Books of Blood Volume 6 By Clive Barker

Books of Blood Volume 6
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1986

The Last Illusion
A private investigator is hired to watch over the body of a dead magician who died right after his final performance. The seemingly easy case – and money – gets much more difficult when the minions of Hell – with whom the magician made a deal for his incredible powers – come to claim the body. Instead of babysitting a corpse, the P.I. engages in a battle with demons as he travels from place to place, trying to keep the body safe.

The Last Illusion was a little long for the amount of story it told, which is not usually the case with Barker’s work. Character and story development were scant. The narrative consisted of one action after another, without any background development. I cared little about the characters.

The Life of Death
Elaine is recovering from a hysterectomy and the breakup of a marriage. She is miserable and depressed. She returns to work and is asked to leave because she cried all day. On her walk home, she walks by a demolition site where they are tearing down an old church. She meets a man watching the demolition and they discuss death and the potential removal of the bodies from the crypt under the church. Thinking about death and her near brush with it, she decides to sneak into the crypt and see what’s inside. She finds a horrific scene of bodies tossed randomly, lying all over the place. Strangely, she’s not horrified. A few days later, she runs into the man she met earlier and they make a date. Elaine thinks she’s making a deal with death, but death is about to cheat her.

This was a brilliant, chilling story! Elaine is developed to the max and the twist is well conceived and well concealed. Fantastic imagery and a terrific, well placed plot. Everything that makes a great short horror story is here!

How Spoilers Bleed
A European company has purchased land in a South American jungle. Nearby is a native tribe which the Europeans treat with contempt. When it comes time to move the tribe, they refuse and one of the Europeans accidentally shoots a tribe member. The elder responds with a curse that makes the already delicate Europeans more delicate. The leader goes to the hospital and witnesses the death of one of his men who literally just falls apart. Also afflicted with the curse, he returns to the encampment to get the curse removed. However, new arrivals have slaughtered all of the natives – including the man who can remove the curse.

This story reads like Rudyard Kipling on LSD. I felt hot and sweaty as I read Barker’s prose. Barker finds just the right level of graphic description to impart to the reader how terrible the curse is. Another fine entry in this last Book of Blood.

Twilight at the Towers
A British spy is recruited to help a KGB agent defect. However, when he meets the guy, others are waiting for him and the agent finds out that he’s been double crossed by his own people, as has the KGB agent. The two enemies find out that they have much more in common with each other than they do with their respective governments who have developed them especially to oppose each other.

While I’m not against it in principle, I generally find the mixing of the spy genre with the horror genre to almost always end up falling flat (Robert McCammon’s Wolf’s Hour being the exception. This story is no different. There wasn’t much story, but there were a lot of words. Lots of action, but little character development to put it in context.

On Jerusalem Street (A Postscript)
A man named Wyburd is hired to obtain the Book of Blood as mentioned in the story of the same name from volume 1. He captures Simon McNeal, the man upon whose skin the dead have told their stories. Wyburd skins him, but ends up drowning in the blood that won’t stop flowing. He dies and arrives on the Highway of the Dead where he tells his story.

I went back to the first volume to reread the first story. This story is not a seamless transition from the first one, but it serves to bring the collection full circle, much as Ray Bradbury’s postscript to The Illustrated Man did.

The final volume of the Books of Blood was not the strongest, but contains two very good stories. It had fewer stories, but longer stories, which I did not like, but is a matter of taste. The Life of Death is some of the finest short horror fiction around and How Spoilers Bleed is well worth the time taken to read it. The Postcript is good at bringing the whole collection to a close, linking it to the first story.

Book to Movie: Candyman (1992)

Book to Movie: Candyman (1992)
Screenplay by Bernard Rose
Directed by Bernard Rose
Based on the short story, The Forbidden, by Clive Barker

Clive Barker experienced some success on the big screen by 1992 with adaptations of his story, Rawhead Rex and his Hellraiser franchise. However, it was his take on urban legends and their sources that would lead to what is probably the finest movie ever based on his work.

