horror, page 1 of 63

Conceived of while writing his previous novel, Barker’s children’s fantasy The Thief of Always came out in 1992, a postprandial belch after the massive banquet that was Imajica. As this was in the days before the Potter-powered YA boom, and Barker was very much considered an adult author, he licensed the book to HarperCollins for a dollar (a silver dollar in one telling, half a sovereign in another); it not only sold well, but has been widely translated, and has several times been touted for a film adaptation, either animated or live action.

It starts with ten year old Harvey Swick bored in his bedroom, wishing away the dull month of February, when the grinning Rictus (with a smile “wide enough to shame a shark”) flies in through the window Peter Pan-style. He offers to take Harvey to the Holiday House, “where the days are always sunny… and the nights are full of wonders”. This House, hidden behind a magical wall of fog, offers its guests the best of each season every day: spring-like mornings, sunny summer afternoons, Halloween each evening, and Christmas every night, complete with the perfect gift (on his first night, Harvey gets the wooden toy ark his father made for him years ago, which was at some point lost). There are two other children there: Wendell, with whom Harvey spends his days making a treehouse, and the more retiring Lulu who, after she shows Harvey her dolls’ house populated with tiny lizards, seems to spend most of her time hanging around the gloomy lake at the back of the House, with its strange, darkness-dwelling fish.

There are a few hints that everything is not so perfect. The man behind all this, Mr Hood, is never seen, though Rictus and his colleagues (the jittery Jive, and the sluggish Marr), and the cook Mrs Griffin, often refer to him, making it clear he not only knows everything that goes on in the House, but “every dream in your head” too. And Mrs Griffin warns Harvey that Hood “doesn’t like inquisitive guests”. Rictus, on first flying through Harvey’s bedroom window, invited him to ask all the questions he wanted, but as soon as he did, accused him of being “too inquisitive for your own good”. “Questions rot the mind!”, he warned—a telling echo of The Prisoner’s “Questions are a burden on others.” Harvey, though, quite naturally wants to know all there is about this evidently magical place.

After Wendell plays a Halloween trick on him, Harvey is determined to get his own back, and with the help of Marr, who can change people’s shape, allows himself to be turned into a bat-winged vampire monster, to swoop down on Wendell and give him a real scare. Rictus and Marr egg him on, to turn it into a real attack; Harvey fights the temptation, but genuinely frightens the boy. The next day, Wendell tries to leave, but finds he can’t get through the wall of fog. Meanwhile, Lulu, who has been hiding away for some time, calls goodbye to Harvey from behind a tree, saying she doesn’t want him to look at her. He realises she has slowly been transforming into one of the fish that haunt that gloomy lake, and has now gone to join them. Is this the fate awaiting all of them—those, that is, who aren’t claimed by the fourth of Rictus’s colleagues, Carna, who seems to be quite capable of killing children who try too hard to leave the House?

The basic idea, of being in a place that seems like paradise but is in fact not just a trap, but a downhill slope to losing one’s humanity, is as old as the Lotos Eaters episode in The Odyssey—and is quite often paired, as here, with something of the Circe episode, too, as for instance when Pinocchio starts turning into a donkey on Pleasure Island, or Chihiro’s parents transform into pigs in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It has always felt a familiar plot-line, but when I come to list examples, I usually can’t find as many as I’d expect. There’s elements of it in Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, and it’s the plot of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I always feel there’s some major examples out there I’m not thinking of. (And it would be quite instructive to compare Gaiman and Barker, though I’d consistently come out on the Barker side as a deeper and more artistically authentic creator.)

The uber-example, for me, though, is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and there are a few resonances between Lindsay’s Crystalman and Barker’s Mr Hood. Both, for example, are explicitly called thieves (Krag calls Crystalman “a common thief”, while Hood is the most obvious subject of the novel’s title), and both are seen at least once as enormous faces (Crystalman under one of his many aliases, Faceny, who is “all face”, Hood in the House’s attic), with an implication that this is because, like Hood, there is “a terrible emptiness inside” them, and the face is, ultimately, all there is. And Hood accuses Harvey of having “brought pain into my paradise”, just as the one fly in Crystalman’s ointment is the presence of pain, as embodied by Krag—the one reminder that pleasure is only a part of human experience, not the whole of it, and so anything that excludes pain must be a lie. Barker has expressed his admiration for A Voyage to Arcturus (calling it “a masterpiece… an extraordinary work, if deeply, deeply flawed”), and I was pleased to hear a perhaps unintentional Lindsay quote from him in an interview, where he says “The most important part of me [is] the part which dreams with his eyes open”—echoing the “I dream with open eyes” line from Arcturus.

