fantasy, page 1 of 92

Abraham Merritt is one of those writers I’ve long meant to read, and despite owning various paperback editions of his books, and making two attempts to get into The Ship of Ishtar, it’s only now I’ve finally read one—his first—The Moon Pool.

This began life as a short story, published in All-Story Weekly (22 June 1918), where it was popular enough for Merritt to write a longer sequel, “The Conquest of the Moon Pool” (in six instalments from 15 February 1919), and then incorporate the two into a single novel-length work. (Which, for some reason, was published in book form twice in 1919, first by Putnam, then by Liveright—apparently with some revisions to the latter, which included changing the villainous Prussian Von Hetzdorp to a villainous Russian, Marakinoff. Merritt apparently preferred the Putnam text, but I ended up reading the Liveright text.)

The book starts with its narrator, Dr Goodwin (“the foremost of American botanists”), meeting a well-respected colleague, Dr Throckmartin (or “Throck”), who’s evidently in the grip of “some searing shock of mangled rapture and horror”. Throck tells the tale of what happened to him in the ruins of Nan-Matal in the South Pacific: of a certain door that only opens by the light of the full moon, releasing a being of shining light which proceeded to carry off, one by one, everyone else in his expedition, including his young wife. Throck has vowed to return with the necessary resources to rescue them, but having told his tale is himself snatched away by this creature of scintillant moonlight before Goodwin’s very eyes. Goodwin, who has promised to take over the task should Throck be unable to, begins making plans. (This is the point at which the initial short story ended.)

Heading for Nan-Matal armed with, among other things, “a set of Becquerel ray condensers” (an early name for radiation, apparently), Goodwin assembles an odd cast of helpers, including a younger action-hero type in the Irish-American Larry O’Keefe (who’s sceptical of all of the supernatural except, apparently, banshees and leprechauns), the somewhat simple strongman Olaf Huldricksson, and the morally ambiguous (at first, anyway) Russian scientist Marakinoff. All manage to get through the moon-activated door to the chamber of the mysterious and deadly moon pool beyond, but are saved from becoming victims of the “Shining One” by a vision of a beautiful woman and her attendant human-sized frog-creature, who show them how to open a hidden door. Exiting the chamber, the band of adventurers find themselves in Muria (as in Lemuria), a subterranean land presided over by an ancient, advanced civilisation. Muria is ruled by the beautiful Yolara, Priestess of the Shining One, and the stocky-but-strong Lugur, Voice of the Shining One. (In this world, all women are tall and beautiful—though only the blondes seem to attain positions of authority—and all men strong and stocky.)

There’s a healthy dose of Haggard’s She going on here, with O’Keefe as the equivalent of the young heroic Leo, Dr Goodwin as the professorial Holly, and Yolara to some extent as Ayesha. Yolara falls in love with O’Keefe, and while he’s beguiled in turn, he’s really smitten by the visionary woman who guided them by the moon pool, who turns out to be Lakla, Handmaiden of the Silent Ones. This isn’t, though, quite the Ayesha/Ustane set-up from She, as although Yolara has all the fatal allure and power of Ayesha, the morally pure and innocent Lakla is essentially her equal, only serving different—and older—gods. Yolara serves the rapacious Shining One, and when she hears of the upper world from which O’Keefe came, makes plans for her deity’s conquest of it. Lakla’s Silent Ones, on the other hand, are a trio of ancient beings who originally created the Shining One, and though they’ve now lost control of it, and are somewhat fearful of it, nevertheless oppose its hunger for destruction. There are, even, echoes of the scene where Leo steps with Ayesha into a magical flame, only here the flames are “shining coils of moon fire”, and the outcome somewhat different, though just as perilous.

Merritt brings two things to this (by then) standard-feeling adventure formula, to make The Moon Pool distinct from She. One is a much greater degree of fantasy than Haggard employed. Merritt’s subterranean Muria possesses super-weapons including rays that shiver things (and people) to fragments, gravity-destroying bombs, invisibility devices; there’s also frog-people, a landscape of fungi that instantly devour living flesh, and the weird Shining One itself (which I can’t help picturing like the many glittery energy-beings in the original Star Trek series).

