1980s, page 1 of 6

After the first three Books of Blood came out, both Barker and his publishers knew he needed to present the world with a novel. His initial idea was for something Sphere thought too fantasy-ish for a man they were intent on marketing as a horror writer, so he put that idea to one side (it would eventually become Weaveworld), and set about writing something more traditionally in the horror mould. Initially titled Mamoulian’s Game, it came out in 1985 as The Damnation Game.

The novel opens in war-ravaged Warsaw, in which “the thief” hears about a legendary man who never loses at cards. Seeking him out among the rubble and destruction proves tricky, but it seems this man has been waiting for him… The story then leaps forward to the present day, where Marty Strauss is serving time for robbery in Wandsworth Prison. He’s offered the chance of an early release, if he goes to work for Joseph Whitehead, the super-rich head of a worldwide pharmaceutical empire. Whitehead, it seems, is expecting trouble, and needs a bodyguard he can trust — and a man with gambling debts (which is what drove Marty to crime), is just the sort of person he needs. But when the trouble comes, it’s in the form of Mamoulian, a man possessed of supernatural power, including the ability to raise and control the dead. This is the card-player that Whitehead (“the thief”) met and played in Warsaw, in a moment that started him on the path to being the head of a massive corporate empire. But Mamoulian considers there’s a debt to be repaid, and has come to claim it.

The first thing to say about Barker’s first novel, I think, is how naturally he seems to have taken to novel-writing after the (admittedly long) short stories of the Books of Blood. Barker is focused in every scene, taking time to bring out of every character and situation some special detail, as though he’s relishing each moment like a fine wine. That said, this is a long novel, with surprisingly few characters. Perhaps an ingrained habit from short stories and plays with a limited troupe of players kept him from sprawling into the sort of large cast you’d expect in a longer book?

Whenever he’s spoken or written about The Damnation Game, Barker has made it clear what its core inspiration was: “At the heart of the novel is the story of Faust.” In particular, it seems what fascinated him was how a modern version of the Faust story, shorn of its religious underpinnings (he characterised the original Faust as being a Renaissance man punished by a Medieval world) would play out.

I have to admit, though, I’m not so sure the Faust aspect really stands out for me. There are two things you really need for a Faust story: a Devil, and a Pact. As the novel goes on, instead of, for instance, Mamoulian developing into a truly Mephistophelean figure, he gets watered down. Initially threatening and mysterious, the more we learn about him, the more merely human he’s revealed to be. He’s no Devil, just a man who has some magician’s tricks, and what’s more is a very old man, with “depleted energies”. He’s not some all-powerful archetypal Evil come to claim a soul, he’s tired and he doesn’t make it clear for a long time exactly what he wants. Because, it turns out, there’s also no real pact, either. Whatever Mamoulian has turned up to claim, it wasn’t agreed by him and Whitehead. (It certainly wasn’t signed in blood.) It turns out, in fact, more to be something Mamoulian assumed he’d be getting but didn’t, so he starts to come across as more petulant and resentful than full of the sort of Judgement of Hell you’d get in a Faust story. Barker has said his modern version of Faust is about a world in which “Every man is his own Mephistopheles”, but I don’t really see how that works with this narrative. Perhaps it’s simply because Barker would go on to create a far more effective and powerful Faustian story in The Hellbound Heart/Hellraiser.

The strongest theme in The Damnation Game, for me, was something quite different. It popped up in the first paragraph, with a sentence describing war-torn Warsaw:

“Mountains of rubble — still nurturing the dead like bulbs ready to sprout as the spring weather warmed…”

This struck me as evoking the first section of T S Eliot’s The Waste-Land, which is shot through with the contrast between plant-life reviving in the Spring, and the un-reviving dead of the Great War, most explicitly in the lines:

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

The novel focuses on Marty, brought out of prison (a kind of death) into the new life of the outside world once more. He even thinks, at one point: “I’ve been dead, and I’m coming back to life.” But The Damnation Game is dealing not in the dead coming back to life, but a sort of false resurrection of various kinds. Marty is not fully alive again, because his job for Whitehead keeps him for the most part in Whitehead’s (luxurious, but fenced-in) estate. (Whose most telling feature, perhaps, is an abandoned dovecote: an empty space abandoned by love.) It’s made clear Marty isn’t his own man, merely a living body there for Whitehead’s use:

“You’re my property, Strauss. You concern yourself with me, or you get the Hell out of here tomorrow morning. Me! … Not yourself. Forget yourself.”

