horror, page 1 of 64

First published in 1994, Everville is the sequel to 1989’s The Great and Secret Show, and so the second Book of the Art. It is, according to Barker himself, “the first of my large novels written on my adopted soil” (the USA), and it’s also the first of his novels to return to a world and characters he’d written about before (not counting Harry D’Amour’s appearance in The Great and Secret Show, after his introduction in the Books of Blood story “The Last Illusion”).

Everville opens with a prologue set in America’s pioneer days. A wagon train is heading west from Missouri to Oregon, floundering as it encounters the Blue Mountains. Among its number is Harmon O’Connell, a man who has created in his mind, and in countless drawn plans, the shining city of Everville, which he intends to found once they reach their destination. He has a gold cross, given to him by a man named Owen Buddenbaum, to plant as a foundation to the city—not a crucifix, but the fellow to the one owned by Randolph Jaffe in the previous novel, emblematic of the magical Art, showing a human figure at the centre of four paths: “One to the dream-world, one to the real; one to the bestial, one to the divine.” When this seemingly Satanic cross is discovered by his fellow travellers, Harmon is blamed for all the ill-fortune that has befallen the trip so far and is killed. His 10-year-old daughter Maeve takes the cross and escapes, to found her father’s dream-city herself.

Skip to the present, where five years have passed since the events of The Great and Secret Show. Tesla Bombeck, carrying the spirit of the evolved monkey Raul within her, has been ranging across America, and picks up rumours that Fletcher, whom she’d immolated at his own request back in Palomo Grove, has somehow returned. Meanwhile her old friend Grillo, now holed up in Omaha (where the previous novel began), is using a bank of computers to collate the endless stream of weird news stories popping up throughout the nation. Both, along with noir-ish private eye Harry D’Amour in New York, are drawn to the Oregon town of Everville, just as it’s holding its annual festival. Also arriving there are Owen Buddenbaum—still alive after all these years, and ready to reap what he sowed when he gave that gold cross to Harmon O’Connell—and that figure who some think is the returned Fletcher, but who turns out to be something much darker. Added to this are some new characters, drawn from the ordinary folk of Everville, and yet to be introduced to the weird wonders coming their way: solicitor Erwin Toothaker, who uncovers a scandal in the town’s past; teen Seth Lundy, who “can hear angels hammering on the sky from Heaven’s side”; and Phoebe Cobb and her lover Joe Flicker, whose affair, once discovered, leads to Joe having to go on the run, and his finding an open doorway to the shores of Quiddity in the mountains above the town.

One thing to ask about Everville, it being the second book in a trilogy, is whether it’s worth reading, given that the third book of the series has yet to be (perhaps is never to be) written. I’d say that, just as the first book, The Great and Secret Show, works on its own, Everville could easily be the concluding part to a duology: it picks up characters from the previous book (I’m not so sure you could start with Everville), but finishes what it starts in terms of character and plot. The only way in which Everville doesn’t feel like a satisfactory conclusion is in terms of its themes. There’s so much going on, so many characters, so much incident, and lots of ideas offered up along the way, but none of those ideas is really pursued to the sort of depth you’d expect of an overall central theme. As such, the book doesn’t end with the feeling that it’s just delivered a big novel’s-worth of meaning—which Barker certainly did in Imajica (with its meditations on the need for balance in the spiritual and divine powers that govern us) or The Great and Secret Show (which could be read as a fable about the imagination being a battleground between fears and dreams).

There’s plenty that Everville could have pursed to greater depth. The Great and Secret Show was about the glitzy, glamorous side of America; Everville addresses itself to the complimentary small-town side of petty prejudices, small scale dreams and local scandals. The series itself has some ideas baked into it, for instance about evolution, whether physical or spiritual (as Raul says in this book: “We’re born to rise. To see more. To know more. Maybe to know everything one day.”), but Everville doesn’t take those notions any further than The Great and Secret Show. There’s the corresponding idea of change, and how things don’t end but merely transform (and this is a novel where at least two major characters spend a good time of the book as ghosts), but this feels more like an aspect of Barker’s world in general than something he’s directly addressing here.