The other thing Merritt brings to this essentially Haggardian lost world adventure—and also what damned him for the more serious SF crowd of the 1950s and early 1960s—is his prose. Although James Blish (among others) would go on to dismiss it as “windy and cliché-ridden”, I think Merritt’s writing shows a real poetry when he turns it on at the right moment:

“There was no sky—at least no sky such as we know—all was a sparkling nebulosity rising into infinite distances as the azure above the day-world seems to fill all the heavens—through it ran pulsing waves and flashing javelin rays that were like shining shadows of the aurora, echoes, octaves lower, of those brilliant arpeggios and chords that play about the poles.”

(And if this sounds somewhat psychedelic, it may well be. As Douglas A Anderson shows in his essential article fact-checking Merritt’s autobiography, there’s an interview in which Merritt claims to have taken peyote, saying it “results in a color reaction. I remember sitting on the grass and watching it change into a variety of colors. Out of that came geometric patterns. I had a consciousness throughout of music that blended with the colors.” Just the melange of music and colour to be found in the above-quoted example of his prose, then.)

I have to admit that not all of Merritt’s writing excited me to the same level. His non-American characters tend to suffer from a touch of the Van Helsings, not just talking in garbled cod-English, but doing it at great length, which implies the author was really enjoying it, but to me it was just readerly friction. (And O’Keefe, despite speaking English, descends into long, lyrical passages infused with Irish folklore and mythology, as though to so underline his archetypal Irishness that you can’t help feeling he must be compensating for something.)

Lovecraft was an admirer, writing in a letter to Robert H Barlow that Merritt “has a peculiar power of working up an atmosphere and investing a region with an aura of unholy dread”. And there are a few pre-echoes of Lovecraft’s own stories here. Not only does The Moon Pool, like “The Call of Cthulhu”, centre around a ruin on an island in the South Pacific, but the Norwegian captain of a ship found drifting nearby—Huldricksson—recalls, for me, the Norwegian captain Johansen from Lovecraft’s tale, both of whom have survived an encounter with their story’s monster. (Which, made of moonlight as it seems to be, has a touch of “The Colour Out of Space” about it.) And then there’s the theme of the scientifically-created servitor that turns against its makers—the shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness, the Shining One here—though of course that could be read as just one more variant on the Frankenstein theme inherent in all science fiction. (Or the Morlock/Eloi relationship from The Time Machine.)

Merritt was a tremendously popular author in his day, even having a periodical (A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine) named after him (though only after his death, and only lasting five issues). He was taken up by early SF fans, perhaps to his later detriment as, when SF started getting serious about the science in its fiction, his was found to be lacking, and he had to wait for his re-identification as a fantasy writer for his works to start being republished in paperback. Now he’s settled into place as one of the deep-cut classics of the fantasy field (I read it in an edition with footnotes and an introduction, from the Wesleyan University Press), not quite at the level of Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, but somewhere, perhaps, in the Clark Ashton Smith zone. (CAS on Merritt: “Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.”)

Merritt is a clear Romantic—not just in his lush prose, vivid imagination and high adventure, but for his ultimate message that “Love is stronger than all things.” (Even though it doesn’t help Throck, nor Huldricksson.) Although I enjoyed The Moon Pool well enough, the characters and situations were perhaps too archetypal, even clichéd, to really make it work for me. The descriptive prose is definitely good, though, as are the moments of bizarre fantasy. His subsequent output seems to be divided between further lost world adventures and a few occult thrillers. Perhaps if I read some more Merritt, I’ll go for one of the latter.

