THE READING RHEUM: THE HELLBOUND HEART (1986)

 My general negative estimation of Clive Barker's work probably discouraged me from bothering to check out "The Hellbound Heart" until now. But given that I did read the 2015 SCARLET GOSPELS, in which Barker sought to construct a "Cenobite mythology" independent of the movie franchise, that probably motivated me to gauge the origins of the Cenobites in prose fiction. In my review I rated the "iconicity" of those characters in the movies over that of the GOSPELS novel, and that made me more a little curious about the source novel. There's also another reason for my reading-reticence, but I'll come back to that later.                                                                       

 To my great surprise, HEART was the best Barker prose work I've ever read. The characters are clearly delineated and confined to a small group of necessary functions in a tightly plotted tale. At base HEART is a "devil's bargain" story, in which a mortal makes a deal that he thinks will be to his benefit, but that instead ends up leaving him both burned and burning. The transgressive mortal this time is Englishman Frank Cotton, a hedonistic reprobate who travels from city to city, getting by on his charm and looks. His one relative is his brother Rory, but Frank holds Rory in contempt for his dull conservatism. On the day Rory wed his glamorous bride Julia, Frank secretly seduced Julia and then blew town.                                                                                                                                                       

But a life of heedless pleasures leaves Frank wanting something beyond ordinary experience. At a family house in England, Frank uses that iconic "puzzle box" to summon other-dimensional beings called "Cenobites." They're not connected to any religious entities, so there's no soul-bartering going on, but Frank thinks that he can make a deal with them anyway, one he thinks will result in his gaining access to new levels of heterosexual pleasures. Instead, the Cenobites' definition of pleasure is the imposition of endless forms of torture upon the body, until pain becomes synonymous with pleasure. Frank is taken into their dimension for the Cenobite games, and the book loosely suggests that these strange entities, with their body piercings and mutilations, may have been humans who became enthralled with self-inflicted mortification. None of the Cenobites in the story are as vivid as their movie-counterparts, by the way.           

Barker's first HELLRAISER movie followed the novel's plot fairly closely, and since I minutely described the plot-action of the 1987 HELLRAISER in this review, I won't repeat myself here. The greatest alteration the movie made to the book is that Kirsty Singer, a friend of Rory's nursing unrequited feelings for him, gets changed in the 1987 movie into Kirsty Cotton. This Kirsty is the unmarried daughter of Rory (whose name is changed to Larry), who resents her stepmother without knowing precisely why. In both book and movie, Kirsty is responsible for consigning Frank back to "Hell" after Frank has murdered his brother. So, in the book Kirsty's no relation to either Rory or Frank. Yet HEART includes a strange scene in which Frank's trying to masquerade as Rory to deceive Kirsty. To lure the young woman, Frank utters a come-on that Barker himself calls "incestuous:" saying "Come to Daddy" to Kirsty Singer. But if Kirsty's not related to either man, how can the come-on seem "incestuous" to anyone, least of all Kirsty?                                                                                                           Despite the various actions of Kirsty, Frank and Julia, Barker throws his narrative spotlight upon the mysterious Cenobites, though they're much more nebulous in prose than in cinema. One Cenobite displays the "pinhead" look and gets more lines than the others, so obviously in crafting the movie Barker built up that character to be more of an authority over the others, so as to take advantage of the talents of actor David Bradley. The movie still edges out the novel in terms of iconicity, but the mythicity of the two is about equal. Lastly, the other reason I was reluctant to read HEART was that I wondered if Barker, who has been public as a gay author for many years now, might not have constructed Frank's "bad bargain with the Devil" as a punishment for his heterosexual excesses. I've seen no shortage of modern narratives willing to punish fictional characters for the sin of being "heteronormative." But while I don't dismiss the possibility that Barker might have had some sort of punitive notion in mind, at least subconsciously, he succeeded in creating myth-figures that went beyond the boundaries of ideology. That the Cenobites deserve that status is suggested by the fact that other authors could excel in depicting the infernal pain-freaks in terms Barker would not have attempted, not least the HELLRAISER movie sequel. Ironically, though SCARLET GOSPELS wanted to stand apart from those other works, Barker's character of "The Hell Priest" owes a lot more to the movie's Pinhead than to the vague figure from HEART.                                               

THE READING RHEUM: THE SCARLET GOSPELS (2015)

I'm glad I got some of my takes on author Clive Barker set down in an earlier essay, so that here I can focus more on the specific problems I had with SCARLET GOSPELS, one of Barker's rare crossovers between two of his icons.