The Thief of Always wasn’t Barker’s first foray into children’s literature. He’d actually made a couple of unpublished attempts before The Books of Blood (something called The Candle in the Cloud in 1971, and The Adventures of Mr Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus with some friends a few years later), and he’d written some plays for a youth theatre. Two of his inspirations were Peter Pan (which Barker has called “the book of my childhood”), and CS Lewis, but I was pleased to find that, unlike Lewis or, say, Roald Dahl, Barker doesn’t pick on one of his kids to be a moral lesson for the others, as with Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the many sticky ends met with in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wendell, who is evidently a little more greedy, gullible and cowardly than Harvey—though all within acceptable child limits—seems the perfect set-up for this, but Harvey and he turn out to be genuine friends, and there was no feeling from Barker of an adult tut-tutting when Wendell couldn’t quite see things through in the ultimate confrontation with Hood.

The Barkerian touch, here, is that Harvey wins in the end thanks not to his moral goodness, but because he’s found a little of Hood’s darkness within himself, and learns how to turn it on this “Vampire Lord” and his deceptive House. There are echoes of other Barker works here too, such as the overall feeling of a Faustian pact; the quartet of Rictus, Jive, Marr and Carna feeling a little like the four Cenobites (both are sets of unnaturally altered humans with supernatural powers, both are three men and a woman, and both feature one member with a ridiculously fixed grin); Rictus, in addition, has the salesman-like patter of Shadwell from Weaveworld; and Mr Hood is first met in a dusty attic, giving it the feel of the lurking supernatural presence of the resurrected Frank in Hellraiser. Barker himself has said that The Thief of Always has some of the same themes as Imajica: “The concerns about the darkness, the secret self; the ideas about some ultimate enemy who is in fact quite close to one’s self.” There’s no sense at all that, in writing for children, Barker is being less Barker.

(He was often, at this time, saying in interviews from Weaveworld on that he’d moved on from horror to fantasy, but there’s a lot of darkness in The Thief of Always, and I have to say it’s in the darker fantastic that his power as an imaginative writer lies.)

The risk with a children’s fantasy about the dangers of escapism is that it might turn into a critique of the genre it’s written in, but Barker, very much a pro-imagination writer—and also, as already said, not of the finger-wagging type—here presents a much more holistic view: “if we embrace Neverland too strongly, we are forever sucking our thumbs, but if we die without knowing Neverland, we’ve lost our power to dream…”, as he’s said in an interview. Harvey is an imaginative lad, and ultimately his imagination is part of the solution, not the problem. Being lured in by the apparent pleasures of the Holiday House is more like a refusal to grow up than a retreat into one’s inner world, and the best children’s literature is usually about learning to open up to the wider adult world. And Barker, a self-confessed “inclusionist” in all his writing, sees imagination, and darkness, as part of the wider, adult world, too.

Retired teachers Thom and Judith Clarendon are visiting their son Allan and his wife Coral at their new home in the seaside town of Barnwall (at number 14 Willow Grove—and you can’t help suspecting that 14 is probably a skipped 13). The real focus of their visit, though, is their six-year-old grandson Dean. Coral’s parents, Kendrick and Leigh, are also visiting, making for a crowded house. But it may have one more occupant still—Dean’s imaginary friend Heady, who “makes it go cold sometimes” and who can talk, but only “when he’s got a head”. Sleeping in Dean’s room, Thom wakes to see a child-sized shadow lingering near the bed, one that doesn’t seem to have anything above the shoulders. It disappears when he fully wakes up, but then Judith says to him “Don’t say you didn’t see.”

It all sounds like the set-up for a ghostly tale, and though it’s one Campbell would surely bring something entirely fresh to, it turns out that’s not the tale he’s telling in this, his latest novel, An Echo of Children. Because, once the grandparents are alone, Judith opens up about her concern that Dean’s imaginary friend may, in fact, be a ghost. And—everyone agrees. What’s more, even Allan and Coral agree, and a local priest, who believes them but for some reason is reluctant to arrange for an exorcism, nevertheless recommends the owner of a local New Age shop, who duly carries out a cleansing of the house. And it seems to be successful. Dean says Heady doesn’t like the smell in the house anymore and has gone. Which is sad, he says, because “He told me he wouldn’t let anyone hurt me… like someone hurt him.”