Even on the plot level, big ideas raised in The Great and Secret Show don’t seem to get much further examination. The nature of the Iad Orobouros, for instance, which in the first book we were told thirsted “For purity. For singularity. For madness.”, and again represents the main ticking-bomb threat as their dark wave travels across Quiddity towards our world. Although there are speculations about the nature of the Iad (is it created from the dark side of the human unconscious, or were humans in fact created from its depths?), there are no answers, and the Iad sort of peters out at the end, more of a maguffin to drive the plot than a carrier of meaning.

Two of Barker’s key strengths, I think, are his depiction of believable human beings encountering realms of the fantastic and having their lives transformed, and his creation of fantastic cosmologies that capture some essence of the human experience untouched by many authors. But in a way, Everville, being the second book in a series, is setting itself up not to play to those strengths. We’ve already been introduced to the cosmology, and as I say, it’s not really explored to any greater depth (though there is a lot more paddling about); and, as many of the novel’s key characters are returning from the previous book, they’ve already had their transformative moments—and the new characters’ encounters with the fantastic are got over more quickly, as Barker no doubt felt it was material he’d already dealt with.

What I’d say Everville is, is a generous slice of Barker: it’s well-written (more readable than The Great and Secret Show), full of interesting characters, weird images and situations, and constantly sparking off ideas (there’s enough ideas to fuel another couple of Books of Blood, if he’d wanted), but it’s not doing anything new. It reads like a horror-fantasy adventure, written with a great deal of invention and verve, which would be enough for any other author. But I think Barker is capable of going deeper. Perhaps, this being the second book of a series, he didn’t have the elbow room to really turn it into something new.

In the novel, Tesla finds a note Grillo left himself on how he should address his attempt to write up what happened in Palomo Grove (the events of The Great and Secret Show): that he should let the telling “be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.” Perhaps that was Barker talking to himself here, too, giving himself permission to let the story sprawl, like the growth of that meant-to-be shining town of Everville itself. If so, perhaps the permission was needed because he perhaps felt, at some level, he should have been pushing Everville into some sharper focus, some more definite meaning, some higher level than the previous book of the series? (It’s towards the end of the book that Barker takes up the idea of “the story tree”, and how every human life is a telling of one leaf of that tree—an idea, I’d say, that would definitely have given this book the thematic weight it was lacking, if only it had been woven in from the start. Instead, from what I’ve read of Barker’s intentions, this is actually the idea he’s going to pursue in the third Book of the Art, if it gets written.)

There are plenty of recurring Barker tropes, in Everville—something I always like to keep track of—sometimes changed in new and interesting ways: the showman/salesman semi-villain, in the figure of Owen Buddenbaum; the “walking anatomy lesson” of a painfully reforming being, in Phoebe Cobb bringing her dead-but-not-dead lover Joe back to corporeality and being interrupted halfway, resulting in him existing for a while in “an agonised and unfinished state”; the massacre of a secret group of beautiful creatures; the intolerant mob roused into action by incursions of the fantastic; a key character turning out to be the offspring of a human mother and a monstrous (or non-human) father—a theme from some of the earliest Books of Blood—though in this case the progeny is itself monstrous in the moral sense… And most of all, the feeling that one should embrace every aspect of the human condition: the transcendent and the bestial, the fantastic and the normal. Barker is a thorough inclusionist, a celebrator of the entire human carnival. (It’s such a Barker-ish thing that Maeve O’Connell kicks off her father’s dream city by opening a whorehouse. In any other writer’s hands, this could be a satirical commentary on America’s being driven by money and selling the idea of a certain type of unrealistic dream; but for Barker, it’s just a carnal counterbalance to the ideas of spiritual transcendence behind the “shining city”: for him, there has to be both sides of the flesh-spirit equation.)

Everville isn’t a bad book. All the same, I’m looking forward to getting on with the later, mid-career Barker novels, each of which was standalone, and written by a man who has now very much found his place as a purveyor of wild, weird, transcendent and carnivalesque fantasy-horrors. Though actually it’s with his next novel, Sacrament, that I remember stumbling as a reader of Barker the first time round. I’m interested to see how I feel about it on a second read.