First I'll say that even though GOSPELS isn't well-plotted and its characters are under-realized, Barker succeeds in creating enough of a linear sense of menace that the novel is a decent read, though I don't envision ever wanting to reread it. The criticism I voiced in the earlier essay-- that often Barker's works are just catalogues of sex-and-sadism scenes, without much narrative "glue" to hold them together-- particularly applies here. Because Barker doesn't care about delving into individual characters, he often tosses in new ones without any attention to context. For instance, one of Harry D'Amour's allies is a female body builder, name of Lana. This makes it possible for Barker to throw in a little femme-formidable action. But who is Lana? Is there a story about why her character devoted herself to muscle-building? Not at all, and so even though Barker might have included her as a change from his studiously swishy characters, she comes off as just another "freak flag" getting flown.

This is even more evident with one of Barker's starring icons, Harry D'Amour. D'Amour isn't exactly a well-known figure outside Barker fandom, for the author has only placed the detective in a handful of short stories, one major role in an unfinished novel-series (THE BOOK OF THE ART), and an unsuccessful stand-alone movie, LORD OF ILLUSIONS. Yet Barker wants to play up D'Amour as if he's a fascinating "everyman" (his word) type of character, who becomes enmeshed in occult situations far beyond his means. Barker doesn't arm his detective-hero with any special weapons or skills, so he clearly wanted him to be the sort of protagonist who just muddles through situations far beyond his compass. I for one just found D'Amour terminally dull, and his relationships with his various allies didn't improve his character. D'Amour doesn't really have the mojo to be dealing with the more famous icon of the story, and so he usually comes off as a glorified viewpoint character rather than an icon with his own stature.

There's actually zero reason for D'Amour to be involved in the story of the Cenobite mastermind Pinhead (whose movie-name I'll use for convenience, since Barker's name for him, "The Hell Priest," is cumbersome). Pinhead has a master plan to take control of Hell, and to that end, he spends a lot of time invading the sanctums of mortal magicians to plunder their secrets. One of these forays brings Pinhead into contact with D'Amour, and Pinhead hatches some contrived idea that D'Amour should be the witness of the Cenobite's grand scheme. Thus Pinhead lures D'Amour and a handful of helpers into Hell to witness his grand scheme in action. Said scheme involves the revelation that Satan, after centuries of ruling Hell, committed suicide due to his estrangement from Heaven. Pinhead uses this opportunity to steal Satan's armor, with which he can channel even greater mystical powers and thus take control of the infernal realm. However, for some obscure reason Satan comes back to life when his armor's removed, and the two demons fight. Without giving away too much, Barker seals the fate of his best-known icon here-- and I wouldn't mind that, except that Barker's Hell Priest isn't much more interesting than Harry D'Amour.

I may finally take time to read the original novella on which Barker based his HELLRAISER movie concept, but without question, Pinhead of the movies is far more famous than his prose predecessor, much less this 2015 version. The first HELLRAISER is indubitably Barker's best venture into cinema, just on the strength of his interbreeding between Hell's standard association with suffering and the new idea of demons informed by sadomasochistic obsessions. But I also admired how HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II-- an original story not derived from a Barker story-- created a Hell with a much more impressive visual appearance. Barker may not have wanted to emulate that approach for either legal reasons, aesthetic reasons, or a little of both. But his Hell is utterly routine and visually unimpressive. 

On my movie-blog I've reviewed all eight of the HELLRAISER movies starring Doug Bradley as Pinhead. While only the first two films are better than average, all of them contribute to a fairly consistent cosmos in which Pinhead only intrudes on reality under special conditions and depends on tempting mortals in approved Satanic style. Barker doesn't abide by any particular rules in his book, much less having any deeper appreciation of the deeper myths informing Hell and, by extension, the rest of the Judeo-Christian cosmos. So his idea of a new Gospel is more like a heresy against the superior iconicity of the cinematic HELLRAISER. 

MY THOUGHTS ON CLIVE BARKER

 I could write overall evaluations of a lot of writers given that I've read all or most of their repertoires. But I can't do more than make general comments about English horror-writer Clive Barker. I'm currently about to finish SCARLET GOSPELS, which I'll review separately, but what I have finished didn't impress me much-- the 1985 DAMNATION GAME and the 1988 CABAL (reviewed here) and one of his short story collections. I certainly didn't feel that he was "the future of horror" as Stephen King fulsomely claimed decades ago.        