I started this read-through of Barker’s fiction wondering why it was I’d stopped reading him the first time round, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it. I think I’d have bought and started reading Galilee (1999) when it first came out in paperback, but I can’t remember finishing it. Reading it this time, I came to a point where I was absolutely ready to give up (as I’m sure I actually did, back then), and it was only my determination not to bail out on this Barker read-through that meant I broke through to the later (better) parts of the book. Maybe this one just isn’t for me—it certainly had mixed reactions among its initial reviewers—but I think there are parts of it that just aren’t up to Barker’s usual standards. And, this being a long book (his second-longest, after Imajica; in some pre-interviews, he talks about it being a two book series) those parts are as long as other people’s actual novels.

Galilee is also the furthest Barker has got from the Books of Blood-style horror that initially made his name. Even in the novels that followed, where he took pains to point out that what he was writing was fantasy, not horror, the darkness was still there, and was still weird, demonic, and grandiose in that very Barkerish way. Galilee is subtitled “a romance”, and although it’s a romance tinged with fantasy, it’s not, to my tastes, tinged enough. (For me, romance needs something else to make it work—Jane Austen levels of wit and social satire, for instance—or should boil along in a subplot alongside adventure, mystery, horror, or whatever.)

Galilee is the tale of two families whose destinies became entwined in the dying days of the American Civil War. On the one hand, we have the Barbarossas, whose roots lie in Africa, but whose generations are few, because their central line are immortal divinities. As the titular Galilee explains, he has no grandparents, because his parents weren’t born. (There are “those creatures God made, but also those who made themselves by force of will or appetite”, and Cesaria and Nicodemus Barbarossa are two such. Though, it has to be said, Nicodemus has managed to get himself killed over a century ago, leaving only the fearsome matriarch Cesaria to preside over the family.)

The Barbarossas live hidden away in their house called L’Enfant des Carolinas (designed for Cesaria by her one-time lover Thomas Jefferson), and it’s there that one of Nicodemus’s bastard sons (the half-divine, half-human Maddox) sets out to write this book, the history of his family. But he realises he can’t write about the Barbarossas without also writing about the Gearys.

The Geary clan are, we’re told, “American royalty”, “As rich as the Rockerfellers and as influential as the Kennedys”. Where the Barbarossas have magical power, the Gearys have worldly power—and a dark heart, for they are “fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred… iron-willed and long-lived… casually cruel and just as casually charismatic”:

“There was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary daemon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights.”

Although it starts out sounding as though it’s going to be a dynastic history, chock-full of events from the past, Galilee really just focuses on one event from the present, the marriage of Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary. Mitchell—rich, handsome and single—is the most eligible bachelor in the USA; Rachel is just an ordinary (but beautiful) girl from an ordinary background, who catches Mitch’s eye while working in a jeweller’s shop. He asks her out, they go on dates, they get engaged and married—it all sounds like a fairy tale. Then Rachel realises how shallow Mitch is—charming, but shallow—and how loveless their relationship is. But the Geary women are used to this, and have a solution. Rachel is told to go for a stay at a certain house on the island of Kaua’i, which only the Geary women are allowed into. There, she’s visited by Galilee Barbarossa, who, it turns out, provides a certain service for all the Geary women when their marriages prove empty. One night with him gives them “A taste of an emotion that struck deep into their being, and offered them a glimpse of what their souls needed to stay bright.” After which they can return to their empty lives. Only, Rachel doesn’t want to return. She and Galilee fall in love, and that love will destroy the delicate balance of hatred and power that exists between the Gearys and the Barbarossas.

Quoted in Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds (by Phil & Sarah Stokes), Barker says, of this novel:

“What I tried to do is take what I learned about writing about the real world in Sacrament and marry it to what I learned about writing a sort of poetic, almost religious fantasy in Imajica. I wanted those to be put side by side.”

He goes on to add: “it’s much easier to relate to some of the chief characters, because there they are, living in our world”.

