final, extended, apocalyptic climax.

(I’m only going into this in such detail because one of the things I’m trying to work out, on this re-read of Barker’s fiction, is why I stopped reading him when the novels first came out. Something happened, or failed to happen, and I don’t believe it was lack of invention or failure of ideas on Barker’s part. (And the fault, of course, may be mine.) I still think Barker’s best fiction is Weaveworld, but I’m keen to see how the other novels read a second time.)

With The Great and Secret Show, Barker was aiming to create his equivalent of The Lord of the Rings: a weighty, mythically-infused fantasy trilogy, but with the crucial difference of being set in our world. It’s impossible at the moment to judge how successful he’d have been, because the trilogy is unfinished—though there is a second novel in the series, Everville, which came out five years later. I think, though, that The Great and Secret Show works perfectly well as a standalone read, a book that’s about the crucial importance of imagination, both as a source of the meaningfulness of life (dreams in all senses, love, mystery and wonder), and as a source of pitfalls and dangers (power-hunger, madness, fear). It’s a book about the deepest of all dreams:

“Most dreams are just juggling acts. Folks picking up their memories and trying to put them in some kind of order. But there’s another kind of dream… It’s a dream of what it means to be born, and fall in love, and die. A dream that explains what being is for…”

(Which I like to think chimes with David Lindsay’s Sphinx, with its “dreams we dream during deep sleep and remember nothing of afterwards.”)

The Great and Secret Show is not Barker’s best book, but it’s certainly an interesting part of his body of work. Next up on my Barker re-read, though, is the novel I’ve been most looking forward to revisiting: his mega-doorstop, Imajica.

Louise Lawrence’s 1986 YA Moonwind is something of a thematic sibling to her earlier novels Star Lord and Earth Witch, and though it’s ostensibly SF, it’s better read as a fable or fantasy that uses the backdrop of space and technology to heighten its themes. (Perhaps a better description might be New Age SF, considering its allusions to ancient Atlantis, humans being partly descended from aliens, and the idea that aliens are more like spiritual beings than bug-eyed monsters.)

It starts with a spaceship being forced to land on a barren moon for repairs. For some reason, only junior technician Bethkahn is left onboard to assess the damage (and to discover there’s one thing she can’t repair), while the rest of the crew take a secondary craft to the nearby blue planet. Landing on an island, that craft is destroyed when a volcano erupts, leaving Bethkahn isolated, alone, and unable to take off. The ship’s computer suggests she enter suspended animation, from which it will wake her when the situation changes. And it does, ten thousand years later, but with alarming news: the formerly primitive people of that nearby planet have developed technology, and are now visiting their moon. Bethkahn takes one look at these lumbering, space-suited creatures, and immediately dismisses them as “Cavorting imbecile monsters!” The ship fears that, when the creatures find it, they’ll take it apart to see how it works, and Bethkahn will be stranded in this primitive system forever. The pair watch for developments.

The story then switches to seventeen-year-old Gareth Johns from Aberdare (yes, that blue planet was Earth all along), co-winner of a World Educational Council essay-writing competition, for which he’s won a month-long visit to the US moonbase. His essay, titled “The Lunacy Syndrome” is about how there are dwindling congregations of church-goers on Earth, but “go to the Moon and you come back converted”. The Moon, he thinks, is “where science and religion finally meet”: “God is alive and well and living on the Moon.”

The other prize-winner is Californian Karen Angers, whose essay is on how the Moon has always been characterised, poetically and mythically, as female: Phoebe, Diana, and the White Goddess. Reading it, Gareth is unprepared for what he considers the “loud-mouthed and gawky” young woman who wrote it, who gets things off between them to a bad start by, first of all, referring to him as English—he’s the “first Welshman on the Moon”, after all!—and by constantly calling him Gary. But underlying this clash are differences of class (Gareth’s home town is poor, and he feels little hope about his own future, or that of the world, whereas Karen’s parents are obviously well-off), and of temperament. Gareth has come to the base expecting to “feel the Moon’s almighty desolation and catch the wonder”; sunny Karen seems to have just come to photograph everything, and Gareth feels she’s turned what ought be an awesome and even spiritual experience into a tourist trip.

