horror, page 35 of 63

As with 1966’s The Crystal World, there’s a feeling that High-Rise (published in 1975) grew from a single image that could have been a surrealist painting — in this case, that of a well-to-do middle-class man crouching on his apartment balcony, roasting a dog over a fire made of telephone directories — and that the rest of the novel is merely a Ballardian extrapolation of that one image.

High-Rise is J G Ballard’s insistence that the utter breakdown of society to be found in Lord of the Flies needs neither an isolated island, nor children without adult supervision to take hold. We can have it here and now, in modern England, in a fully-populated high-rise tower block, tenanted entirely by the most educated, professionally responsible classes. In fact, Ballard seems to be saying, we can not only have it, but we secretly long for it.

The novel kicks off at the moment the newly-built tower block reaches ‘critical mass’, as the last of its residents move in. From that point, a slow but steady escalation of petty social tensions, technical teething troubles and Ballardian psychopathology takes its grip, as the residents of the building — ‘a virtually homogeneous collection of well-to-do professional people — lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, senior academics and advertising executives, along with a smaller group of airline pilots, film-industry technicians, and trios of air hostesses sharing apartments’ — become increasingly violent, territorial, and tribal. At first maintaining a flawless facade towards the world outside, going to work each day in immaculately pressed suits, the residents return each night to spend more and more time engaging in vandalism and violence, finally forgetting the world outside altogether, to concentrate on their new, almost entirely primitive existence enclosed within the self-contained forty-storey apartment block, whose corridors, garbage chutes, elevator shafts and swimming pools are clogged at first with rubbish sacks, then, towards the end, human bodies.

High-Rise follows not one but three protagonists, chosen from the three social tiers into which the forty-storey apartment block divides itself — a division that can’t help seeming arbitrary, homogeneous as the residents are. We start with medical lecturer Robert Laing, who lives on the 25th floor (throughout the book, as well as the usual Ballardian habit of identification-by-profession, minor characters are labelled by their floor of residence — so we get ‘a 28th floor account executive’, ‘a radiologist from the 7th floor’, ‘a newspaper columnist on the 37th floor’ — thus emphasising the social surface, in contrast to the violent or irrational behaviour they’re engaging in). We then switch to Anthony Royal, the high-rise’s architect, living in its penthouse apartment, who, like some sort of Bond villain, wears a white safari jacket while being accompanied by an arctic-coated Alsatian dog. He also has a walking stick, thanks to a recent car crash, which makes him seem, as well as a Bond villain, like an image of the author himself: Ballard, who wears a white suit in his author photograph, had also recently been through a car crash of sorts — the writing and publication of his 1973 novel Crash. Third in this trio of protagonists is Richard Wilder, a pugnacious TV documentary maker from the lower floors. Of the three, Wilder is the only one who has a real story, as such — a determination to climb the high-rise and inveigle himself into the top floors, under pretence of making a documentary. Laing, is, generally, too languorous to do much other than forage for food and join in with the occasional sortie against other floors, while Royal soon loses any sense of being a Bond villain, and retreats into a mix of traumatised detachment and a feeble longing to see the high-rise in terms of some sort of transformation:

‘…the present breakdown of the high-rise might well mark its success rather than its failure. Without realising it, he had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organisation that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.’

But you don’t read Ballard for the story. It’s the ideas, the images and the writing that ensure High-Rise is never static. Throughout Ballard’s works, there’s a longing for the outer world to match the trauma, chaos and perversity of his characters’ inner worlds, as though he were egging us on to become the people he knows we really are beneath the civilised surface — or at least the people he’s seen us becoming, in his prison-camp childhood in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. But also, there’s a sense of striving for a new sort of freedom, even if it takes violence to reach it.