I thought I’d take a side-step from re-reading Barker’s novels to look at some of his plays, written in the days prior to the publication of (but in some cases alongside the writing of) the first Books of Blood stories and The Damnation Game. A good selection are currently published in individual editions from the Clive Barker Archive, complete with Barker cover art, photos, and informative afterwords.

Barker had been creating plays since his days as a teenager at Quarry Bank School in Liverpool, which from the start were both horrific and fantastic in nature. According to Douglas E Winter in his Barker biography The Dark Fantastic, Voodoo (1967) was “a living horror film”, Inferno (1967) a “weird reinvention of Dante” complete with “Hell and Nazis and God knows”, and the title of Neongonebony (1968) refers to our current neon-lit age descending into a bone-choked post-apocalypse. The Holly and the Ivy (1970, when Barker would have been eighteen), was a three-hour take on the King Arthur story, ending with the revelation of a homosexual relationship between two of its main characters, which caused some consternation among the school staff—not for the first time, with Barker. These early works were collaborative and partly improvised (an approach Barker would encourage even in his later works, as he says in his introductions to the published editions: “These plays are not finished things, they’re invitations to collective work.”). Nevertheless, he was the one who assigned parts and determined the purpose of each scene within an overall narrative. Playwriting, acting and production continued for Barker throughout his time at university (where he switched from philosophy to English Literature), in first the Hydra Theatre Company, then the Theatre of the Imagination, and for a short while the Mute Pantomime Theatre. These all seem to have been small groups, mostly of the same people (Pinhead actor Doug Bradley, and Hellraiser II scriptwriter Pete Atkins, for instance). They all moved to London around 1977, and formed the Dog Company, where Barker, now out of university, concentrated entirely on the stage. He continued to act in his own plays for a while, but gave that up in 1980 to concentrate on writing and directing, and in 1982 gave up directing too.

The three plays I chose to read (and I’ve seen none of these performed, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of how they’d actually be experienced) all had the more obviously fantastical titles. First among them was The Magician: A Farce in the Style of the Commedia dell’Arte, which was first performed from November to December 1978. As the title says, this is a take on the traditional comedy form the Harlequinade, with its set character-types (Pantalone, Columbine, Pierrot, and so on). Here, Pantalone is the governor of an unnamed European city-state, where rumours arrive that the great magician Cagliostro is on his way. But is he a real magician or “all reputation, no power”? It turns out he did perform one genuine act of magic many years ago, the creation of an homunculus, which he proceeded to drown, in horror at what he’d made. But the creature survived, and was raised in ignorance of what it really was, to become the governor of this city-state. The play ends with a reconciliation between the father/creator Cagliostro and his fantastical “son”.

The History of the Devil was first performed in September 1980, and went on to have a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was listed among the twelve best plays of the festival. It would be the Dog Company’s most performed play. In it, the Devil has himself put on trial in the hope that, if found innocent, he’ll be allowed back into Heaven. Witnesses (most of them summoned from the grave) appear, and their testimonies turn into on-stage enactments, including the story of the Devil’s first arrival on Earth (in what seems to be medieval Russia), his encounter with Christ in the desert, his attempt to get a Renaissance architect to build him a palace (if not on Earth, then in Hell), and his freeing some women accused of being witches in Puritan America. For me, although these episodes provide plenty of variety, they don’t really add up to an argument for or against the Devil as a source of evil, and it’s the court scenes that are the best parts of the play. The Devil’s ultimate justification is that none of this would be any different if he weren’t here:

“Is there a moral sky over me? No. Does this dirt suffer morality? No. In all the natural world there’s no moral thing. You ask why you are unhappy. Why, why? Morality. You go against nature.”