It’s always been an archetypal situation for Barker—and one of his strengths as a writer—presenting the effect on ordinary people of encountering the fantastic, and having it transform their lives. It was only while reading Galilee that I realised this “encounter with the fantastic” occurs in other ways in Barker’s fiction, too: people are also transformed in his stories by encounters with super-heated passion (think of Julia’s one-night-stand with her husband’s brother Frank in The Hellbound Heart). That’s what happens in this novel, too—Galilee is, in a sense, the novel-length version of novella-length Frank—but Rachel’s life is also transformed by her encounter with another sort of the unordinary, the world of the incredibly wealthy. (Only, that’s not a positive transformation.)

And it’s here where one of my complaints about the book lies. Barker says this is a novel where it will be easier to relate to the characters because they’re living recognisable lives, but, aside from a couple of minor back-story characters, none of these characters is living a life that could be described as normal. Even Rachel, who comes from an ordinary background, is obviously beautiful enough to attract the country’s most eligible bachelor, so she’s already out of the ordinary. And once she’s swept up into the world of the ultra-rich (which doesn’t take long) her life is not ordinary, and nor are the people around her. That wouldn’t matter, but these characters are all so uninteresting. They are what I imagine the ultra-rich to be: spoiled, festering in their own insecurities, hang-ups and (this being Barker) perversities, but so very shallow, and I just don’t care about them or, sadly, Rachel. Compared to them, the plainly dysfunctional but gleefully Bohemian Barbarossas are by far the more “normal” people, despite being semi-divine. (Though, for all but the fearsome force of nature that is Cesaria, that divinity extends to nothing more than being long-lived. And being long-lived hasn’t exactly imparted wisdom on these messed-up beings.)

This wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if it wasn’t for my other complaint about Rachel’s story (which takes up most of this book). The non-fantastic parts—dealing with Rachel’s wooing, her marriage, the breakdown of that marriage—are boring. Nothing surprising happens, and the dialogue is just platitudes and clichés. Perhaps this is an expression of the emptiness of the Geary family, but the limpness of the dialogue extends to Rachel herself, and even to the most lively of the Geary wives, the down-to-earth and frankly alcoholic Margie, who becomes Rachel’s closest ally. This section of the book just had nothing to offer me, as a reader—no wit, no character, no surprises, no ideas. It’s certainly where I’d have stopped reading on my first go at this novel.

But this time I pushed on through, and things got a little better. If nothing else, I was driven by my interest in the themes Barker has developed throughout his fiction, and how they play out in this book. (Though I have to say, I found Galilee the most devoid of the sort of metaphysical and philosophical ideas that can usually be found in his work.)

Fictionally, the stand-out moments for me were two background stories. Both, notably, are about genuinely ordinary people encountering the fantastic. The first was the tale of the fisherman Zelim who meets Cesaria and Nicodemus as they’re baptising their first-born, Galilee. This one moment is enough to upend his life, and he eventually becomes a renowned storyteller. (Which echoes Sacrament’s tale of an encounter with a fantastic couple leading to a life driven by imagination and creativity, making me think this may be Barker’s own version of the artistic initiation story.)

The other is the story of Captain Holt, who meets Galilee in the final days of the American Civil War, a moment which recalls another Barker trope, this one from his first novel, The Damnation Game: the Faustian pact made in the aftermath of a war. There, it was a deal made in the ruins of WWII-era Warsaw that led to a man becoming fabulously wealthy; here, it’s a deal made in the Civil War-ravaged south that leads to the Geary clan becoming fabulously wealthy. In both cases the deal turns toxic, as Faustian pacts do.

As I say, there’s a lot of another Barker archetype—Uncle Frank from Hellraiser—in the character of Galilee. Not only does he spice up the lives of the Geary women, and Rachel in particular, with his skills in the bedroom, but he goes through something of Frank’s painful reconstruction when Rachel nurses him back from near-death following a shipwreck. (This makes me start to see this painful-return-to-life trope in Barker’s fiction as something almost shamanic. In some traditions, the shaman’s visionary initiation sees them being torn apart, stripped to the bones or cooked in a big pot, then reconstituted before their return to the world.)