At first, I thought the only thing I didn't like about Barker was that I found most of his characters superficial. Yet I've enjoyed a lot of authors who aren't particularly good at characterization and who depend mostly on "types." But reading GOSPELS makes me realize that a lot of my problems with Barker depend on his heavy dependence on projecting his oft declared S&M fetish into his fiction. This would not be a problem if he was able to make his characters come alive, to sound as if each of them has specific motivations. But without a sense of individual character, Barker's constant barrage of hyperviolence and (usually gay) sexuality becomes wearying and takes me out of his stories. True, I sometimes have the same reaction to the works of Sade, the author whose name begat the term "sadism." But whenever I enter Sade's world, I know in advance that sex-and-violence scenarios are pretty much all he offers.                 

In my review of the last firm that Barker both wrote and directed, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, I remarked that the Barker stories I've read don't "hold together" because of his lack of ability to empathize with the world of ordinary people, in contrast to the occult demimonde in which his characters move. I have not read the story Barker used as the source of his movie HELLRAISER, but I note that in the movie Barker did an admirable job of showing how the ordinary folks Kirsty and her father get trapped in the bizarre domain of the Cenobites and their votaries. Yet Barker also scores fairly low in the realm of imaginative play when he's not depicting his sadism scenes, as the version of Hell he depicts in GOSPELS is not nearly as interesting as the one in the HELLRAISER sequel that was given to two other raconteurs, Tony Randel and Peter Atkins.                        

In conclusion, there's some irony that Barker is just as hemmed-in by his dependence on his demimonde tropes as a more conservative creator-- say, Frank Capra-- might be by his concentration on tropes of middle-class life. The moral of the story might then be, as Captain Kirk sagely said, that "too much of anything isn't necessarily a good thing."                                           

UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR

 In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3 (2012).

So in my previous essay I extended my terms of "grotesque and arabesque" to two "super-genres," horror and fantasy. I call them "super-genres" because both subsume so many subgenres that it's difficult to claim that any single genre embraces works as far apart as Poe's HOUSE OF USHER and the Chichester-Johnson JIHAD (for horror) or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories (for fantasy). I think it's plain enough as to which super-genre is aligned with the grotesque and which is aligned with the arabesque.

It's more challenging, though, to place these super-genres-- which extend their influence far beyond their manifestations in popular fiction-- in the Schopenhaurean categories of authorial will. I've attempted to rename, for my literary project, Schopenhauer's names for his two types of representation, "intuitive" and "abstract," but I'm not going to reference any of my revisions in this essay. I want to get at a very narrow aspect of how audience expectations form patterns within authorial will.

I referenced that aspect-- or two manifestations of that aspect-- in the 2012 HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS, where I summarized Thomas Huxley's distinctions between what he termed "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence." 

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

It also should not be difficult to guess which super-genre I'm likely to align with downward transcendence, and which with the upward species. Although the "intuitive representations" that human beings share with lower animals are not inherently "lower" by themselves, they become "lower" in contrast with "abstract representations," which generally suggest principles that supervene the world of base animal existence. Such principles may be metaphysical, as in religion, or empirical, as in science, but both systems depend on abstractions in order to promote the philosophies of their adherents. I may never have reason to further use terminological terms for the two forms of literary transcendence, but for convenience I'll name them after two Greek religious terms: "chthonic" for "earthbound," and "ouranian" for "heaven-bound." 

So what are the "audience expectations" I referenced above? With respect to the super-genres, horror is expected to give audiences "the worst case scenario," and fantasy is expected to give audiences "the best case scenario." There are naturally exceptions, and I named two of them above. 

HOUSE OF USHER is in every way a grim, grotesque look at familial relations, and thus represents the "mainstream" of horror fiction. In contrast, the narrative of JIHAD somewhat transcends many of the gruesome activities of both Cenobites and Nightbreed, and offers to the audience-- if not to the characters-- a metaphysical rapprochement between their respective worlds.

 LORD OF THE RINGS offers a panoramic vision of human courage against overwhelming odds, and of redemption even in the face of near-total degradation (i.e., Gollum, Frodo's "shadow-self.") Thus Tolkien's book represents the mainstream of the fantasy super-genre. In contrast, though Smith's "Zothique" stories take place in an apocalyptic fantasy-verse full of colorful arabesques, many of them have downbeat or diffident endings worthy of Smith's idol Poe. Yet none of these exceptions disprove the rule, the rule being that audiences look to fantasy for the feeling of positive life-affirmation, while they look to horror to feel as though they have met the negativity of all life-denying forces, and still survived. 

I may develop these points further, but that's a decent stopping-place for now.