The story, The Forbidden, did not have urban legends as its plot leader. In the story, the main character was studying urban graffiti when she fell into the legend of the stalker of housing projects. In the movie, A graduate student named Helen Lyle stumbles onto the legend of the Candyman who stalks Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project while interviewing undergraduate students about urban legends.

The Candyman is an urban take on the folklore of the notorious Bloody Mary. Legend has it that if you say Bloody Mary five times while looking in a mirror, she will appear. Bloody Mary has been entertaining generations of preteen girls at slumber parties. While the Bloody Mary legend has connotations of a more rural period, the Candyman is black, urban, and violent.

She studies the history of Cabrini Green and finds that the upscale condo where she lives with her husband in a troubled marriage (she suspects he’s seeing another grad student) was designed as a housing project similar to Cabrini Green. She discovers that only drywall separates the apartments between the medicine cabinets in the apartments. Knock out the drywall behind your medicine cabinet and you can access the apartment next door. This is how the suspected killer in Cabrini Green made his way into apartments.

Armed with this knowledge, she and a fellow grad student visit the Cabrini Green to photograph graffiti and crime scenes related to the Candyman. She explores an empty apartment and finds the painting depicted in the short story as a striking face with a hole in the wall at the mouth. The hole in the mouth is the missing medicine cabinet. Before the face, on a makeshift altar, is an offering of candy. Written throughout the walls in the complex is the phrase, “Sweets for the sweet.”

Helen and her friend make the acquaintance of a resident, Anne Marie McCoy who invites them in and talks to them about Candyman. This woman believes he’s real and has heard the tales. Helen tells her it is all just legend.

Helen later learns from an academic rival that Candyman is based on a real person. He was the son of a slave who painted portraits in Chicago of the 1860s. He made a living at it. But when he ran afoul of a wealthy man’s daughter who he fell in love with and impregnated, his life ended horribly. The man cut off his painting hand and replaced it with a hook. He was then staked to the ground and smeared with honeycomb to attract bees. Candyman was stung to death.

Helen returns a few days and encounters a small boy who tells her how Candyman murdered a mentally challenged teenager in the public bathrooms in the complex. She enters the filthy, roach infested bathroom to take pictures. While there, she is confronted by a hook wielding man who says he’s the Candyman. He proceeds to beat her badly.

She is able to identify her assailant in a lineup and he is jailed. She returns home to her husband’s comments of “I told you so.” A few days later, however, when leaving the university, she encounters the real Candyman – a large black man with a deep resonant voice. She passes out and awakens in McCoy’s Cabrini Green apartment, covered in blood and holding a meat cleaver. She sees that the woman’s dog has been slaughtered. She finds Anne Marie in her baby’s bedroom crying hysterically over an empty crib, her baby gone.

Police arrest Helen on suspicion of kidnapping and for killing the dog. Without evidence that Helen was involved in kidnapping, police release her on bail. She returns home, but is visited by Candyman again at her apartment. He tells her that since she has been telling his believers that he’s nothing more than a legend, he must shed innocent blood to restore his legend. He invites her to become his victim and offers to trade the life of the baby for hers. He then attacks her.

While the attack is going on, her friend, Bernadette arrives at her apartment. She enters and Candyman kills her. Helen awakens in a pool of blood – Bernadette’s blood. This time she is arrested for murder.

Helen is confined to a mental hospital. Candyman visits her in the restraint room and again asks her to be his victim and live in immortality with the legend of her murder repeated for time immemorial. She freaks out and is sedated.

She awakens about a month later and is taken to the office of the hospital psychiatrist to discuss her upcoming court case and her ability to aid in her defense. She offers to summon Candyman to prove to him that the legend is real. She turns to a mirror and completes the ritual. The psychiatrist looks at her with a mix of skepticism and pity on his face when he is attacked and ripped apart from behind. Candyman throws the body aside and jumps from the window.

Helen escapes from the mental hospital and goes home. There, she finds her husband and the grad student setting up housekeeping in her apartment. She throws a tantrum and leaves. She heads for Cabrini Green and the face.