The novel is full of characters existing in states of living death. Sometimes literally, as in the case of Breer, whom Mamoulian claims from a death by suicide so as to use him as his agent in the world. Others more figuratively, as in Whitehead’s daughter Carys, with her addiction to heroin, or Whitehead himself, retreating from the world out of fear of Mamoulian, and Mamoulian as well, fastidious and nihilistic, a walking emptiness, yet too afraid of death to leave this life he seems to despise. Marty at one point finds himself infused with “unwelcome thoughts of lying face up in the ground, dead perhaps, but anticipating resurrection.” But this isn’t a resurrection type of world, not with Mamoulian and Whitehead in charge. It’s a living-death world, always holding off the first step towards a true resurrection.

Although it’s unfailing readable, I felt The Damnation Game began to lose its initial focus from the mid-point on, and I place the blame firmly with the character of Mamoulian. It’s at the halfway point the much-anticipated meeting between Whitehead and Mamoulian occurs — the moment Whitehead has been dreading, because he knows it will lead to his death. Only, it doesn’t. Mamoulian turns up, says he will come again, and leaves. Later, he comes again, kills a few secondary characters, and leaves again. The second half of the novel is a series of confrontations with Mamoulian where nothing gets resolved, and for no clear reason. And perhaps nothing gets resolved because it’s not clear for a long time just what Mamoulian wants.

Mamoulian lacks the sort of clearly-defined meaning Barker is usually so good at giving his antagonists. He’s wonderful at creating larger-than-life, loquacious monsters who expound their philosophies of excess — of experience, pain, power. (Or, as in the case of, say, Rawhead Rex, are so blatantly symbolic they don’t have to explain themselves.) Mamoulian never does this. It’s only after a while we get a glimpse of what his inner world is like, and it turns out to be a foggy world of nihilism, asceticism, and absence. It’s not even a fierce nihilism, it’s all rather tired. Mamoulian is clearly at the end of his life, fed up with it all, and doesn’t make for a very powerful figure — he just keeps lingering. Even his title — he calls himself “the Last European” — comes across more as writerly bravura on Barker’s part than having any real meaning. This makes confrontations with Mamoulian difficult — just what is it you’re confronting? What’s the ideological battle that needs to be fought while the supernatural shenanigans are going on?

I think you can find an opposite to Mamoulian in the novel, but it’s not spelled out. There’s an intensity of living, a relishing of experience, as with Marty when he’s finally let out on his own for a night from Whitehead’s estate:

“He felt real. God in Heaven, that was it. At last he was able to operate in the world again, affect it, shape it.”

The “game” of the novel’s title, perhaps, isn’t so much about the rules of what’s going on, as the feeling of being a player in the world, being part of it all, taking your chances, getting your hands dirty. (Something the fastidious Mamoulian doesn’t want to do. This, perhaps, is at the root of his ability to always win at cards — that chance-phobic ultra-control of his smacks more of anxiety than a Devil’s power.)

And the one power Marty and Carys can wield against Mamoulian, it turns out, is the connection they feel. Both Whitehead and Mamoulian are powerful figures, locked by their very power into their own solipsistic worlds, able to hold off what they fear, and so become all the more imprisoned by that fear. It’s the more human characters, with their vulnerability and need to connect, that overcome the powerful, in their own small way.

As I say, The Damnation Game remains readable, but I don’t think it has the sort of lasting meaning it might have had if Mamoulian had been a figure who really stood for something — as, say, “the Hell Priest” (whom we all know as Pinhead) does in Barker’s next piece of long-form fiction.

