horror, page 2 of 65

The Sundial is Shirley Jackson’s fourth novel, begun in 1956 (following a couple of years of creative block, according to her biographer Ruth Franklin) and finished in July 1957. It was published to mixed reviews the following year.

The setting, like the two masterpieces that would follow it (The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle), is a large country house, surrounded by a walled-in estate. This is the home of the Halloran family, who, as the novel begins, have just buried their only son, Lionel. Lionel’s wife, Maryjane, is convinced her mother-in-law pushed Lionel down the stairs. She shares her suspicions with her ten-year-old daughter Fancy, and soon the little girl is asking “Shall I push her? … Like she pushed my daddy?”

Whether she pushed him or not, Mrs Halloran now owns the house (her husband is still alive but feeble in mind and body), and says she’s going to eject as many of its inhabitants as she can: Maryjane will be given a small allowance and sent to live in an apartment in the city, though Fancy (who stands to inherit after Mrs Halloran) will stay; Fancy’s governess Miss Ogilvie, and young Essex, who came to catalogue the library, will simply have to leave. Meanwhile, Aunt Fanny—the aged Mr Halloran’s sister—will be moved into the house’s tower, with the implication that she’ll be expected to stay there.

They’re saved, though, when Aunt Fanny, after getting lost in the house’s extensive gardens and having some sort of agoraphobic attack (perhaps egged on by Fancy, though the girl denies being there), seems to receive a communication from her dead father, saying the world is going to end (“Fire and floods and sidewalks melting away and the earth running with boiling lava”), though everyone in the house will be saved, the lone inheritors of a new world, into which they will emerge “safe and pure”.

Mrs Halloran—as well as pretty much everyone else in the novel—accepts this, and allows everyone to stay after all: if she sends them away from the house now, they’ll be killed in the coming apocalypse, and she doesn’t want that on her conscience. It’s agreed not to tell anyone on the outside (and it’s perhaps notable of this misanthropic bunch that not one of them has someone they want to warn or save), but a number of people turn up by chance and are allowed to stay. There’s an old acquaintance of Mrs Halloran’s, Mrs Willow, now a widow and in search of some means of providing for her late-twenties daughters Arabella and Julia, who come along too. Seventeen-year-old Gloria Desmond, daughter of Mrs Halloran’s cousin, also turns up, having been sent for a holiday while her father is away. And Aunt Fanny decides to adopt a random man she finds in the local village—perhaps realising they have only Essex and the feeble Mr Halloran in the house, now—a man she pretends to recognise as (a name clearly made-up on the spot) Captain Scarabombardon.

They start making their plans. Aunt Fanny buys bulk supplies at random—food, medicines, umbrellas. Mrs Halloran issues a page of rules everyone will be expected to follow on the night before the apocalypse and that first new morning, including the need to look presentable: “I want to know that I am bringing with me into that clean world a family neat, prepossessing, and well-groomed.” She talks about “the good impressions we must create”, even though that new world will, supposedly, be devoid of people. The servants will be sent away the day before (to die with everyone else), and the villagers will be given an (unknown to them) farewell party.

The sundial of the novel’s title is the one part of the house that, because it has been placed off-centre, defies the otherwise perfect architectural symmetry. The dial bears an inscription, “What is this world?”, a quote from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale:

What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, with-outen any companye.

If Jackson is asking “What is this world?” of the world she’s created in The Sundial, then it’s a world of casual backbiting, social power-play, and a constant, outwardly civil cruelty between the characters. And it’s one in which the “love” referred to by Chaucer is already absent, well before the “colde grave” comes to call.

All of the characters are here not because they love one another, but because they’re dependent on Mrs Halloran’s riches. And Mrs Halloran, whose one and only aim seems to be to own the house (“It is my house now, and it will be my house then. I will not relinquish one stone of it in this world or any other.”) presumably lets them stay not only for her conscience’s sake (she barely has one), but because she knows, if she ousted them and they thought they were going to die, they’d most likely force themselves back inside, and maybe get rid of her in the process. Rich she may be, but her riches are her only power, and they’ll surely mean nothing in the new world.

One of the things that means The Sundial doesn’t work as well as Jackson’s subsequent two novels, for me, is that it has no main character, no side to take amongst all these rather icy folk. Hill House has Eleanor, and Castle has Merricat. Neither is necessarily admirable (Eleanor is weak, Merricat a murderer), but both are very clearly, and relatably, human. There’s no one like that here. And not just because none of the characters is exactly sympathetic—that doesn’t matter—it’s because none of them is fleshed out enough. Mrs Halloran gets the closest, though largely because she’s the one in charge. But whereas at the start I felt that her believing in the prophecy was more by way of acknowledging a sort of social chess-move on Aunt Fanny’s part (to force her to allow everyone to stay), by the end of the novel it’s apparent she fully believes it, leaving me unable to work her out, as a character. She declares she’ll be queen of the new world when it comes, and buys herself a gold crown. Perhaps she, too, went insane, just more quietly? The rest of the characters (all but one) are too shallow to be much differentiated. When Jackson began bringing in new people—Arabella, Julia, Gloria, the captain—I couldn’t work out why, because none of them brought anything different to the story. Granted, Julia makes a break for it and tries to leave the house for the city, but it might as easily have been Arabella, or Gloria, or Maryjane.