Bethkahn, meanwhile, realises she has a chance of escape. If she can sneak into the moonbase, she can use their tools to fix her ship’s broken stabiliser and take off. But how to enter the base without being detected? She does have, it turns out, a means of doing so. Because Bethkahn, and the rest of her people, are non-corporeal; they are “spirit”, not flesh. But in order to do the work on the stabiliser she’s going to need to use a physical body, somehow, and the easiest way seems to be “spiritual possession”: she will enter a person’s body, take it over for a while, get the work done and leave. But her first attempt ends in disaster. She tries to enter a lunar buggy to possess the driver, but because the driver, lazily, left the internal airlock door open, all she succeeds in doing is killing him. Her next, more careful, attempt drives her intended possessee mad. She realises she needs, not a body to use, but an ally. And there’s only one person this can be: Gareth, who has discovered one of her ship’s spy modules but has kept quiet about it. He, she realises, might be someone she can trust. (And he already has a hint she exists. Just before the disaster with the moon buggy, he and some others saw a cloud of moon dust, driven by what, despite there being no atmosphere, seemed like a wind—a moonwind—and inside it, he thought he saw a young woman.)

I’m sure the more hard-SF type of reader will already have noticed what appears to be a massive logical hole in this set-up. Bethkahn is non-corporeal, yet she had to open the moon buggy’s door to get in, which is why the driver was killed. It turns out she always has to open a door to get into anywhere. It also turns out she can carry physical objects—the damaged stabiliser is one such object—even though it seems she can’t handle the tools she’d need to use to fix it. (This despite being an engineer on a spaceship that surely at some point needs tools to fix its other components. And why does she need a physical spaceship at all if she’s non-corporeal?) In one scene, Gareth hands her a plastic bag containing the spy module he discovered, and she walks off with it; but when Gareth tries to touch her, his hand goes right through. Bethkahn’s non-corporeality, it seems, is there to first of all create a plot difficulty (how to fix the stabiliser), and secondly to underline the core theme of the book: loneliness.

Bethkahn has spent ten thousand years on the moon, and though she has her ship’s computer for company, “It was not enough that the starship cared for her. She needed a person… a voice, a smile, another living being beside herself.” Gareth, meanwhile, has already been warned that one of the main perils of this harsh environment isn’t its lack of atmosphere, but that “Solitude can be dangerous on the Moon”, because “here on the Moon was a loneliness that terrified, a monstrous isolation.” When he comes to know Bethkahn, he immediately grasps the poetic meaning of her nature:

“She’s non-corporeal, see? A ghost… stranded here… wandering. My God, there’s loneliness for you.”

Gareth is equally lonely, in a way. He’s hopeless about his life at home (“a decaying industrial nation, closed-down coal mines and acid rain and small chance of getting employment”), and doesn’t fit in with the mostly cheery Americans on the base. When Karen suggests he come to Santa Barbara where her dad can help get him a job, he bursts out:

“There’s nothing anywhere! No reason! No purpose! … There’s no memory on Earth. Here’s where the meaning began. Here! I want to go on, not back…”

Bethkahn, though, offers him an alternative: leave with her. Only, to do so, he has to become, like her, non-corporeal, which in human terms means dying. Moonwind is, at times, a stark narrative, about not just loneliness, but the way loneliness only increases the difficulties between people. Bethkahn’s inexperience in dealing with physical humans leads to one death and one madness; Gareth, on the other hand, is always getting in trouble with Karen and the other people on the base thanks to his oscillating between a spiky resentment of their generally happy dispositions, and his own rather disruptive sense of humour. In her essay on the moon goddess, Karen wrote that “loneliness makes her cruel”, and that certainly seems the unintentional effect of both Bethkahn’s and Gareth’s isolation.