Just to tick off another Barker theme I’ve noted in his fiction since The Books of Blood, here we also have the situation where women are allied to fantastic males or monsters, as opposed to human males, who are presented, in this trio, as murderous and toxically powerful. It’s been there since “Skins of the Fathers”; the Geary women and Galilee versus the nasty Geary men (most of whom are murderers and abusers of women) are just the latest version of it.

It may be that Galilee just isn’t my type of book. Contemporary reviews I’ve been able to find have certainly been polarised. Kirkus Reviews said it was “Overheated and intermittently risible, but the thing is entertaining”; The Birmingham Mail said “This is Barker’s greatest achievement—an addictive read that is nigh-impossible to put down.” But The Bookseller said, “We’ve all been waiting for another Weaveworld, but sadly this isn’t it… It’s a fan’s book, I feel—not one to expand his readership.” And Maxim magazine (not one I’d usually go to for literary analysis) called it “well-written Jackie Collins with a dose of X-Men,” but went on to note that “Loyal Barker fans will feel cheated.”

Barker himself was certainly in a happy place when he wrote it (the character of Galilee was based on his new partner at the time, and the house on Kaua’i was inspired by Barker’s holiday home on the same island). And he deliberately chose to make the book narrated—in fact, written—so he could freely comment on his own creative process. So, we get some glimpses of how he feels when he’s writing:

“Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities and show you the loveliness of filth.”

As well as perhaps his most explicit echo of William Blake:

“I suspect, by the way, that in the creation of divinities we see the most revealing work of the human imagination. And of course in the life of that imagination, the most compelling evidence of the divine in man.”

My own reading of Galilee was more powered by my interest in Barker’s work as a whole than the book itself, but I’ve found my enthusiasm for this Barker read-through undampened. For some reason I’ve got my heart set on reading Coldheart Canyon no matter what, perhaps because I bought it but never read it when it first came out. Here’s hoping it’s a return to the sort of Barker I like.

Having by now spent ten years publishing blockbuster novels that mix horror and fantasy on an often Biblical scale, Sacrament (first published in 1996) saw Barker taking a step back from the multiple worlds and earth-shaking events of Imajica, The Great and Secret Show and Everville to something less chock-full of entire carnivals of the fantastique. Here, he addresses some issues of concern in the real world around him. And though, this being Barker, there are still moments when it all strays into the metaphysical, fantastic and luridly horrific, it does, at times, even get a little autobiographical.

The protagonist of Sacrament is Will Rabjohns, a world-renowned wildlife photographer known for his images of animals brought up hard against humankind’s impact on their home environments. The novel opens as he’s finishing his latest project, on polar bears hunting through the rubbish tips of Balthazar in northern Canada. But a bear attack puts him into a four-month coma, during which he revisits the events of thirty years ago when, as a thirteen year old, he encountered a strange and beautiful pair of vagabonds, Jacob and Rosa.

Back then, Will’s parents had just moved from Manchester to the Yorkshire village of Burnt Yarley following the death of Will’s older brother, who had always been his parents’ favourite. Still left very much in the shadows of his parents’ affections, when he meets this strange pair, and finds Jacob taking a keen interest him, Will decides to run away with them.

Jacob has a strange avocation as “the Killer of Last Things”: he seeks out the final mating pairs of dying species, documents them thoroughly in his journal, then kills them, thus making what he sees as an irreversible impact on the world. Something passes between Jacob and Will, and the boy experiences some of the older man’s memories, including one of a dead painter, Thomas Simeon, from two centuries ago (Jacob and Rosa are, it seems, immortal, and have a Cenobitish air of ennui’d repletion about them), whose body, left in the wilds, was partially eaten by a fox. (In his coma, Will sees that fox once more and speaks to it—Lord Fox, it calls itself.) In the end, events transpired to prevent Will from joining this dangerous but alluring couple, but he left the town and his parents as soon as he’d grown up: a gay man, he knows his parents—and, indeed, most of society at the time—couldn’t accept what he was. He left England for America, settling in San Francisco.

