horror, page 2 of 63

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.

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.

First published in 2013, Doctor Sleep is the long-gestated sequel to The Shining (coming out 36 years after the original), though not one King at first intended to write. Fans would occasionally ask him what happened to young Danny after the events at the Overlook, and the result is a quite different kind of tale than the haunted-hellhouse narrative of The Shining.

Although we get a few glimpses of young Danny’s life growing up, for the bulk of Doctor Sleep Dan (as he’s now known) is a 40 year old man. He’s had a lot to deal with, ghosts of the past both metaphorical and actual (gloopy old dead lady Mrs Massey pops up in the bathroom, even though there’s no longer an Overlook Hotel for her to haunt), as well a paternally-inherited weakness towards both drink and rage, which all leads to a descent into alcoholism. After a pretty unpleasant hitting-the-bottom moment, which involves stealing first from an addicted single mother then a homeless man, Dan arrives in the town of Frazier, joins Alcoholics Anonymous, and gets a job as an orderly at a hospice, where his uncanny ability to soothe the passage of the dying earns him the nickname “Doctor Sleep” (neatly tying in with his childhood nickname of “doc”).

Meanwhile, a group of shining-gifted oldsters who call themselves the True Knot have been ranging the United States in their RVs, extending their lives by consuming what they call “steam”—the psychic energy given off when someone, particularly someone with the shining, dies, and which is, unfortunately for their victims, made all the more powerful when combined with suffering. And, of course, “steam”, like the shining, is at its richest in children. It’s not Dan the True Knot come for (his shining abilities are a little faded from their childhood peak), it’s a psychically-powerful young girl called Abra Stone, who at first senses what the True Knot are doing when she mentally connects with one of their victims. She reaches out to Dan for help, first psychically, then physically, to put an end to the True Knot’s vampirism for good.

It was wanting to revisit King’s world of psychic powers than led to me re-reading The Shining, then reading Doctor Sleep. There’s a whole tangle of themes and ideas that recur in his depiction of these powers. There’s the association with children, for a start, in particular intelligent and sensitive children, as with super-smart Luke Ellis in what’s probably my favourite King novel, The Institute. Alongside that, there’s parental abuse, as in Carrie and The Shining, which extends to abuse by other forms of authority, such as in The Institute, Later (where the abusive figure is both an ex-step-parent and a police officer), and Firestarter (where it’s the government). All these ingredients—the abuse of a sensitive child—combine to create Carrie’s psychic rage, but Dan’s rage in this book, though rooted in his father’s (which comes from his own rageful father) is presented here as being as much inherited as down to circumstances. (Abra, though she has perfectly loving parents, has also inherited a little of that rage, and it’s part of what drives her power, in the moments when she really needs it.) Psychic powers, for King, encompass a whole range of abilities, not just telepathy and telekinesis, but premonition and the ability to see dead people—all of which, I suppose, can be divided into two basic categories: the sensitive (telepathy, premonition, seeing dead people) and the rageful (telekinesis, pyrokinesis). The members of the True Knot in Doctor Sleep tend to have a single individual talent, such as locating people, persuasion, or passing unnoticed.

Doctor Sleep is also King’s Alcoholics Anonymous novel. Dan is a recovering alcoholic, but the True Knot can be seen addicts too, it’s just they’re of the high-functioning type where their addiction doesn’t screw up their own lives (it just ends the lives of others). Their psychic gifts have led to the True Knot believing they’re special, “the chosen ones”—that, in fact, they are the only true human beings and the rest of us, including their child victims, are just “rubes” for whom they have no feelings at all. (This is the path Dan could have taken at his low point, the dehumanising effect of addiction.) The True Knot are vampires in all but not having the traditional aversions (daylight, mirrors, crosses), and their leader, Rose the Hat (they all have rather silly names), even has, in her feeding state, a single tusk-like tooth that recalls the Nosferatu-like Barlow from Salem’s Lot. (And King mentions that one of their favoured camping grounds is near the town of Jerusalem’s Lot.)

This is, I think, not so much a horror novel, certainly not like the The Shining—even though King, at the time, said this was going to be a return to the scares of yore. (I may, of course, be inured to the more horrific elements!) It’s more a supernatural thriller or urban fantasy, with its super-powered goodies and baddies doing battle in modern-day America. The main thing that makes it feel different to The Shining, for me, is it lacks the former novel’s sense of a non-human supernatural evil driving merely fallible humans to full-on evil. The True Knot certainly tick the box of being evil, but only ever a human evil, driven by greed and fear—recognisable emotions, taken to destructive extremes—rather than that cosmic coldness that seems to be driving the sentience behind the Overlook. Generally, King makes the members of the True Knot seem ordinary, even rather dull personalities (apart from Rose the Hat), meaning the impression they give is mostly of a community of self-centred, slightly grouchy, gossipy, well-off old folks living a peripatetic life, just a little bit cut off from the rest of the world, as old folks can be. They never make much of an impact as characters—I mostly couldn’t tell one from the other (again, apart from Rose the Hat, and even then I didn’t get the sense of her as a rounded human being).

What I said about The Shining and IT—that King is at his best when presenting human evil rather than overblown supernatural evil—seems to need modification here. Thinking about it, for me he can do purely human nastiness (the staff of The Institute, who are are so casually, thoughtlessly evil it’s genuinely chilling, and their only motivation is that it’s just their job; another good example is Annie Wilkes in Misery), but when he tries to make them out-and-out evil, it can come across as a bit forced and unconvincing (as in the villain in Mr Mercedes, with his rather tired set of arguments for the meaninglessness of it all). On the supernatural side, I prefer King when he has his supernatural having to work through human characters by playing on their weaknesses (something Ramsey Campbell does so well). When he lets the supernatural loose on its own terms, it all gets a bit overblown for me. Here, the True Knot don’t have a philosophy, just an unexamined sense of their own superiority. They’re a bit lacklustre as antagonists, in terms of character; but the threat they represent in the book is good—it really builds towards a tense finale.

The focus of Doctor Sleep is, on the one hand, Dan’s redemption from his lowest-of-the-low years, and on the other, another of King’s depictions of a psychically-gifted child in Abra Stone, only in this case an un-abused one. This is, far more than The Shining, a novel that’s about those psychic gifts—which, in King’s hands, really come across as being a metaphor for the individuality, humanity, and wonder of all children, and the way the world can all too easily crush those qualities. That, to me, is at the root of King’s narratives of psychic kids—basically, they’re just kids.

Doctor Sleep was adapted in 2019 by Mike Flanagan (who had by that point already adapted King’s novel Gerald’s Game, and would go on to create the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and the very King-like Midnight Mass, among others). Although it starts out as a fairly faithful adaptation, Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is a sequel to Kubrick’s The Shining rather than King’s novel, meaning it gets to end in a showdown at the Overlook Hotel, which King (having blown it up in his novel) couldn’t do. It also has actors looking as much like Shelly Duvall and Jack Nicholson as possible, playing Dan’s mother and (ghostly) father, which tends to break you out of the story, as you find yourself thinking, “Hey that looks-like-but-also-doesn’t-look-like so and so”—but at least Flanagan didn’t attempt the sort of digital recreation of the original actors as seen in, say, Alien: Romulus. There are other little references to Kubrick’s film, such as Abra’s home being number 1980 (the year of Kubrick’s Shining), and Dan (played by Ewan McGregor) being interviewed in an office that looks exactly like the room where Jack was interviewed at the start of Kubrick’s film. Flanagan is an excellent horror director (this is far more of a horror film than King’s novel), with a fine cast, so it’s worth a watch, whether you’ve read the novel or not.