I found this book while looking for more 70s/80s YA folk fantasy, and it’s one I hadn’t heard of before. Published in 1981, The Grey Dancer is the first novel from poet and novelist Alison Fell, and doesn’t seem to have been reprinted after its initial hardback and paperback. This may be down to its length — at 90 pages, it’s a very slim paperback, even for YA books of the time.

The story is set around the village of Dal, near Laggan in the Highlands. Change is coming to this remote community, in the shape of a new contraption: a television, acquired by the small, two-teacher school, to let its pupils watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, thus placing the start of the novel in June 1953. The protagonist is eleven-year-old Annie Latto, who sees the young queen in the TV’s “flickering grey square” as something out of a fairytale (“her Cinderella carriage”) and feels enough of a link with this far-off woman to worry “what would happen if the queen needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of it all.” It seems to be a symbol of progress — all those lords and ladies bowing to a young woman — as does the building of a new hydroelectric dam in a nearby valley. Annie’s father, who used to drive the school bus, is now employed in the building work there. The new bus-driver, said to be a gypsy, is Lal McLennan, a man with eyes “the yellow of a burn in full sun, or the feathers at the throat of an eagle”, soon makes friends with Annie by curing a wasp sting with a wad of sphagnum moss.

But not everything in Annie’s life is so positive. Her father is not pleased with lax standards in the dam’s construction, but no one will listen to his warnings about what might happen when the water starts flowing. Meanwhile, Annie’s headmaster and main teacher (or “Dominie”) is a sadist, far too fond of corporal punishment for the slightest reason. Annie’s favourite place to be by herself is under a tree she’s named the Grey Dancer, “for the way it swayed and rippled its branches higher than any other tree of Dal, and wilder” — a symbol, perhaps of her own spiritedness. When a local bully, sixteen-year-old Fergie, finds her there and starts to chase her, she’s saved by the sudden appearance of a golden eagle, swooping down on the lad and scaring him off. This awakes a defiance, and a sense of power, in Annie for the first time: “she knew that the eagle had left something to her. Like some kind of territory which was in her own keeping.”

Bus-driver Lal begins to tell her his story, and it’s here the book’s folkish fantasy element comes in. For, although it’s his story, it’s one that happened “a fearsome long time ago. A hundred years or more.” Back then, it was also a time of changes. A new laird had come to Dal, with his English woman and his wealth acquired from British India. Another new woman comes to the valley, too: lame Isobel, who can cure the sick with her knowledge of plants. Lal, a farmworker, falls for Isobel, and the two declare before the village that they are to be married. The new laird, meanwhile, says he has to make more efficient use of the land, and that thirty-five of the residents are going to have to move on. Isobel, who has come from a similarly depleted community, warns that this will be just the first step in them all losing their homes. But when Lal speaks out against the laird, Isobel is summoned before a court, accused of “Unlawful practices and irreligious conduct” — basically, witchcraft — though the couple know this is just the laird getting his own back. And, as the only consequence is that they won’t be able to be married in church, Isobel conducts her own marriage ceremony, in front of the tree that Annie will later call her Grey Dancer, invoking the name of “Bride, goddess of the old religion”. (So perhaps she is a little bit witchy after all.)

It’s hard to describe the book’s fantasy element without giving the whole story, but it’s established from the start that Lal lost his Isobel — and that Lal is, in some way, also the golden eagle who saved Annie from the bullying Fergie. It’s an old folk-tale element, though: the separated lovers transformed, Lal into a golden eagle, Isobel into a trout, to meet again as humans only once a year, on Midsummer’s Night. But the place they meet is, Annie realises, one of those soon to be flooded when the dam begins operation, and that’s going to be on Midsummer’s Day.

As well as being about times of change — which recalls, to me, Robert Holdstock’s idea in the Mythago books that myths emerge in times of change — The Grey Dancer is about standing up to oppression. Lal and Isobel did so, speaking out against the laird and letting him know they could see what he was up to with his part in the Highland Clearances. Annie’s father does so, too, speaking out in a meeting about how the dam might not be as safe as everyone’s claiming it will be. Annie does her own standing up to the misuse of power, cheekily writing the word “tyrant” on the blackboard when the Dominie asks her to spell one more word than everyone else in a spelling test.