There, the Candyman tells her her life is over with her marriage, friends, and freedom all gone. She needs to become his victim to achieve immortality. She agrees, if he’ll sacrifice the baby. Candyman directs her to go to the pile of refuse in the courtyard where residents have assembled garbage for a bonfire.

Helen arrives at the pile and hears the cry of a baby deep inside. She climbs the pile and finds a way inside where she finds the baby. She is just about to take it out when the crowd arrives to start the fire. She tries to escape when Candyman grabs her and holds her, intending that she and the baby die in the fire. Helen fights and escapes. Candyman cries out in anguish as Helen craws out, her hair and back on fire, with the baby. She dies handing the baby to her mother.

Helen is laid to rest with her husband and colleagues from the university looking on. Just as the graveside ceremonies are getting underway, a contingent from the Cabrini Green arrives, led by Anne Marie and her baby. They have come to pay their respects to the woman who saved the baby and ended Candyman’s reign.

The movie ends with Helen’s husband standing before a mirror. He say’s Helen’s name five times while looking into it. Helen arrives and kills him with Candyman’s hook. A painting of Helen with her hair ablaze is tattooed on the walls of Cabrini Green by a graffiti artist. She is now the stuff of legends.

This was a fantastic adaptation of one of Barker’s more traditional works. It incorporated all of Barker’s clever story ideas while expanding – and Americanizing – the story.

The cast delivered top notch performances. Virginia Madsen delivered a performance as Helen worthy of the best of the scream queens. But it wasn't Madsen's screams that terrified. It was her eyes. Apparently, she was hypnotized for her encounters with Candyman to give her character subdued horror rather than the traditional screams of terror. It’s great acting and great cinematography as Madsen’s eyes are fixed and she looks as if she’s off in another world. Character actor and soap opera veteran Tony Todd played Candyman. Really, all he had to do was float around and look menacing. But Todd’s deep, resonant voice and the effects used by producers made him an awesome character.

The best written role was that of Helen’s friend, Bernadette. Too often in horror films, the “friend” is the one always complaining that this is a “bad idea.” That becomes trite and boring. Rose used Bernadette and her dialogue with Helen to develop a more plausible story. Making Bernadette likeable instead of nagging made her death more significant to the viewer.

Clive Barker served as executive producer of this film. His influence is seen in the inclusion of his most important story elements and also in the art depicted in the film. Barker is quite the artist as well as writer.

The story, The Forbidden, is a well crafted, exciting short story. One would believe it would be hard to make a movie that tops such a wonderful story. But Barker and Rose succeeded in this fun horror film.

In the Flesh: Books of Blood Vol. 5 By Clive Barker

In the Flesh: Books of Blood Vol. 5
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1986

The Forbidden
A woman developing a thesis idea related to urban graffiti ventures into a housing project to photograph the work of spray can artists. She enters one of the apartments and finds a disturbing image of a face painted on a wall with the door serving as the mouth. She later hears from residents about a couple gruesome murders. She relates her tale at a dinner party and one of the guests scoffs at the tales of brutal murder, telling her that that they were made up to scare kids and entertain adults. She returns to the housing project to get evidence to prove the man wrong. She tries to talk to one woman who she talked to earlier, but the woman won’t talk. Other people she finds won’t talk or have never heard the tales. She starts to believe she was being deceived. When she returns to that apartment, she finds the entity whose mug appears on the wall and learns the price of her disbelief.

Barker took his time building this story, but it finished in a delightful rush of horror. The “monster’s” enticement to the main character was a clever play on urban legends and appealing to the desire for immortality. This story was adapted for the film, The Candyman.

The Madonna
A small time commercial developer – Jerry -- meets a potential financier at an old swimming pool complex. They explore and evaluate the potential of the building. While doing so, the financier – who’s also a mobster – sees a naked girl running through the complex. He tries to find her, but can’t. He’s bewitched by her. The deal goes bad and the mobster sets up a meeting at the complex. What was supposed to be a showdown between the two men instead evolves into an encounter with demigoddess. Jerry is transformed into a woman.