THE READING RHEUM: CABAL (1988)

 

I finally read Clive Barker’s CABAL. Long ago I’d seen the theatrical version of NIGHTBREED, the 1990 film Barker adapted from his own work, and had enjoyed some of the Marvel Comics extensions of the franchise, particularly the Nightbreed-Cenobite crossover JIHAD. I recently contemplated reviewing the “director’s cut” of NIGHTBREED, and for that reason decided to immense myself in the source novel.

Despite the many accolades given to Barker, I find him off-putting. I’ve only read an assortment of the “Books of Blood” stories and one novel, THE DAMNATION GAME, but I’ve found all his fiction poor in terms of both style and characterization. In fantasy, horror and SF, one doesn’t necessarily expect Melville or Faulkner in terms of great characters, and often I’ve been able to get pleasure out of texts in which the characters existed purely to provide a flesh-and-blood justification for an author’s ideas. One can even accomplish this with a straightforward meat-and-potatoes style, as I’ve found in the better works of Stephen King (one of the writers whose endorsement helped bring Barker to prominence).

Barker’s style is hard to analyze. Many passages are clearly meant to be soulful and tormented, but Barker’s choice of images and metaphors is often trite. Take as example this second paragraph in CABAL’s first chapter:

What time didn’t steal from under your nose, circumstance did. It was useless to hope otherwise, useless to dream that the world somehow meant you good. Everything of value, everything you clung to for your sanity, would rot or be snatched in the long run, and the abyss would gape beneath you, as it gaped for Boone now, and suddenly, without so much as a breath of explanation, you were gone. Gone to hell or worse, professions of love and all.

This is not, IMO, poetic writing, but hortatory: it’s telling the reader how he should feel about the character of Boone and his lover Lori. Barker’s opening shots are meant to make the reader sympathize with the couple’s plight before he even knows what that plight is. Barker informs the reader that Boone’s gone through some tough times, which have led to his consultation of Decker, a psychoanalyst. Unfortunately for Boone, the respectable analyst leads a double life, for on the side Decker’s a psycho-killer who slaughters victims in gruesome ways. Evidently no one nurtures the least suspicion about Decker, least of all the trusting Boone. Nevertheless, Decker rather randomly decides to frame Boone for the murders. The evil representative of authority succeeds, and Boone is sent to an asylum.

However, in the asylum Boone meets a resident named Narcise. This peculiar fellow, who may or may not be some sort of monster, puts Boone on the trail of Midian, a mysterious city out in the wilds of Alberta. Boone, having already heard of the legend, escapes imprisonment and seeks out Midian. Both Lori and Decker follow him, albeit for vastly different reasons.

The various seesaw developments in Boone’s predicament aren’t of much consequence, but one might have thought that Barker would throw his all into the depiction of the people of Midian. The idea of a “city of monsters,” an inversion of a normal human community, is a theme on which a fair number of horror-writers have discoursed, and much of the idea’s attraction rests on the visual fascination of diverse specters gathering together into a community, whether for purposes of drama or comedy. Unfortunately, Barker’s description of the Midianities is deliberately vague, and none of the monster-people stand forth as either good characters or icons. Barker implies loosely that the monsters are the risen dead, who have somehow transcended death and have gained assorted metamorphic powers. The monster-people were brought to their own Jerusalem by a savior-god named Baphomet, and Boone ends up almost destroying the community, though in a tortured metaphor this action makes Boone the group’s new leader, under the name of Cabal. There’s a dodgy reckoning between Cabal and Decker, which I suppose makes this a combative work, though it’s not an outstanding one. Barker’s usage of traditional names like “Baphomet” and “Cabal” (derived from the Hebrew “kabbalah”) proves scattershot, so that despite considerable potential Midian is just “middling” in the myth-department.

Having read that Barker’s earliest creative endeavors were in the theater, it occurs to me that some of his hortatory musings read a little bit like stage directions. The author obviously possesses a sincere love of fantasy and horror, but there’s something overdetermined about his monsters. Even the ones given more than a quick line of description feel like they were invented to illustrate some didactic “chaos vs. order” theme, rather than having any fictive life of their own. Of the Marvel Comics characters known as “Nightbreed,” only Boone, Narcise and Peloquin appear in CABAL.

I also read the Barker short story “The Last Illusion,” which introduced occult detective Harry D’Amour and which was adapted (purportedly with many alterations) into the film LORD OF ILLUSIONS. The style and characterization aren’t any better, but the story has the virtue of brevity. Since I am an afficianado of crossovers, I’ve given some thought to reading his recent book THE SCARLET GOSPELS, in which detective D’Amour crosses paths with Barker’s most famous creation, the Cenobites. Given Barker’s international success, I don’t expect the characterization to be much improved. But if I’m lucky, maybe his style has gotten a little better since CABAL.