That moment of hope through change the novel opened with — the crowning of a new queen — is, Lal says, not to be accepted without question. Having told Annie about the Clearances he lived through a century ago, he says:

“Never forget that tale, Annie… So when your teachers stuff you with pap about the braw Queen and her Commonwealth and the great Empire, mind some of the crimes that were done in the building of it.”

I can’t help feeling there’s an ambivalence about how the fantasy element is brought into this tale of speaking truth to power. Lal and Isobel’s story of standing up to the new laird can only find its happy ending through a shift to the supernatural, by Lal and Isobel’s transformation into a bird and a fish. Without that, it’s the tale of the laird’s retribution and nothing else. It’s similar to how I felt about Pan’s Labyrinth, where one reading of the film is to see the fantasy elements as a desperate re-shaping of tragic events, in the moment before poor Ofelia’s death at the hand of fascists, because there’s no other place to find that much-needed sense of fulfilment except in her own imagination.

Or is the right way to see it that stories of defiance of misused power, even ones that need to resort to fantasy to find their sense of justice, are at least an inspiration for the powerless to stand up to the powerful, even if they will, in most cases, not win? Because perhaps, every so often, one will win, and there will be a genuine positive change?

The feeling The Grey Dancer ends with is, I think, one of hope, a sense that Annie will in the future be all the more ready to speak out against what she knows to be wrong, even if she has had to witness the tragedy of Lal and Isobel — or perhaps because she’s had to witness that tragedy. Lal certainly says he sees this spirit in her:

“I see you seeking and not finding… and Scotland is aye full of those who forget the seeking and live on, never hearing the speak of the land, never noticing their hearts wither within them.”

The 70s and 80s YA I’ve covered on this blog — by the likes of Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, John Gordon and so on — always has something of a political sensibility, or at least an awareness of social wrongs, certainly when it comes to class. But mostly class is presented in these books as a fact about the world, a thing that individual characters have to deal with, rather than a social problem to be solved. Gwyn’s solution in Garner’s The Owl Service is to self-educate himself out of it, to fake his way into the middle classes by losing his accent; in other books of the time, the mark of social progress is for the middle-class main characters to be friends with a working-class character, but not to think much, or do anything about, the political or social injustices that lead to such a divide. But these books, in the main, are about conflict with more fundamental, primal forces, and class differences are there to add realism to their fantasy narratives. Fell’s novel is by no means preachy, but it feels to me that, in it, there’s much more of the sense of needing to challenge social and political wrongs and the misuses of (non-supernatural) power, be it political, local, or personal. To accept those misuses is to let a little bit of yourself die.

It’s a nice, short, and poetically-written tale, infused, through its language, with an awareness of the natural world, and the intense, slightly fantasy-tinged mind of a child protagonist on the verge of adolescence. Its length would have made it perfect for the sort of hour-long TV adaptations some similar books of the time had — Red Shift, The Bells of Astercote, The Ghost in the Water — but that was not to be. Still, a nice addition to my growing collection of 70s/80s YA folk fantasy. (Which needs a better genre-name!)

Barker began writing his Books of Blood stories at the start of the 1980s — bizarrely enough as a relief from the intense work of playwriting (his initial career being as a playwright, actor, and director of the Dog Theatre Company). They were, at first, intended only for himself and his friends, and for the sheer joy of doing something new. But later, realising he might be able to make a go of these things, he had them typed up as a 600-page manuscript and handed it to his theatrical agent, who tried Gollancz (who turned it down), then paperback publisher Sphere Books, under the misapprehension they published Stephen King. Sphere accepted, and took the unusual approach of releasing them in three volumes simultaneously (Barker had thought of the stories as one book, The Book of Blood), and putting this then-unknown author’s name as part of the title. They even used his art for the covers. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood volumes I to III came out in March 1984.