This one brought in elements of H.P. Lovecraft, but not particularly effectively. There was a lot of story here that could have used some more character development.

Babel’s Children
An English tourist breaks down in the middle of nowhere in rural Italy. She is drawn to a walled compound after hearing shots fired and seeing a man fleeing from another man who is dressed like a nun. When she enters the compound, she is taken prisoner. She learns that she is being held in a compound that is inhabited by the most brilliant minds of the 1960s. These scholars and philosophers were gathered and placed here as the Cold War developed. Their job was to keep the world from destroying itself by making wise and enlightened policy for the world’s nations. They run the world while its elected and appointed leaders serve as puppets. But the men have grown tired and old and some of them want to escape. They look to the young woman to help them.

This story worked well. Barker took his time in developing his characters and building his plot. The cross dressing was rather gratuitous as it was featured prominently in the story, but never explained.

In the Flesh
A career criminal named Cleveland gets a new cellmate. Tait has arranged to be thrown into prison to reunite with his grandfather who was executed in the prison decades before for killing his entire family except for Tait’s mother, who escaped. Tait is able to locate his grandfather’s unmarked grave and apparently commune with his spirit. Cleveland begins experiencing vivid dreams of a city where killers are doomed to relive their crimes through eternity unless they can find a replacement. When he’s awake at night, a dark shadow visits their room and Tait communes with it. Cleveland tries to convince Tait that his grandfather’s spirit is playing him for a fool, but Tait isn’t buying it.

I have a passion for a well told prison tale and this one is pretty darn good! Cleveland is well developed – a simple man with simple thoughts thrust into a metaphysical situation. The plot is not a particularly original notion of Purgatory, but it is well executed with a well paced plot. To top it off, Barker adds some of the most atmospheric narrative I’ve ever read. It’s easily the best story in the book.

Book to Movie: Quicksilver Highway (1997)

Book to Movie: Quicksilver Highway (1997)
Teleplay by Mick Garris
Directed by Mick Garris
Based on the short story Chattery Teeth by Stephen King and The Body Politic by Clive Barker

A lot of Stephen King fans loath Mikc Garris. They point to his work on Riding the Bullet and Desperation as just how bad a poor director can mess up a good story. I disagree with most King fans on the quality of Garris’s work. I think he takes some average tales and makes them better.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Quicksilver Highway. He took two average tales – one by King and one by Clive Barker – and makes average vignettes out of them.

The movie opens with a newlywed couple stranded along a rural highway. The groom takes off to look for a spare tire, leaving the bride behind to wait. It grows dark and the lady is getting scared. That’s when Aaron Quicksilver (Christopher Lloyd) arrives on the scene in a Rolls Royce towing a large Airstream trailer.

Quicksilver invites the young bride into his trailer to wait out her boyfriends disappearance in safety and comfort. The trailer is actually a richly appointed suite with fresh fruit and liquor. Once he has her inside, Quicksilver – a tale teller by trade – tells her the tale of the Chattery Teeth.

The script for Chattery Teeth stays very close to King’s vision of it. A traveling salesman purchases the pair of metal, mechanical chattery teeth which walk on little feet for his son. The contraption is supposedly broken.

He hits the road and picks up a hitchhiker who tries to rob him and steal his car. There is an accident during the struggle and the van lands on its top. The salesman is trapped in his seatbelt while the hitchhiker is preparing to carve him up. The chattery teeth come to live, taking down the hitchhiker then dragging him off into the woods.

Terrified of the tale, the bride bursts out of the trailer to see a pair of chattery teeth dragging her new husband off into the desert brush.

The second vignette opens with a professional pickpocket making his way through a carnival crowd, taking what he can lay his hands on. He stumbles across Quicksilver’s tent which promises macabre exhibits. He goes in.