Recovering from the coma, Will says he’s finished with photography, but has no plans for what he’s going to do instead. He returns to San Francisco, only to find himself in a community ravaged by AIDS. And Lord Fox, stirred into wakefulness inside him, starts visiting, enlivening his senses with a fresh acuity, and driving him to Barkerian excesses in the city’s gay nightclubs. Will realises he has to rid himself of this troublesome animal spirit just as Jacob, elsewhere in the world, decides he needs to rid himself of the connection he still feels to Will. To this end, Jacob and Rosa return to Burnt Yarley and assault Will’s father, putting him into hospital, thus sending the message that they want Will back for a confrontation.

As ever with Barker’s fiction, that confrontation doesn’t go according to anyone’s plan, and turns into a quest that heads further north to the Isle of Tiree, where Jacob and Rosa’s former master—perhaps, even, creator—the magician Rukenau, dwells in the magical structure known as the Domus Mundi, the House of the World.

Barker has said this is a novel infused with autobiographical elements (his biographer Douglas E Winter says “Sacrament is arguably the best of Clive Barker’s novels, and one of the most directly and profoundly autobiographical of his fictions”). It’s broad strokes stuff, though, as this is a novel about a creative gay man who has moved from the north of England to the West Coast of the USA. And Will’s critics say, of his art, what Barker must have heard many times himself: “Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”

The main fantastical element centres on Jacob and Rosa. (Winter writes: “The bloodthirsty scourge known as Jacob Steep is only the most recent of the light-bearing zealots who burn their way through the pages of [Barker’s] fiction,” which is a wonderful description.) Both have some power, most explicitly in Rosa’s case, as she has an animated string of rosary beads that does her bidding (usually murder). Like so many Barker figures, the couple exist in a twilight world, or perhaps an elevated version of this one, their concerns philosophical and aesthetic rather than the mundane ones of daily survival, blessed visionaries and cursed wanderers in one.

As so often in Barker’s fiction these are figures on a quest for deeper, or higher, knowledge. Like The Great and Secret Show’s Jaff or Weaveworld’s Shadwell the Salesman, their power derives from an awareness of another world, but one they are not the masters of. Jacob and Rosa, in fact, do not really understand what they are. They know they’re immortal; they’re haunted by certain memories (an ice palace they visited many years ago reminded them of something, though they can’t recall what). Jacob in particular is troubled and inconsistent. Despite his extinction-killings, he seeks forgiveness somehow, and a clear view of God—who is drowned out, in this world, he believes, by the “smothering, deafening fecundity” of its animal life, hence his need to kill it off—but, at the same time, he’s contemptuous of the deity, saying “God’s a coward and a show-off, Will… He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are…” Zealot he may be, but his faith blows hot and cold.

Jacob and Rosa know they owe their existence to the magician Rukenau, who dwells in the Domus Mundi—which they, somehow, helped build—and it’s when they, and Will, start to learn more about both Rukenau and the painter Simeon (who was, for a while, Rukenau’s partner in magical endeavours) that the novel really starts engaging with its ideas, and became much more fulfilling, for me.

Simeon’s is the clearer, more positive, vision, as he (in one of the memories Will has experienced) holds up a flower petal to Jacob and provides the novel with its title: this petal is “the true sacrament”, “the Holy of Holies… the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself”, as is all of the natural world. He has something of Algernon Blackwood’s panpsychism about him as he says: “God knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service…”

But Simeon died centuries ago, and we only get to meet Rukenau here, living a squalid existence in the out-of-this-world structure known as the Domus Mundi. Whatever it is or was meant to be, this structure (I don’t recall it getting a full explanation) is a shining thing that seems to contain the essence of the world’s animal and plant life, a light full of “hints of living things”—or would do, but because Rukenau is unable to face its constant light, he has covered the interior walls in “mud and excrement”—the main image that lingered from my first reading of the book, making me wonder at the time just what Barker was saying. (I’m still not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s more by way of a complaint, that we live in such a wondrous world, but insist on polluting it in every way we can?)