It’s from this point something changes in the household. Coral and Allan, already stricter than their own parents ever were, take Dean out of his new school because they don’t like the influence of his new classmates. As both work from home (Coral is a copyeditor, and perhaps being a corrector of other people’s mistakes has crept into her parenting style a little too much), they decide to home-school him, but their main intent seems to be to keep him away from anything that would make him question their increasingly strident religious views—and that even includes the local church.

Judith (now at her own home again, and having to work out what’s going on with Dean via video calls) starts to have new suspicions about the level of punishment involved in Dean’s home-schooling. She researches 14 Willow Drive and finds that the street changed its name after a horrendous local case in which a couple became so obsessed with correcting their wayward child, he “died by accident while they were attempting to purge him of wickedness” by attaching him to “a heavy child-sized cross”. And this is merely the latest in a long line of atrocities in a town whose very name, it turns out, commemorates a Viking massacre of a particularly nasty type: Barnwall, meaning bairn-field, or child-field, derives from the mass burials that were required once the Vikings had done their work.

An Echo of Children is a dialogue-driven novel, with something of the feel of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (another tale of people caught in the tangles of a supernaturally-charged landscape). But the dialogue is characteristically Campbell’s own. Virtually every line spoken is fraught with unintended implications—accidental second-meanings instantly latched onto by the recipient, leaving the speaker scrabbling to correct themselves, or revise what they’d just said. It’s a novel in which even those who love one another seem to be constantly having to reassure their loved ones against the unintentionally bruising effects of language. For Campbell, dialogue is a minefield even before such a delicate subject as the possible abuse of a child gets introduced. The effect is a sort of hemmed-in isolation as the difficulties of communication lead to Judith’s constantly having to deal with others’ almost wilful misunderstandings, or is simply battered into helplessness by the kind of false reassurances people give when they see someone in distress.

The theme of this novel, as Campbell himself has said, is “the vulnerability of children, as well as how people are willing to embrace beliefs that rob them of the right to question.” And the vulnerability of children is by no means a new strand in his work. Right back in the early novels, The Nameless was about a parent’s fear of what the world can do to a vulnerable child (and this could well be seen as Allan and Coral’s motivation here), while The Influence dealt with the spectre of psychological abuse that hangs over a family through multiple generations. The abusive impulse arising from a location with a dark and supernaturally-charged past can be found in The House on Nazareth Hill, and there are of course numerous short stories in Campbell’s body of work that touch on the theme (for instance, in the collection I recently reviewed, Waking Nightmares). An Echo of Children comes closest to Claw, in that it’s about the potential parental abuse of a child, but here the focus is on the helplessness of grandparents who suspect what’s going on, but who, while they feel they must surely be able to do something about it, are too easily dismissed as interfering busybodies, or as simply having a different parenting style—or, even, as suffering from the first signs of dementia. (Thom’s living with a constant barrage of age-related aches and pains, bouts of blurred vision and so on, is a constant note throughout the book, which only adds to the tension of the concluding chapters.)

The mix of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the smily, reassuring collusion of the local establishment figures who are also neighbours (and so, presumably, under the same influence of the land’s dark history) gives this novel a (sadly evergreen) relevance. Neighbours on Willow Drive include a police inspector, a social worker, and the owner of a local amusement arcade—all figures associated with the protection of children, or at least of places where they ought to be protected—and there’s almost a folk-horror-ish air in the way they pop up whenever Thom and Judith go out, offering their opinions on the right way to treat children, and how Dean is of course safest in his parents’ hands.

I might have preferred more in-depth background on the history of Barnwall, but perhaps that would have been a different sort of novel entirely. (I’d certainly have liked more characterisation of Allan and Coral. Surely the grandparents must have been wondering where this sudden religious impulse was coming from—though perhaps that’s part of the point: Allan and Coral’s behaviour is allowed to pass due to the usual British reticence in discussing peoples’ religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are a stepping stone to cultish behaviour.)

It’s an immensely readable novel (I polished off the last half in a single day, which is rare for me), not so much on the chilling edge of horror as the domestic end of a psychological thriller, though one with a definite supernatural edge. It continues Campbell’s run of fresh takes on the rich themes that have informed his body of work throughout, while showing him to be constantly seeking new angles and ideas.