Aaron Quicksilver is there, standing before a candle resembling a human hand. He proceeds to tell the thief so nimble with his hands a story about another man, who plied his trade with his hands until they betrayed him. The Body Politic opens.

Garris alters Barker’s story quite a bit. He makes the man with the traitor hands into a plastic surgeon who starts out by inexplicably dropping instruments and making errant cuts. It progresses from there to strangling his girlfriend.

As in the story, the hands have their dialogue while he sleeps. Right promises to cut off left, to liberate him so that he can raise an army of hands to take over the bodies of the world. The surgeon watches while his arms and hands, completely independent of him, cut off his left hand. The hand makes its escape as police and emergency personnel arrive at the house.

The surgeon is transported to the hospital and is placed in a room under sedation. The hand follows him and pretty soon, hospital patients and personnel all lose control of their hands which rebel and “free” themselves. The hospital is soon crawling with hands with murderous intent.

The hands make their way to the surgeon, whose right hand is regarded as the messiah by all of the liberated left hands. The right hand is still attached to the surgeon’s body, but the lefties plan to remedy that situation.

The surgeon takes off, proclaiming himself messiah. The hands all follow. He climbs to the roof and jumps to his death. All of the hands follow him blindly to his death.

Aaron Quicksilver wraps up his story, telling the pickpocket that there is no moral to the story. It’s just a story. The pickpocket finds that his hands have had enough and act on their own to get him captured by police.

Quicksilver Highway was entertaining television fare. It was awfully light on horror and left a lot of potential material on the table.

First, one has to wonder why Garris chose these two stories. Neither story is particularly great, but neither is bad. Both stories require a huge suspension of belief to work which make them bad candidates for screen adaptation. Both stories also contain an element of camp, and this is what is left on the table.

With Christopher Lloyd acting as the host, dressed in campy costumes and makeup, one assumes early on that this is going to be a campy take on two campy stories. My first impression was that this was going to be a television riff on Creepshow. I was disappointed.

Garris took his movie and the stories upon which they were based entirely too seriously. Both stories lent themselves so well to dark camp, but Garris goes for the straight scare. It doesn’t work because neither story is scary. Christopher Lloyd’s talent (as well as his excellent costume and his stateroom on wheels) are wasted.

There have been much worse adaptations of both authors’ works. Garris has done worse movies (Desperation comes immediately to mind). Quicksilver Highway was an entertaining movie to watch. But one cannot help but wonder how much better it could have been if Garris had taken his movie an entirely different direction, fully utilizing the talents of Christopher Lloyd.

The Inhuman Condition: Books of Blood, vol. 4 By Clive Barker

The Inhuman Condition: Books of Blood, vol. 4
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1985

The Inhuman Condition
Three teenage delinquents beat up a vagrant to steal his liquor. While going through his possessions, one of the kids finds a string with three tightly tied knots in it. Curious, he puts it in his pocket, takes it home, and starts trying to untie them. When he unties the first one, he unleashes a demon that kills one of his friends. The string falls into the possession of the girlfriend of one of his friends, and she unleashes a demon that kills her boyfriend. The youth gets the string back and notes the third knot is working its way lose on his own. He seeks out the vagrant they beat to ascertain if he can help hold back that third demon.

This was a clever concept for a horror story. The main character was well developed and the narrative flowed nicely with well paced action. Students of the short story should study this Barker work to learn how to properly write a solid short story that entertains.

The Body Politic
A man’s hands conspire against him whilst he sleeps. His hands have independent thoughts, ideas, and views on morality. They finally establish their dominance over their master and free themselves of their constraints and set out to recruit allies and wreak havoc on society. Soon, thousands of hands, cut from their owners, are terrorizing the city.

This story was campy, almost a spoof of detached body part horror. It was a great story for those who have sense of humor about horror. A love of B movie horror is almost essential for the enjoyment of this story.