But is that what the residents of this high-rise achieve? Towards the end, as tribal divisions break down and the residents retreat individually into their barricaded apartments, there’s a sense of stagnation — ‘sometimes [Laing] found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted’ — or reversion, as the social breakdown, at first presented as a sort of inner fulfilment of what these over-conventionalised professionals really need to live fuller lives — ‘All this brought them together, and ended the frigid isolation of the previous months’ — starts to feel more like a regression, a retreat. Laing reforms his childhood ménage with his sister, and settles into petty power games with her and another bedridden woman he rescues from a nearby apartment; while Wilder, finally reaching the roof, sees children playing in the sculpture garden and doffs his clothes to join them. (Royal’s ending is the most disappointing of all — I was really expecting him, Ballard fashion, to be eaten by his beloved gulls, or perhaps to think he was one of them and attempt to fly off the tower-block roof.)

High-Rise was the first of Ballard’s novels that I read — thanks, of course, to Hawkwind’s song of the same name (whose lyrics paint a more science-fictional and socially rebellious picture of the same theme), released a bare four years later (but recorded in 1977, only two years after the novel came out). It is, I think, the perfect Ballardian novel. The story may at times feel static, but the writing never flags, with Ballard still pulling new images, ideas, and angles out of this situation right up to the final chapters. It also represents something of a change in Ballard’s writing. Before it, despite the careening handbrake-turn from his early disaster novels (The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World) into the transitional, highly experimental work of the late 60s and early 70s (The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash) his writing focused on the individual’s response to a disaster, however worldwide or (in the case of The Crystal World) universe-wide, that disaster was. Here, though, we get to see more of the response of a whole section of society, which is more the style of Ballard’s latter novels (Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes, and I haven’t yet read Kingdom Come, but I’m assuming that’s similar).

Apparently, before starting the novel, Ballard penned a 25,000 word summary, ‘in the form of a social worker’s report on the strange events that had taken place in this apartment block…’ — which I’d love to read, though in the same quote, Ballard says: ‘I wish I’d kept it; I think it was better than the novel.’ !

Clive Barker’s new novel may open with the resurrection of a magician, but its primary purpose is not to revive the magical past, it’s to lay a ghost. Or, rather, exorcise a demon. For here, in a literary kill-off move that’s surely been played out too many times for anyone to believe it’ll work, Barker does a Reichenbach Falls on his most famous creation: the Hell Priest.

Who?

That’s Pinhead, to you and me — or the Lead Cenobite, if you’re a purist, as that was how he was credited in the first Hellraiser film (while in The Hellbound Heart, he wasn’t even the lead) — but apparently the entity in question prefers to be addressed as the Hell Priest. At least, until he slaughters the rest of his order and embarks on a new career as would-be King of Hell. (The Devil, in this version of Hell, having been absent for some time.)

It’s here, I think, Barker’s trouble begins. If you’re going to kill someone off, you’ve got to at least get their name right. I don’t even think he gets the location right. The Hell Priest is to be killed off in Hell, right? But Pinhead — the creature who, to me, made his one and only definitive appearance in Hellraiser, and whose name ought to be Pinhead, because it shows the proper degree of fear-hiding-behind-irreverence that such truly terrible monsters are often treated with — doesn’t belong in Hell. The ‘Hell’ in Hellraiser is figurative, not literal. ‘Hell’ is a state you go through — toils and torments raised to religious levels — not a place. (Certainly not as quotidian a place as Barker presents in The Scarlet Gospels: a Hell with uniformed police, bicycles, money, and other much-too-mundane details, far more reminiscent of the Hell of Barker’s mostly disappointing previous novel, Mister B Gone. It does have some glorious architecture, though.)