MYTHCOMICS: JIHAD #1-2 (1991)

I've provided a brief sketch of the concept of JIHAD's status as one of pop culture's best crossovers in this post on my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS, which is more or less my "stuff I've been reading" blog.  This neglected graphic novel consists of a pair of squarebound 48-page books issued by Epic Comics during their creative roundelay with Clive Barker. I detailed my personal acquaintance with the Hellraiser and Nightbreed franchises on the OUROBOROS post so that I wouldn't have to explain all that here.

I'm also not going to spend a lot of time on the complicated plot and the extremely crowded cast of characters in JIHAD. As noted in the other essay, the base goal of JIHAD's plotline, as scripted by D.G. Chicester and painted by Paul Johnson, is to meld the loose mythologies of the Hellraiser and Nightbreed franchises. However, there's quite a bit more going on in JIHAD's theme than the customary cross-franchise meet-and-greet.

For one thing, JIHAD offers one of the few complex meditations on the metaphysical theme of "order and chaos." In Greek creation-myths these contrary forces are more often styled as "kosmos and chaos." The English rendition has been used by many authors, but may be most familiar to fantasy-fiction readers in its utlization by author Michael Moorcock in some of his sword-and-sorcery works, notably the "Elric" series. Though I haven't read every Moorcock work, I've found his handling of the dichotomy to be routine at best, and the same applies to similar adaptations in DC Comics' "Doctor Fate" franchise.

In contrast, JIHAD begins with a syncopated juxtaposition of images that contrast the worlds of the Nightbreed and the Cenobites as emblematic of "chaos" and "order." Yet. instead of picturing chaos as simply some sort of nasty world-conquerors opposed to the reigning hegemony, the Nightbreed embody the messy chaos of the unbridled life-force. It's violent, but also sexy in a visceral fashion.

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In contrast, the Cenobites, who practice a form of extremely violent mortification that surpasses anything that the flagellants of medieval times could have imagined, seek to impose a ruthless form of order upon their bodies and of all those within the hell of their god Leviathan. In keeping with the HELLBOUND film, the Lord of Hell is an abstract polygon-shape whose precision the Cenobites seek to emulate. Chichester takes screenwriter Atkins' conceit-- probably borrowed from similar motifs in the horror stories of Arthur Machen-- and expands upon the conceit, satirizing the attempt of all religions to impose an artificial orderliness and to restrain the chaos of life.

The force that brings the two factions into conflict is a group of inferior Cenobites who aren't satisfied to suffer under the banner of Leviathan, as is the nameless leader known as "Pinhead." These Cenobites are led by an accursed couple, Alastor and Chalkis, who urge Leviathan to allow them to declare a jihad against the resurgent Nightbreed. The true aim of this purgatorial power couple, however, is to elevate themselves to become deities in their own right and take over Hell. Pinhead opposes their ambitions, not least because such desires possess "the stench of chaos," but his many-faceted deity overrules the Cenobite leader and allows Alastor and Chalkis to make war on the monstrous Nightbreed. The villains' plans involve a blasphemous parody of the Christian host and the suborning of a Knight Templar (based on the historical Jacques de Molay). The Nightbreed fight back with both bestial fury and subtle alchemies. One of these involves bringing back a dead man to be the vessel of their long-absent deity Baphomet, who is more or less the deific opposite of Leviathan. In the Johnson-Chichester cosmos, the order represented by the Christian mythology is every bit as inverted as that of Christianity's versions of sin and suffering. Indeed, I strongly suspect that one of the creators had read his Bataille, for on page 19 of Book 1, one of the Cenobites recites an injunction from hell's holy books that is an almost verbatim reprise of a phrase from Bataille's EROTISM: "And do not deny the taboo, but rather transcend it and complete it."

I've discussed various aspects of Bataille's taboo-and-transgression formula in essays like LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION and HOLY NUMINOSITY PART 4, so I won't comment further on this theme here. Suffice to say that whereas a lot of horror-writers, both in prose and comics, merely play at transgression, Johnson and Chichester display a predilection for physical distortions worthy of the celebrated Hieronymous Bosch.

To be sure, JIHAD is as as dense as-- well, hell. Not all readers will catch its learned references, but I'll note that my favorite is the Thomas Malory FAUSTUS quote on the last page, which offers a tragic perspective on the dedicated diabolist Pinhead; one that the extremely uneven film-series certainly never managed to articulate.