First published in 1991, Imajica is Barker’s longest novel yet (and ironically for a novel whose main theme is unification, at one time it was split into two volumes in paperback). Another notable point about Imajica is that, unlike so many of the works I’ve already covered in this Barker re-read, when he wrote it he worked on Imajica alone. There were no plays (as with The Books of Blood I-III), stories (as with The Damnation Game) or films (several of the other novels) going on at the same time. Imajica became, virtually, Barker’s whole life for the eighteen (in some accounts fourteen) months he was working on it, during which he put in up to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. He’d write Imajica during the day, then go to bed and dream Imajica at night. And I think it shows: there’s no sense of the distraction I sometimes felt with The Great and Secret Show, and it’s probably his best work since Weaveworld. (Barker’s biographer Douglas E Winter suggests this regime may have been down to the frustration of his experience directing the film Nightbreed, and how that was ultimately taken out of his hands. Barker wanted a major project he could feel proud of, and to do that, he needed total control, something in which a novel easily beats a film.)

Imajica is a hefty work, and not just in terms of page count (1,136 in my paperback copy). Even for a man who’s not shy at bringing in Heaven and Hell, demons and angels, and the whole great and secret show, it’s got more scope than anything he’d done before, not just in terms of length and geography (not one but five worlds), but depth and ambition of theme. If Weaveworld, with its magic carpet and gypsy-like tribe of Seerkind is a fairy tale, and The Great and Secret Show an attempt at a new myth along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, Imajica takes things further still, by being, essentially, a work of the religious fantastic. Barker had always dealt in such concepts as redemption, damnation, transcendence and revelation, but here he was giving himself the elbow-room to not just hint at these things, but see them through to the end.

The novel opens in 1990s London. But this, our world, is merely one of five Dominions that together form the Imajica. Ours, the Fifth Dominion, is cut off from the others. Whereas people can pass from, say, the Second Dominion to the Third, or the Third to the Fourth, between the Fifth and the others is an abyssal realm known as the In Ovo, populated by deadly monsters. This schism opened thousands of years ago, and although there have been multiple attempts at Reconciliation—the re-joining of the Fifth to the other Dominions—they’ve so far ended in disaster. Now the Fifth has all but forgotten its fellow realms, as well as the magical arts one can use to reach them. (In a neat detail, the Fifth has acquired a cultural cool in the other Dominions, whose peoples adopt our fashions, covet rare exports—including cars but not, for some reason, telephones—even naming their children using random Fifth Dimension words, like Hoi-Polloi, Huzzah and Coaxial.)

The other exception is the First Dominion, the home of the Unbeheld Himself—the Creator, Hapexamendios, swathed behind a wall of mist known as the Erasure. (Barker, I have to say, is very good at naming things. Types of magic, for instance: feits, sways, writs, pneumas, uredos. Goddesses: Uma Umagammagi, Tishalullé, Jackalaylau. Monsters from the In Ovo: voiders, and the fearsome gek-a-gek. You just know from the name alone that you do not want to meet a gek-a-gek.)

For such a big novel, the main focus is on only a few main characters. First we have John Furie Zacharias, known as Gentle, whose day job is painting forgeries, and whose time is otherwise given over to his singular obsession for women. Then we have the beautiful Judith Odell, whose abandonment of her rich husband kicks off the action when the jealous Estabrook, unable to live without her, decides to have her assassinated. The man hired to do the job turns out not to be a man at all, but Pie’oh’Pah, a being from the other Dominions known as a mystif, who is seen, by each person who looks at it, as the person they most desire. When the first attempt on Judith’s life fails, she contacts Gentle, and Gentle, seeing Pie’oh’Pah, becomes entranced. Pie, in turn, evidently recognises Gentle, though Gentle doesn’t know why. Gentle has a peculiarity, that every ten years or so he remakes his life and forgets the previous decade. Almost as though he were under a spell of some sort. But whose spell, and why? The answer to that question will eventually lead to the next attempt at the Reconciliation of the five Dominions.

Imajica came out during the height of Barker’s fame as a creator. It was widely, and—according to the book’s Wikipedia page—positively, reviewed. (The reviews from UK sources I’ve been able to find, including a few newspapers and Interzone, weren’t entirely positive. Perhaps the UK was engaging in its usual practice of denigrating anyone once they started to get too successful. Or perhaps it sensed Barker was leaving: he’d finished writing Imajica in his empty London house, after his possessions had all been shipped to his new home in the US.) The criticism most often levelled at it, though, seems to have been about its length. At about a third of the way through, when Gentle has left the Fifth Dominion and started exploring the Imajica, I might have been inclined to agree. At this point, the growing mystery and hints of dark fantasy of the first third were replaced by outright otherworld fantasy of the sort done just as well—if not better—by so many other writers, and I found myself wondering if Barker would have made such a name for himself if he’d started off writing fantasy rather than horror. But as things in the Dominions darken, and even more so when Gentle returns to the Fifth in the final third of the book, things not only got back to being as good as they were at the start, but began to reap the rewards of this novel’s breadth of narrative, invention, and theme. It’s hard to put a finger on, but after a thousand pages of talk of redemption, transformation and revelation, when the point arrives for Barker to start delivering on his promises, he actually does, in a way it’s hard to imagine many other writers being able to.