Revelations
A traveling evangelist, his wife, and their driver stop at a seedy Texas motel to wait out a thunderstorm. Also taking up residence in the hotel that night are the ghosts of a former married couple. Thirty years prior, the wife and shot and killed her boorish husband in the very room where the evangelist and his wife are staying. She sees the ghosts and communicates with them. Her husband thinks the devil has worked its way into her soul. Two unhappy couples try to work it out as the storm rages.

The haunted motel motif has been done to death. However, despite the cliché of the setting, Barker tells an intriguing tale where the reader is never quite sure of the ending until he arrives there. It has all of the essential elements of a horror movie.

Down, Satan!
A wealthy businessman has lost his faith – or believes his faith has lost him. He can no longer feel the presence of God. So, he decides to put his soul in mortal danger, believing that God will sweep in and save him. He builds a vast castle to replicate Hell on earth. To attract Satan, he begins to torture and kill people in his Hell. We never learn whether or not Satan came to him or if God rescued his soul.

This was a refreshingly short story that was pure narrative. It is written in a style similar to H.P. Lovecraft. No dialogue appears in the story. However, while an ambiguous ending can often be effective, this ending was a little too ambiguous to leave the reader satisfied.

The Age of Desire
Police arrive on a scene of carnage at a pharmaceutical laboratory where a lab worker has been raped and eviscerated. The rapist, at large, is overcome with an overpowering urge to have sex with anyone and everyone he sees. Having been injected with an experimental aphrodisiac, he roams about the city, creating mayhem. The scientist behind the experiments tries to destroy his concoction and the records associated with it. The police try to put the pieces together and stop the mayhem.

This was an enjoyable, but unremarkable short medical thriller. The graphic gore for which Barker is noted would have seemed apt for this story, but is really toned down.

Books of Blood, Vol. 3 By Clive Barker

Books of Blood, Vol. 3
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1985

Son of Celluloid
An escaped con and cop killer is on the run from police. He’s been shot in the leg, but that’s not his greatest pain. His stomach is hurting him immensely. He knows its cancer, but doesn’t want that to be the cause of his death. He escapes to a crawl space under a theater where he bleeds out and dies of his wound. The cancer still lives and takes on a life of its own. One evening, after a movie is over, two patrons, a female usher, and the theater manager are in the theater. The female patron is waiting for her boyfriend who is in the lavatory. The theater manager goes in to check on him and finds himself in a shootout with John Wayne. He survives to get out, but the boyfriend is dead. The girlfriend is led off by a large bunny like out of the movie, Harvey. The theater manager is lured into a confined space by the late, great Marilyn Monroe who seduces and kills him. The sole survivor, the female usher is tried for the murders and found not guilty. She knows that the cancer has entered the body of the female patron and is roaming the country, spreading its evil. She tracks it down.

The fantastical elements of this story are excellent. A guy steps into a filthy restroom and finds John Wayne pissed off about him taking a leak on his street. Marylin Monroe getting all raunchy to seduce and kill him works wonderfully. The whole idea of a tumor taking on a malevolent nature doesn’t work so well.

Rawhead Rex
An ancient evil is awakened when a farmer removes a sunken stone from his field. A gigantic humanoid creature with large claws, large teeth, and a taste for human flesh is unleased on a British village to kill and pillage at will. The police can’t help. The church can’t help. But perhaps a new immigrant can.

Written with Barker’s usual lack of restraint, Rawhead Rex is a lot of fun and perhaps the best story in this book. The monster, Rawhead, is as menacing as they come. Parts of the story are written from his point of view and he is truly evil and depraved. Barker knows no sacred cows and adheres not to conventional mores, making the first reading of any of his stories and adventure.

Barker authored a screenplay based on Rawhead Rex and it was made into a movie in 1986. It is not held in high regard.

Confessions of a (Pornographer’s) Shroud
An innocent accountant is set up to take the fall for a large scale, mob run, pornography ring. He takes out a few of his enemies before the mob gets to him and takes him out. But so strong is his lust for revenge that his indomitable spirit is transferred from his body to the sheet that covers him in the morgue. He shapes the sheet into something resembling a human body and sets out to take out the top dog in the mob.

