horror, page 2 of 63

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?

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.