They were something different in the then-booming horror market, very much unlike its leading author, Stephen King. As Douglas Winter puts it in his biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic:

“His stories exercised an unbridled enthusiasm for the lush and the lurid, pushing at taboos of sex and violence, yet confirmed an unparalleled ambition and audacity.”

King, though, certainly does excess — perhaps more self-consciously than Barker, in whom it feels like a natural mode — but anyway that’s not the real core of what Barker brought to the genre. As well as being explicit in terms of blood, gore, and bodies, Barker was explicit with the more philosophically religious elements in horror fiction: he wasn’t just out to shock, he was after revelation, transformation and transcendence, even if it was of a dark kind. As he’s quoted in Winter’s biography:

“The kind of horror I like drags things into daylight and says, Right. Let’s have a really good look. Does it still scare you? Does it maybe do something different to you now that you can see it more plainly — something that isn’t quite like being scared?”

There’s a strong feeling in these stories of a highly creative talent let loose on an unexplored domain, rushing around and trying all sorts of ideas, approaches, modes and genres, squeezing them to see what juice they’ll produce in his particular hands. There are ensemble pieces and narratives focused on just the one character (even a rare first-person story), there’s realism (the non-supernatural “Dread”, about its protagonist’s philosophical education thanks to a man who believes that the only subject of any “worthwhile philosophy” is “the things we fear, because we don’t understand them”, and goes on to give practical, personalised lessons), there’s fable (“Hell’s Event”, about a once-a-century race that decides who will rule the next hundred years: Heaven or Hell), there’s something close to comedy (“The Yattering and Jack”, about a minor demon’s attempts to break the mind of a stubbornly disbelieving gherkin-importer), and something close to a love story (“Jacqueline Ess—Her Will and Testament”, in which a woman gains the ability to reshape flesh with her mind, but her attempts to learn how to use this new power from the powerful men in her life only show how shallow power is compared to passion, which is so much harder to find).

Some, for me, don’t work so well and perhaps betray the fact that Barker, though highly creative and an obviously gifted writer, was still learning his craft. “Pig Blood Blues”, about an ex-policeman newly hired to teach woodwork at a Remand Centre for Adolescent Offenders, who discovers the whole facility has taken to worshipping a seemingly possessed pig in the centre’s farm, felt to me as though it could have done with a slower pace, a longer build-up. It’s as though Barker, impatient to see where this idea would end (it’s a rare case of one his tales leaving its revelations till the end), hurried through the elements that might have turned this into a novel: character build-up, growing hints about what was happening, and so on.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex” were among the first to be written, as they’re both less satisfying in their overall story structure, while also having some of the rawest laying out of themes that I can imagine were bubbling around in this young male creator’s psyche: themes of monstrous fathers and victimised sons. In Barker’s fiction, though, that word “monstrous” can have a far different meaning to its normal, daylight, usage. In “Skins of the Fathers”, for instance, we have two types of monstrous father. There’s Eugene, who considers it his absolute right to have everything his own way, and to abuse his wife Lucy and son Aaron as much as he likes. He’s clearly monstrous, but in Barker’s world, calling him that would be an abuse of the term, because there are also, in this tale, actual monsters, and these are, it turns out, Aaron’s real fathers: ancient creatures of the desert, a varied mix of weirdly beautiful or downright incomprehensible beings who have come at last to reclaim their son and awaken him to the powers that are his birthright. I can’t help reading this story as, in some ways, a creator’s self-remaking fable, in which he disowns the traditional ideas of (as it’s put in the story) “hand-me-down machismo” (something that might have been especially important to a gay writer like Barker), in favour of something weird, marginalised, secretive and perhaps forbidden, but also magical, transformative and creative.

“Rawhead Rex”, on the other hand, presents us with an outright monstrous father in both meanings of the word: a child-eating monster whose only purpose is to eat, kill, destroy, and dominate, but whose one weakness is the the equally archetypal image of the female as source of life. What Rawhead Rex and the monsters in “Skins of the Fathers” have in common is they’re presented as ancient creatures who father children on human mothers. In “Rawhead Rex” the subsequent pregnancies kill the mothers, but in “Skins of the Fathers” the monsters, rather than men, are women’s natural partners for generating offspring:

“Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men… What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation. Within mere eons, the worst rooted out the best; the women were made slaves, the demons killed or driven underground, leaving only a few pockets of survivors.”