Frankenstein in Love was first performed from April to May 1982, after which it was taken to Holland, Belgium, and again to the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s set in an unnamed South American country at the point where its current dictator, Perez, is being overthrown by the revolutionary forces led by El Coco. Perez’s chief executioner, it turns out, is Doctor Frankenstein (who has been allowed to experiment to his heart’s content on the regime’s political criminals), while El Coco is actually his first creation, the famed “monster”. After the revolution, El Coco is assassinated, but, being dead already, cannot die, and returns to revenge himself on Doctor Frankenstein, arriving on his wedding day (where the doctor is marrying one of his experimental subjects). Of the three plays, this is the most out-and-out horrific, dripping in gore, death, shock and transgression, including a man’s heart being ripped out on stage, another having his head trapped in a box of knives, and another having a new face sewn on, all wrapped up in an air of political oppression, medical experimentation, plague, cannibalism, and the misuse of corpses (“hardly the standard ingredients of British theatre” as the reviewer for The Scotsman put it).

Despite the political background, Frankenstein in Love doesn’t feel like a political statement (unless it’s in the overall tone of misused power and constant backstabbing), but rather presents a vision of a world in which all is merely flesh and death, but in which flesh is not ended by, but transformed by, death. As Veronique, one of Frankenstein’s experiments, says:

“Yes, I’ve learned that lesson. Flesh is trash. Its natural state is meat. Everybody is just meat. The rest is the will to be more than meat.”

Or, Frankenstein himself:

“We look at our bodies and we see them putrefying around our living minds and we know, finally, that the enemy is our flesh. The body is a prison and must be escaped by metaphysics, or changed by wit and knife and courage.”

Far more relentlessly grim than anything Barker put into his fiction—perhaps doubly so because it was being put on live, on stage, where the horror is unrelenting—it was actually written shortly after the most powerful of Barker’s initial Books of Blood stories, “In the Hills, the Cities”.

Aside from the general air of horror, these plays are speckled with hints of what was to come in Barker’s more well-known works. For instance Christ, in The History of the Devil, when planning his means of martyrdom, asks “Isn’t there something they do in the East with hooks in the skin?”, which recalls the hooks in the skin in Hellraiser. In Frankenstein in Love, after El Coco’s assassination (by fire), he becomes a skinless walking corpse, “A walking anatomy lesson”—which recalls Frank from Hellraiser, as well as the “anatomy lesson, raw and wet” of Gentle’s homunculus in Imajica.

More generally, I think it’s possible to see how Barker’s approach to writing fiction has been informed by his background as a playwright. All three of these plays feature a narrator who speaks to the audience and interacts with the characters, and who talks knowingly of the events being played out as a drama (somewhat like Puck when he addresses the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only in this case throughout the play), and there’s certainly a similar tone in Barker’s fiction, where he’s always highlighting archetypal aspects like character roles and story-types (it’s so ingrained in Barker’s prose style it’s hard to isolate in a good quote, but here he’s describing Gentle and Judith’s love affair in Imajica: “one death short of tragedy, and one marriage short of farce”). In addition, I think his penchant for making his monsters such eloquent, often philosophical beasts, is rooted in writing them as characters for the stage.

The theme that kept standing out for me, even if it wasn’t the main one of each play, was that of monstrous sons and their fathers/creators. I’ve already mention the reunion of the homunculus and his creator in The Magician, but there’s also the Devil seeking reconciliation with his father/creator God in The History of the Devil, and El Coco/Frankenstein’s monster seeking revenge on his father/creator (he calls him his father, but it’s pointed out a couple of times that, no, he’s his creator) in Frankenstein in Love. In the latter two plays, these attempts at reconciliation (if the last one can even be called that) end in failure, if not tragedy. This is a theme I thought popped up in some of the early Books of Blood stories, too, such as “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex”, and now I think about it can also be found in The Damnation Game (most explicitly in the character Breer, who’s resurrected by Mamoulian, and so in a sense becomes his “monster”, though the Faustian pact-that-isn’t-a-pact between Whitehead and Mamoulian perhaps makes more sense if read as a father/creator-son relationship) and in Gentle’s created double in Imajica.