To me, Pinhead is a far different creature to this troublesome Hell Priest. His origins — along with those of Barker’s first (and best) feature film — lie in an experimental short film, The Forbidden, first glimpsed on The South Bank Show in 1994. Here, Barker presents us with a variant on the Faust myth, in which a lone magician in search of ‘the further reaches of experience’ summons a ghostly lover, then passes onto more esoteric pleasures, culminating in his being skinned alive. The Forbidden is scattered with abstract, purely cinematic sequences (which can be seen sneaking their way into Hellraiser, too — as in the shot of an unfurling, blood-red flower that precedes Kirsty’s waking up in hospital), some of which are of Barker’s ‘nail-board’: a square wooden base, criss-crossed with regular score marks, six-inch nails hammered into each juncture. Moving a light around it, Barker explores this for its abstract visual qualities (as he does the lights-through-slats that precede the appearance of the Cenobites in Hellraiser), but it’s unmistakably the origin of Pinhead:

‘Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jewelled pin driven through the bone.’ — The Hellbound Heart

Contrasted with the Faust character’s visions and torments, the image of the nail-board contains, I think, a sort of boiled-down abstraction of crucifixion: nails (significantly, these aren’t points-upwards, as you’d expect from an image of torture), crosses and wood, simplified and multiplied, as though transcendence were being sold by the yard, and made available to anyone with a DIY temperament.

Moving from the nail-board to Pinhead, you see a man (or creature) who is in his own, permanent, self-crucified state, the very image of pain and transcendence unified. Summoned by Uncle Frank — who’s more interested in a far different meaning of the phrase ‘getting nailed’ — the Cenobites are ‘Angels to some. Demons to others.’ So they are, in Hellraiser, not evil, and do not belong to Hell. Instead, they’re a gateway to extreme experience that transcends the idea of pain being opposite to pleasure, or of evil being opposed to good. Heaven is their Hell, and vice versa; one is reached through the other. Their whole point is that they do not belong in a duality. Which means that, by putting its ‘Hell Priest’ in a very traditional Hell, The Scarlet Gospels, to me, strikes a false note. The Hell Priest that Barker is killing off isn’t the Cenobite known to the rest of us as Pinhead; he’s an imposter.

(Mind you, the Hellraiser movies have been doing just as convincing a job of removing Pinhead from his original ‘beyond good and evil’ meaning and turning him into a standard movie monster since the second film. And this, no doubt, is the version of the creature Barker wants to kill off.)

I’ve said before that Barker’s work is all about unifying the divides between, for instance, imagination and mundanity, between day-to-day experience and the transcendent extremes. For much of it, The Scarlet Gospels is too concerned, I think, with a storyline that doesn’t allow any of this deeper theme to come through. It reads like a checklist of what a Clive Barker novel ought to be: a very gruesome beginning, and then a lot of excessive, perverse, blood-soaked demonic goings on after that, but very little of the higher themes like transcendence.

Which isn’t to say there’s no transcendence. As well as being about the Hell Priest, The Scarlet Gospels is about two other characters with a literary pedigree: Harry D’Amour, Barker’s longstanding supernatural PI, and Lucifer. Both of these are transformed by the events of The Scarlet Gospels, in far different (and more convincing) ways than the demise of Pinhead (which can’t help being unconvincing — he’s been offed too many times in the movies).

The Scarlet Gospels isn’t the best of Barker, but that’s not to say it’s not worth reading. If at times it feels a little dated in its constant excess, it also feels like a reminder of the days when major publishers put out stuff that actually seemed dangerous and transgressive but which also had artistic intent. Barker is an artist, and I’d certainly like to read more of him — but moved on, not dwelling on the same old stuff in the same old way. And I wonder if there aren’t signs Barker might want this too:

Now Harry realized with terrifying clarity that he no longer wished to be the witness of such sights. This was not the world in which he belonged.

And:

“I have heard this story. I have seen you. I have seen all of you! In countless incarnations!” the Devil shouted to the crowd who attentively watched his every move. When he spoke again, it was slow and deliberate. “I do not want this anymore.”