One notable shift in Barker’s fiction that comes through in this novel is its attitude to death. In his previous fiction, death has only ever been a transformation, a change of state rather than an ending, and one it’s possible to return from (however painfully—think of all those half-made Uncle Frank-like “walking anatomy lessons” throughout the novels). In Imajica, a man who died from AIDS became a voice that spoke from the afterlife, an “angel” to one of that novel’s characters; here, when a man dies from AIDS, it’s the end. Resurrection has been a key theme of Barker’s fiction from the start, but “This is not a world of resurrections.” Rather, it’s a world of “early and unexpected goodbyes”, where “Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.”

Jacob and Rosa, though, belong “to a race or condition which was in some unfathomable fashion beyond the frailties of disease, or even death.” In the end, though, they are revealed to be not human at all. They form part of another theme in Barker’s novels, of created beings, like the homunculus of his play The Magician, or the magical doppelgängers of Zacharias and Judith in Imajica.

What humanity they have, in particular their characters as a man and a woman, was acquired by “learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them”. Jacob, then, is death (“It was one of this appetites as a man; to love the hunt, the blood-letting and the kill”); Rosa is a combination of lust and a constantly-frustrated desire to have babies.

Overlapping with this Barker theme of the created being is another that’s closely allied to it, the relationship between fathers and sons. Here, it’s dealt with in entirely non-fantastic terms in Will’s relationship with his monstrously unemotional father, a philosopher whose response when his son says they should try to talk his mother out of her mournful depression, is to go on about the inadequacy of words to express any sort of meaning. “Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels,” Hugh tells the boy, which is basically his excuse for doing nothing. His mockery of the idea of human emotion reaches its nadir when, pushing the question to its absurd extreme, he asks Will to imagine “a portion of excrement which may be dubbed loving”, and thinks that this disproves love, when it in fact only invalidates his methods of enquiry. Will finds a far better father-figure in the murderous Jacob, who at least, for a while, is interested in the lad (even if he later wants to kill him).

Sacrament received some friction at the time for centring on a gay character, both from critics and its first (soon-replaced) editor (who apparently asked Barker if he couldn’t swap Will’s boyfriend for a girlfriend, scared it would hurt sales). Surprisingly, for a book that depicts the gay community as Barker knew it, and so which presumably could have provided it with a de-stigmatising voice at the time, the sequences in San Francisco are a little bleak, and not just because of the presence of AIDS. (Douglas E Winter writes: “its take on gay lifestyles is by no means a gentle or encouraging one”.)

Kirkus Reviews, though, gave the book a mostly-thumbs up critique:

“By turns suspenseful, intellectually exciting, wildly melodramatic, turgid, and bombastic, Barker’s novel is charged—in its complex development and surprising resolution—with very real, very human emotion. A weirdly absorbing and entertaining tale that offers more disturbing delights from one of our most inventive and risk-taking writers.”

I certainly enjoyed it, perhaps more than the first time around, as I can maybe appreciate its maturity and depth a bit more. The first half felt a little unsatisfying, perhaps because of the lack of Barker’s usual profusion of fantastic images and ideas suddenly leaving his characters with nothing to be beguiled by, but as the themes kicked in, in the second half of the novel, it certainly grew on me.

Some questions seemed unanswered, particularly about Rukenau (just what was he up to when he had the Domus Mundi built?), but ultimately it’s a book that retains Barker’s usual visionary concerns, just versed in slightly less fantastic terms. Inclusionist that he is, Barker sees the wonders of creation at all levels of existence, in all aspects of being human, and in the natural world:

“The creators of the world had not retreated to the heights. They were everywhere. They were stones, they were trees, they were shafts of light and burgeoning seeds. They were broken things, they were dying things, and they were all that sprang up from things dying and broken. And where they were, [Will] was too. Fox and God and the creature between.”