The end of the Dog Company came, ironically, not through failure but success. As well as Frankenstein in Love (the first of Barker’s plays to be directed by someone else, which was partly done to ensure the Arts Council took the company more seriously), they put on another Barker play at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Secret Life of Cartoons. This was enough of a hit that the troupe recognised they’d need to bring in other people to give it its full due if they were to take it further (which they did), and this meant leaving the days of a six-actor, one-playwright fringe group behind. Barker continued to write plays (for the Cockpit Youth Theatre), but was already working on The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game, with Hellraiser and international bestsellerdom looming fast.

Set in the year 2120, Alien: Earth opens with the USCSS Maginot on its way back from a 65-year mission to gather alien specimens—and not just any alien specimens, but, seemingly, the most cunningly lethal it can find—when the inevitable happens and some of them get loose, causing the ship to crash into the city of New Siam. While the Maginot is owned by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, New Siam is owned by one of its rivals, Prodigy (the entire solar system, at this point, is divided up between five mega-corporations), so it’s Prodigy emergency teams who go into the wreckage. Prodigy, meanwhile, have been working on a new technology, the uploading of human consciousness into synthetic bodies. At the moment, only children’s minds are adaptable enough to make the change, so a handful of kids with terminal illnesses have been uploaded into new, adult-sized and super-resilient bodies. One of them, the group’s “big sister” Wendy, has been keeping an eye on her older brother in the outside world, and sees him entering the crash site in his role as a medic. She persuades Prodigy’s founder and CEO, the “boy genius” Kavalier, to send the kidroids (not what they’re called in the show) in, as a test of their abilities. Kavalier agrees, and soon sees an upside: they can get him the alien specimens before Weyland-Yutani reclaim them. It needs no degree in science fiction to know this is a bad idea.

Of course, one of the specimens loose on the Maginot is the Alien xenomorph. (There’s also a handy supply of its eggs, as well as the usual array of face-huggers in jars.) But, just as one swallow does not a summer make, neither does one xenomorph make this, necessarily, a real part of the Alien franchise. My take on the series is that, while it would have made an interesting, even quite original, SF show without the xenomorph, bringing one in, and calling the show Alien: Earth, sets up expectations it doesn’t deliver on. In short, it’s a good SF series, but it’s not an Alien series.

Some things are definitely Alien. The look and feel of the original film has been reproduced, particularly in the USCSS Maginot, which is pretty much identical to the first film’s Nostromo, complete with wildly outdated-looking computer equipment (green VDUs, chunky keyboards, and vast, room-sized arrays of winking lights). But the xenomorphs themselves aren’t really central to the plot. (I even began to suspect the show was written with one many-tentacled eye on easily removing the Alien elements, just in case it wasn’t green-lit for the franchise.)

One thing that makes the xenomorphs themselves expendable is that there are a host of other, new alien lifeforms, all with icky and disturbing ways of infecting, consuming, or parasitising human beings. And one of them, the eyeball-thing that spends most of its time planted in the head of an eerily determined-looking sheep, is by far the most memorable. (And one that doesn’t get fully explored. The “boy genius” Kavalier at one point wonders what it might say if planted in the head of a human rather than a sheep, but never gets round to trying it out. This, to me, would clearly be the focus of a second series.)

But there’s another thing that spends the show elbowing the xenomorphs aside in their traditional role of apex predator. In Aliens, the Weyland-Yutani corporation want the xenomorphs because of their potential use as a weapons technology. But here, Prodigy have already developed something far superior in the bodies of its hybrids: they’re super-strong, super-resilient, and have super-sharp perceptions. They’re already the perfect killers (except that they’re currently inhabited by the consciousnesses of children, who of course don’t want to kill—but that changes as the show goes on). At one point, Wendy, who has developed a bond with the xenomorphs (to the extent that she can basically use them as attack dogs, thus removing the element of conscienceless chaos that made them so frightening in the first two movies), starts to explain what she sees in them. As she did so, I was so primed for her to echo Ash’s speech in the first film (about them being “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality”), that when she merely said “They’re honest,” it felt like a missed opportunity—or, perhaps, an acknowledgement that, in this show, the xenomorphs don’t stand for much.

