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.