“Midnight Meat Train” is another story to feature a root race of non-human (or once-human) fathers. Here, the protagonist escapes becoming a victim of what seems to be one more New York City serial killer, only to find this killer had in fact been working for the city — not the government, but for the “City Fathers”, a race of ancient and perhaps once-human elders who have among them the “Father of Fathers”, the “original American”, who is most certainly not human:

“If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in union, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was iridescent, like mother of pearl…”

But the most general theme that links these stories — and the books Barker would go on to write, too — is the transformative effect of contact with the darkness. That contact, for Barker, is never an end-point, as it so often is in horror; it’s always a door to be opened, a curtain to be lifted, a secret to be brought into the light. From “Midnight Meat Train”:

“You shouldn’t have seen this: it’s not for the likes of you,” he said, taking another step towards Kaufman. “It’s secret.”

Which recalls my favourite line from Barker’s 1987 film Hellraiser, and one I’m sure recurs throughout his work, in many forms: “This is not for your eyes.” It’s not for your eyes, but Barker’s going to show you anyway.

The one story I’ve heard most often singled out in these early Barker stories is “In the Hills, the Cities”, a weird mix of transcendent vision and tragic horror that pretty much defies categorisation. A couple of lovers, Mick and Judd, are on their first — and, they soon realise, last, because they’re just not getting on — holiday together, somewhere in Yugoslavia. Mick, it turns out, is (to Judd) a “political bore”, while Judd keeps wanting to take side-trips to obscure local churches to see their paintings. He’s not religious, he’s only interested in the paintings’ aesthetics, leading Mick to think that the “complexities, the contradictions, even the agonies that made those cultures blossom and wither were just tiresome” to Judd. Then, cutting through their petty squabbles, comes a vision straight off the cover of Hobbes’ Leviathan to not only transcend their politics-versus-aesthetics debate, but blow it out of the water.

Two towns they pass close to have a tradition. Once a year each makes itself into a single, walking giant, a carefully strapped-and-bound-together ambulant city made of people. Some people are the eyes, some are the teeth, some are the fingers, others are the muscles, the heart, the stomach. These two “cities” then do battle. It is a thing that seems to capture a sort of nobility, as one character says:

“It is the body of the state,” said Vaslav, so softly his voice was barely above a whisper, “it is the shape of our lives.”

But it is also rooted in the madness of the mob:

“Mick saw the leg raised; saw the faces of the people in the shin and ankle and foot – they were as big as he was now – all huge men chosen to take the full weight of this great creation. Many were dead. The bottom of the foot, he could see, was a jigsaw of crushed and bloody bodies, pressed to death under the weight of their fellow citizens.”

It — quite literally — embodies politics and aesthetics, transcending both into something incomprehensible, awe-inspiring, deranged and monstrous. It’s a seemingly allegorical image (as the cover of Leviathan was) but it goes so far beyond any allegorical meaning. (It’s surprising to realise that this, perhaps the most powerful image in Barker’s first three Books of Blood is not supernatural.)

I actually think that “In the Hills, the Cities” is perhaps the only example, here, of something that works despite Barker’s philosophy of “having a really good look”. Although nothing, in the end, is hidden, the reason behind all this remains obscure. Is this an image of transcendence, or of derangement? Had Barker included this image in his later fiction — and he’d soon go on to find his natural medium in doorstop-sized novels like Weaveworld — he’d have to explore its meaning, lay it bare somehow. But I think its power here lies in the way it absorbs and transcends both Mick’s politics and Judd’s aesthetics to become so much more than both, while still remaining almost screamingly incomprehensible. It reaches beyond Barker’s images of transcendence — however dark and magical — to the sublime, in all its terror and mystery, insanity and imagination.