The show doesn’t tie in with what, for me, is one of the key thematic strands of the Alien series, which is all about just how viscerally, weirdly biological our bodies are, and how vulnerable that makes us to all sorts of violation by infection, parasitism, or weird varieties of impregnation. But where Alien: Earth does tie into the Alien series is in its exploration of the extremes of capitalism. One way of viewing the original film is that it’s about the ultimate abuse of workers: they’re already having to work lightyears from home and sacrifice years of life they could have lived with their families, but now they’re being forced (under pain of receiving no shares at all—and presumably this is the only form of salary available in a corporate-dominated future) to put their lives in mortal danger. In Alien, workers are expendable. The ultimate corporate man in that film is Ash, the android, who will do anything the company wants, even if it means the deaths of his fellow crew-members. In Alien: Earth, we have all sorts of compromised beings, from the Ash-like synthetic Kirsh to the cyborg Morrow, who has become the perfect company man not because he’s had his humanity removed, but because he owes so much of his body to Weyland-Yutani that he has no choice but to act as it demands. (As he says to Wendy’s brother at one point: “There’s always a price when the corporation gives you something. Do you know what it is?” “Everything,” says the brother. “Everything,” Morrow rejoins, “doesn’t begin to cover it.”)

The only glimpse we get of ordinary workers along the lines of the “space-truckers” from Alien are the first-responder security guards/soldiers. One of them says: “We got a good thing going here. We’re alive. We get paid.” But in a tone that implies you can’t really ask much more than that. No freedom, self-expression, or security, just survival. In this ultra-corporate world, the only truly free people are the CEOs that sit atop those five mega-companies. Everyone else has to do what they’re told.

The child-robot hybrids are the essence of this clash between corporate beings and human beings. Their bodies are entirely owned by the Prodigy corporation. And after uploading their consciousnesses into these bodies, the company renames them, as though to underline its ownership. (Later, the “boy genius” Kavalier tells them straight that they’re not human beings or employees, but “show models”: company property.) But, because they’re kids, and not yet worn down by the corporate grind, they resist—and that, really, is the main story being told here, not the survival-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth narrative of all other Alien movies.

As a standalone SF series, I’d still, perhaps, be tempted to criticise the often over-mannered acting. It’s understandable for the kids to act like kids, and the synthetics to act a little strange (Kirsh’s constantly talking just a little too quietly, for instance), but elsewhere normal people act so mannered it started to become distracting. In a non-Alien series, I might think the show was making a point about how differently people might behave in the future, but the Alien franchise needs its people to act realistically to highlight the contrast between their ordinary humanity and the extreme survival situations they’re faced with. Here, I found myself feeling mostly irritated by the characters, so I didn’t care so much when they died. (There were exceptions. I think Adrian Edmondson was excellent, channeling the paternalistic menace of late-career Charles Dance.)

But also, I’m not sure the show really had something it was trying to say. Occasionally in the last episode, someone would say something that felt like it was one of those lines that sums up the theme of everything that had gone before. For instance, when the cyborg Morrow is fighting the synthetic Kirsh, he says “In the end, Man will always win. It’s a question of will.” Then he seems to win, but there’s a switch-around, so that obviously wasn’t the theme of this show. I was left feeling the show hadn’t really focussed on one particular theme or meaning. This, combined with the fact there were no major twists (you can predict the ending from the beginning, except for it being even more simplistic than you might expect), was one thing that made me feel that, even as a non-Alien show, it wasn’t entirely in the top notch of SF shows.

Still, it had some good ideas, and some relevance to our times (in its examination of a world ruled by a handful of over-indulged tech-trillionaires, for instance). I do think the Alien franchise needs to switch to this sort of long form TV series to really do more than merely attempt to reproduce the first movie. As I said in my review of Alien: Romulus, what I’d like is much more of a political thriller, focusing on the xenomorphs as the subject of industrial espionage, with plenty of corporate shenanigans and the occasional gruesome death, but I’m happy to watch something like Alien: Earth, which at least tried to do something new. Frankly, the first two movies of the Alien franchise are pretty much perfect, so it’s hard to imagine anything equalling them, but I’ll continue to watch (and no doubt criticise) anything that makes the attempt.

And I will watch the eyeball-thing when it gets its own series.