After Neither Sea Nor Sand, I thought I’d give Gordon Honeycombe’s second novel a go. Dragon Under the Hill (published 1972) takes place over a week and a day on the island of Lindisfarne, where the Wardlaw family have just arrived, so that Ed Wardlaw, a lecturer in Medieval History, can finish his PhD. With him are his Norweigian wife Runa and their seven-year-old son Erik. Ed and Erik aren’t getting on — Ed snaps orders at this son and calls him ‘the original mixed-up kid’, while his son wilfully ignores everything he says. Runa is mostly left trying to ‘prevent her champions coming to blows’. On their first day, they meet Professor Mervyn MacDougall, who has recently uncovered what he believes to be an important find: a fragment of a local chronicle which claims the first Viking landing on Great Britain was in 793AD, when a Viking king, Guthorm, sacked Lindisfarne, then was killed at nearby Bamburgh.

But this isn’t just a minor historical detail to the Wardlaws. Unknown to them, their little family unites the two sides of this conflict, with Ed descended from Sicga, Guthorm’s slayer, while Runa’s ancestors include Guthorm’s son, who vowed revenge on his father’s killer. Blond-haired Erik, of course, takes more after Runa than Ed, and once he’s on the island, supernatural forces begin to play their hand. Both Runa and Erik think they see a mysterious one-eyed man watching them, then Erik discovers Guthorm’s tomb, and begins secretly carting its treasures back to his bedroom — first some golden dragon decorations and a ring, then a shield boss and rim (which he thinks is an ancient bicycle wheel), then some arrow heads and a spear-head. Guthorm’s sword, too big for little Erik to hide, he leaves at the tomb. One night, Ed is out walking in the town square and is nearly killed by a thrown Viking spear. The blade bears the name ‘Guthorm’ in runes; the haft is a mop handle from his own kitchen…

There’s something decidedly Oedipal in Ed and Erik’s relationship. Not only does Erik — or something acting through him — want to kill Ed, but at one point Erik spends the night sleeping in his mother’s arms while Ed is banished to his son’s room. (After which Ed vows, ‘He’s not going to take my place again — ever again. I’ll see to it.’) But Erik isn’t presented as the demon child of horror cliché. When he’s on his own, or with his mother, he’s a slightly wilful, slightly resentful, but nevertheless normal seven-year-old with a bit of a grudge against his father. Ed may think Erik’s possessed (‘Do you think he needs a doctor?’ Runa asks; ‘A witch-doctor, more likely. Or an exorcist,’ Ed says), but Runa thinks it’s more the opposite: ‘The trouble is that he is not possessed. By us.’ But, the truth is, he is possessed. The spirit of Guthorm is on the loose. Or is it one-eyed Odin All-Father?

This is the trouble I had with the book. The characters and relationships are very well drawn, and I liked the fact that the supernatural events were scattered subtly throughout a believable, slowly-advancing story. But the clues as to what was actually happening seemed a bit diverse. Is it Odin, lingering long after his proper time to oversee this final revenge, that’s driving events, or is it the power of the past, and of Ed and Erik’s ancestry? Or is it Erik’s resentment of his father, causing poltergeist activity (a great racket, like a dragon outside the house, is heard by Runa and Ed one night, but by no one else)? Or is it something about human nature itself, as Professor MacDougall says:

‘Take away the gloss of modern living, the aids, the artifice, the outer show, the shackles of convention, and you still have the natural man of instinct and emotion. These things still rule the mind in any struggle for existence… Kill, or be killed. An eye for an eye.’

A comparison that kept coming to mind is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, another novel in which the past seeks to replay itself through modern characters. But there, I never found myself asking why: the power of pent-up emotion, both in the influence of the past and in the modern character’s current situation was ‘why’ enough. With Dragon Under the Hill, the emotional atmosphere, though tense, never seems super-charged enough to act as a conduit for the supernatural — and I think emotional charge of some sort is the supernatural, in fantasy and horror fiction. (Or at least the sort I like.) Still, it kept me reading to the end, and was rewarding enough in terms of plot and character.