As with Lawrence’s Star Lord, the alien in Moonwind is a more advanced, more spiritual being, but one with a slight coldness to it. The closer parallel, though, is with Earth Witch, which is also about a troubled Welsh lad getting into a relationship with a woman who’s part human, part mythical entity. In all three, Lawrence takes her stories as close to tragedy as she can with a Young Adult audience, while leaving a little space at the end for something like a positive ending.

Moonwind was adapted for TV, though in mini-format. It was shown as part of ITV’s Book Tower magazine programme, in eight episodes from 8th January 1987 to 19th February (4:50p.m. on Thursdays). The Book Tower was itself only a half-hour (minus adverts) programme featuring book reviews and story readings as well as its drama serial, but even if each episode of the adaptation was only 10 minutes long, that could still make for a short feature-length film in total, which would be interesting to see. The only thing I’ve been able to find, though, is one picture of some of the cast:

First published in the US in 1991, and in the UK in 1992, Waking Nightmares is Campbell’s next all-original collection after 1987’s Scared Stiff. Most of the stories it collects are from the 1980s (three were originally published in Night Visions 3, alongside fellow Liverpudlian Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart), but there are a few mopped up from the 70s: “Jack in the Box” (one of Campbell’s EC Comics tributes), “The Trick”(previously published in the UK edition of Dark Companions, and presumably included here — despite Campbell himself thinking it “coldblooded” — because it had not been published in the US before and is set during Halloween), and “Eye of Childhood” from 1978. There’s also “Playing the Game”, written in 1980 — or, rather, rewritten, because it was originally written in 1974 as “Snakes & Ladders”. That earlier version was published in Twilight Zone Magazine (April 1982), but by this point Campbell had completely rewritten it because he felt the characters lacked motivation. (Having read both versions, I have to say I prefer the earlier one: motivation doesn’t seem to matter, as it gets straight into the action, and reads like a persecutory nightmare. By comparison, the 1980 version feels a bit overthought-out, and loses the fraught atmosphere of the first version through trying to make it seem more realistic. But, aside from the central idea, they’re almost completely different tales.)

Having a peppering of 1970s stories among the 1980s ones highlights what might have been a change in Campbell’s style (or, anyway, an expansion of his available styles). The 80s stories are less hallucinogenically intense and claustrophobic, with a clearer, pacier style — more easily readable (which isn’t meant as either criticism or praise), while still touched with moments of the perceptual weirdness that’s Campbell’s trademark. One that stuck with me from my first reading of this collection, back when it first came out in paperback, is “Old Clothes”. Here, 40-year-old Eric is working as a removal-man’s assistant, clearing out the house of a deceased medium. As her belongings are all going to be either sold or junked, when it starts to rain he grabs her coat and puts it on. Subsequently, he starts to find little items in the pockets: a flower, rare coins, a ring. He’s sacked when a pearl necklace suddenly appears in one of the pockets while he’s helping move house for a somewhat confused old lady who claims it’s hers. By this point, though, he’s realised that something is making these increasingly valuable objects appear. He learns that the medium whose coat it was had one particularly devoted but mischievous “guide” whose apports took an increasingly dark turn. As they now start to do for Eric, too… There’s a lot of action compressed into a short story, but it doesn’t veer into the territory of borderline mental instability (in both prose style and character) that marks a lot of Campbell’s fiction. Eric is quick to accept what’s going on and try to take advantage of it, at first, anyway.

“Old Clothes” points to a theme in Campbell’s fiction, not just in Waking Nightmares, but throughout: how characters are made to feel, and even be punished for, a guilt that is not theirs. Eric’s taking of the coat might be questionable (though the medium had no relations, and the chief removal man pockets the proceeds from selling her furniture), but the persecution he suffers — and the worse he manages to avoid by passing the coat on — massively outweighs whatever punishment he might be owed.

Elsewhere, the guilt-to-punishment ratio is even more out of whack. In “The Trick”, for instance, two girls are punished — by being drawn into a dark tunnel at night, towards a potentially nasty fate — and not for anything they’ve done, but because their dog barked at a local woman all the kids call a witch. To make it worse, the main character, Debbie, tries not to think of the old woman as a witch because she thinks it’s unfair — only, of course, the old woman is a witch, and Debbie’s simply the one who’s punished for it all.