The one exception to all this is Fancy, the ten year old girl whose self-absorption and lack of sentimentality made me think of her as a proto-Merricat (the narrator of Jackson’s last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with whom she shares a certain witchyness). Fancy is the one character with any life to her, and the one character to see through the ridiculousness of the prophecy, and the household’s belief that the world ending would be a good thing. What, she asks at one point, “makes anyone think you’re going to be more happy or peaceful just because you’re the only ones left?” And: “you all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different”, with the clear implication this isn’t going to be the case. Fancy herself, meanwhile, is the only one to actually want the world outside to continue to exist, even to go out into it:

“Who wants to be safe, for heaven’s sake? … I’d rather live in a world full of other people, even dangerous people. I’ve been safe all my life…”

Early on, I suspected the events of the novel were, really, driven by some witchy plot by Fancy. We know she has a very detailed doll-house, and at one point one of its dolls is found on the sundial, pierced by pins, voodoo-style—is she, then, actually manipulating all these events? If she really was present when Aunt Fanny had her anxiety-driven visions, did she in fact create them, as part of her aim of getting her own back on Mrs Halloran for pushing Lionel down the stairs? (I couldn’t help picturing Fancy, with her very detailed doll-house, as a stand-in for the author, who is herself playing with her own little fictional doll-house, with the Hallorans and co. as dolls—and just as lifeless as dolls, too.)

The thing is, Fancy appears in the first chapter, and briefly (and disappearingly) in the second, then is absent for most of the rest of the novel till the finale. And I suspect the reason for this is that Jackson might have sensed how quickly Fancy would have demolished all the other characters, and quite rightly taken over the narrative, making it into a very different novel (a better one, but evidently not the one Jackson wanted to write at that point). Fancy is the one living character among a host of the dead and the dull, and the basic notion of The Sundial just wouldn’t have withstood her little-girl pertinacity and self-interest. So, she’s left to reappear at the end, where she promptly assumes the dominance due to her, as though marking her place at the centre of a future novel (Castle).

Without her, the rest of the novel is episodic and patchy. It’s funny, yes, in a very dark, deadpan, Charles Addams kind of way, but the humour can never be anything more than witty, snipy lines, because none of the characters has enough character to support anything deeper. (You can’t joke about Julia, or Arabella, or Gloria, because what is there to joke about?) Elsewhere, chapters, or even incidents in chapters, feel like they might be better as standalone stories. A number actually suggest existing Jackson stories, such as Julia’s nightmare journey through the absurdly-named Fog Pass in the company of a sadistic and lecherous taxi driver (which could sit alongside a story like “The Bus” or “Paranoia” from Dark Tales). Jackson’s portrait of the nearby village as striving for an outward gentility while knowing its one and only attraction is a house where a child murdered all her family but one aunt (another detail that points to We Have Always Lived in the Castle), captures something of Jackson’s satire on late 50s America, and could easily have been a novel on its own. Incidents such as the Hallorans having to start burning books when Aunt Fanny’s supply-buying requires the library shelves for storage, or Aunt Fanny creating a duplicate of her mother’s house in the attic, or her getting lost in the garden maze, or the visit of a rival apocalyptic cult who are expecting to be taken to Saturn one day, and have had to renounce all metal ornaments—all these could be Jackson stories, and might have worked better standalone than here, in a novel, where they don’t really gel with anything else.

Jack Sullivan in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural is much more positive about The Sundial, calling it “a quirky, brilliant tale of apocalyptic terror”. In it, he says, “Jackson pulled out all the stops… and was not afraid to switch tones abruptly.” (I’d say the tones don’t so much switch as wander.) And while I’d certainly agree “these are some of Jackson’s most intensely neurotic and unpleasant characters” (though without the “intensely”), and that the humour is “more sardonic and pungent than in any of her work to this point”, I don’t know if I can agree that this humour, as Sullivan says, “is irresistible”.

Perhaps if I’d read The Sundial before Hill House and Castle, I might have appreciated its dark humour more—but only because it provides a taster of what, in those final two books, is so well developed. It’s a further examination of her intense ambivalence about the idea of home. A quote from a talk she gave about the writing of Sundial is revealing about this theme in her fiction. Saying that her fiction, up to that point, had mainly been about people trying to get into some walled-off paradise they never attain (those nightmare journeys home), she decided to try writing something that starts within the walled-off paradise, only to find:

“I had set myself up nicely within the wall inside a big strange house I found there, locked the gates behind me, and discovered the only way to stay with any degree of security was to destroy, utterly, everything outside.”

In her creation of ten-year-old Fancy, who welcomes danger so long as it brings her people, Jackson had perhaps allowed a little kernel of herself to defy that sense of apocalyptic, agoraphobic dread which powers her final two novels. Fancy/Merricat—the wilful and witchy girl who lacks sentimentality and can push a grandmother down the stairs, or poison her family—is, perhaps, Jackson’s version of a survivor-character, her perfect embodiment of vitality in the otherwise dark and cruel world she creates in her fiction. The trouble was, the rather low-tension atmosphere of social backbiting and petty power games she created in The Sundial wasn’t challenge enough for the likes of Fancy/Merricat, and the girl had to be left offstage for too long.

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.