The writers that most often popped into my head while reading Imajica were C S Lewis and Philip Pullman. Lewis, primarily, for this being a similar set-up to the solar system of the Space Trilogy. The Fifth, isolated as it is from the other Dominions, recalls Earth/Thulcandra from the Space Trilogy, and how it has become cut off from the other planets, as well as any awareness of the higher spiritual reality behind it all. But the similarity to Pullman’s His Dark Materials is more evident, as both his and Barker’s novels feature protagonists going through multiple worlds leading to a confrontation with God, who in both cases is a deity and a sort of physical being. But Barker—do I need to say?—adds more, often weird, sex into the mix than either.

Lewis, Pullman and Barker were all directly working with Christian myths: Lewis as one he believed in, Pullman as one he was attacking. Barker, ever ready to see the potential in anything that partakes of the imagination, seems to have employed it due to its being the most resonant Western-world myth of our times, and long overdue exploration in the literature of the fantastic. In interviews (here, from the Starburst Yearbook 1991/92, with David J Howe), Barker is frank about this being the seed of the whole novel:

“Imajica started with my thinking about the images which appear in the great paintings of Christian mythology. Whether or not they’re true, they seemed to me to be potent, powerful and important cyphers of image and meaning.”

But, as he said in another interview (in Cemetery Dance, Winter 1992), “I don’t think I’m going to get good reviews from the Christian Monitor, you understand…” Because, Barker’s God Hapexamendios does not come out well in this. Imajica is a deepening and further exploration of a theme that’s been in his fiction from the start (in such Books of Blood stories as “Skins of the Fathers”, “Rawhead Rex” and “The Madonna”): the imbalance caused by masculine domination, and the necessity of re-accessing the power of the female divine. Hapexamendios wants to be the only god: “only one name on your lips, one prayer, one altar”, though this leads to a “joyless, loveless, corrupt thing”—super-powerful, but with no human sympathies. Hapexamendios is “One, and simple”; the goddesses are “many, and diverse”. But, as Barker says, you cannot go against the deepest nature of things:

“Creation and its maker are one and the same… And Creation’s as full of women as it is of men.”

Imajica is too vast a novel for me to even list its many themes. Pick a Barker trope (reviled and persecuted tribes, for instance), type (the magical-murderous sidekick/servant), or image (the slow and painful formation of a living body, like an “anatomy lesson, raw and wet”, in a bare dusty room, a la Frank in Hellraiser), and you’ll find it here, in some new or deeper variant. Perhaps the main thing I noticed that I hadn’t before (but which I’m sure I’d find in his earlier fiction if I looked) is a concern with identity. Gentle, whose name is also John Furie Zacharias, as well as another name by which he went many years ago, not only has lived multiple lives (separated by his regular amnesias), but has a magically-created identical twin, who is sometimes his close brother, at others his greatest enemy, but nevertheless deeply tied to him: his shadow, his other self. Judith has a similar multiplicity of pasts, as well as her own mirror self. In a novel about a return to wholeness, and a unification of what has been sundered, such themes run deep, uniting the psychological and personal with the religious, philosophical and mythical.

Plus, of course, there’s so much simply on the level of imagination: a sea that only moves when the sun shines on it; a woman imprisoned for centuries in a doorless cell beneath the ground, wreathed so tightly in cords they cover her entire body; beings whose heads resemble pairs of giant hands; a city of tents on the edge of the world; an ancient society dedicated to repressing all magic; the ghost of a lover who died from AIDS—there is so much in this novel, and no sense at all that its size means the invention has been spread thin.

I still, perhaps, prefer Weaveworld, but maybe only because it’s a little bit shorter, a little bit less overwhelming in scale. (If nothing else, it’s easier to hold while reading.)

Ultimately, this is a novel about unification:the balancing of the rational and irrational, the masculine and the feminine, the mundane and the divine. The Imajica, Barker tells us, is “a single, infinitely elaborate pattern of transformation”. What can you add to that?