In some cases, the very sympathy or sensitivity a character feels is what leads to them being singled out for a punishment that’s absolutely undeserved. The prime example of this is “The Old School”, whose protagonist, Dean, is a teacher who tries to connect with his pupils on their own level. Meeting a few eleven-year-olds kicking a can and smoking in the grounds of a historical house, he manages to direct them into a game of hide-and-seek. But while seeking, he finds himself lured into the woods, to the ruins of an old school renowned for the brutality of its teachers, and haunted by the cobweb-and-dried-leaves ghosts of ex-pupils, who, in a dark echo of “the best days of their lives”, have returned to the “greatest terror of [their] life” as a reaction to the greatest terror of all, their own deaths. Dean tries to assure them that, though he’s a teacher, he’s a kind teacher, and will even play with them for a bit. But, of course, they want someone to play with them forever, and they’re well beyond kindness.

Perhaps Campbell’s best-known story from this collection, “The Guide”, is a subtler continuation of the theme. The main character, Kew, on holiday with his daughter and grandkids but wanting a break from the children’s taste for the bloodthirstier extremes of horror, takes himself off for a day, led by an old guidebook written by the sort of writer whose subtle scares he much prefers, M. R. James. But the place he ends up in, thanks to some handwritten annotations in the copy he’s picked up, is one, it turns out, James deliberately left out, so seekers after the subtler thrills wouldn’t be tempted to go there. Kew’s very sensitivity to a rarefied aesthetic, then, makes him a victim. (This story contains a nice Jamesian joke, when the landlord to a pub Kew finds himself outside says “Come in and wet your whistle, my lad.”)

There are a number of main characters who are writers, in this collection, though Campbell never uses this as a mere background detail, but always as a key part of the story. Most effective is “Beyond Words”, in which a certain propulsive rhythm starts to infect the main character’s use of words. And this is at a time when his wife is pregnant and expecting their first child, as though the story were contrasting one, perhaps more authentic and natural, type of creativity with another that may just be a gateway to mental instability. Elsewhere, the mental instability has already arrived, as in “Next Time You’ll Know Me”, in which a budding writer keeps finding his ideas being stolen before he’s had time to even write them down, unaware that it may be an entirely different talent — precognition — that’s the cause. In “Meeting the Author”, on the other hand, the writer-figure is the source of horror, as the child-narrator is persecuted for not liking the writer’s first book, and is haunted by, of all things, a card-thin but looming caricature of the author that emerges from a pop-up book.

The writer-characters in this collection, though, are outnumbered by characters who are teachers. (This may be down to the fact that Campbell’s wife is a now-retired teacher.) But again, the choice of profession isn’t an arbitrary detail, as it allows Campbell to explore the relationship between children and adults — something he’s explored in a number of his novels that focus on parenthood, including The Nameless, The Claw, The Influence, and The House on Nazareth Hill. In “Eye of Childhood”, a girl casts a vengeful spell on a replacement teacher, showing how deeply even casual abusiveness can affect a vulnerable child. The teacher in “The Old School” has already been mentioned; another here is “The Other Side”, which Campbell wrote as his response to an image created by J. K. Potter (printed on the cover of the 1986 World Fantasy Convention’s Program Book, which contained Campbell’s tale). Here, the teacher is Bowring, who has moved across the river from the school where he teaches, but spends his time spying on his delinquent pupils on that other side through a pair of binoculars. He starts to see a clown-like figure whose assaults on these pupils are increasingly tied to Bowring’s own repressed disdain, even hatred, for those he teaches.

Waking Nightmares is a fine and varied collection, and though the developments in Campbell’s craft aren’t as dramatic as those in his earlier collections — The Height of the Scream and Demons By Daylight especially — it’s evident that even two decades into his writing career he’s continuing to expand and develop.