This was apparently supposed to be a parody or dark humor with an honest to goodness sheet-clad ghost. I didn’t find it particularly humorous, but it stands as a well written revenge tale.

Scape-Goats
A boat containing four young, horny adults on a party cruise beaches itself on an uncharted island. One couple goes ashore where they find, at the top of the peak of the island, three sheep confined by a low stone barrier. On the return to the boat, one of them is killed when stones start flying of their own accord from the island. The island then attacks the boat and the other couple aboard, sinking it and killing them. One woman manages to escape with the island’s “caretaker” who tells her the true nature and purpose of the island. She finds, in the end, the island and its residents are quite purposeful.

Barker really blew it with this story. It was a fantastic, original concept. However, there is absolutely no backstory which would have made the story oh so much more haunting. Events are disconnected and seem to have no bearing upon each other or the story. Instead, it turned into a half baked chase story. It was supposed to be horrifying, but in order to be horrifying, the horror usually requires a scary backstory.

Human Remains
A gay prostitute picks up a john and goes home with him. When they get back to the apartment, it becomes clear that they are not alone because somebody is upstairs, hammering on the walls, demanding attention. The john goes upstairs and after a few minutes, the prostitute follows. He finds a statue immersed in murky water in the bathtub. He leaves the apartment. A few days later, the prostitute is working when he’s approached by a pimp with whom he’s shared a peaceful coexistence. The pimp accuses him of maiming one of his prostitutes and a physical confrontation ensues. The prostitute is just about to be killed when his assailant is slain. The prostitute is surprised to see that his savior is himself – or at least someone who looks exactly like him. The doppelganger has his looks. He makes it clear that he intends to possess his soul.

It’s always effective to wrap up a collection of short stories with its strongest work and this is the best story in the book. It works on a number of levels. It is great horror writing with a good riff on the doppelganger archetype. It has Barker’s trademark violence woven in. It also works on an emotional and spiritual level with a moving and revealing final scene.

Books of Blood Vol. 2 by Clive Barker

Books of Blood Vol. 2
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1984

Dread
A college student makes a new acquaintance who is obsessed with the psychology and philosophy of human dread. He discusses and analyzes it without end. He kidnaps his girlfriend and subjects her to psychological torture, recording the event in a series of photos he shares with the college student. Our hero soon finds himself the subject of a more dreadful and dangerous experiment in terror.

Barker knocks it out of the park with his first story in the second volume of his famous short story collection. The character development is superb and the tension unrelenting.

Hell’s Event
The race for humanity is on as a marathon run starts in downtown London. Unknown to one runner, he is running for the future of humanity because Satan has a wager on the race. Meanwhile, God’s athlete’s agent finds out about the plot and does what he can to stop it.

This was tame fare by Barker standards. Nonetheless, it was an entertaining story. Think, The Devil Went Down to Georgia but instead of Georgia, it’s London and instead of fiddle players, it’s marathon runners.

Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament
A neglected wife tries suicide by slitting her wrists. She survives. While in the hospital, she becomes so angry with a patronizing doctor that she wills him to death by mangling his body with her mind. She leaves the hospital and moves into the world, feeling like the most powerful person in the world. She falls for a lawyer, who ruins his own life to be with her. She feels that she can’t learn anything from him and moves onto a powerful, ruthless businessman who she is confident can teach her to wield her power with similar ruthlessness. She leaves that relationship with him dead and herself disappointed. She evolves into a sort of black widow spider prostitute until her old lawyer friend comes to her rescue.

This story, as the earlier stories in this book, lack the graphic violence of the bulk of Barker’s work. The thinly veiled subtext and overriding theme is how people dehumanize each other. Jacqueline Ess is a sympathetic anti-hero.

The Skins of the Fathers
A man traveling across the Arizona desert happens upon a parade of dinosaur like creatures. They destroy his car and flees to a nearby town. The sheriff organizes a posse to hunt down and destroy these monsters. Meanwhile, a local woman remembers how she was raped by these creatures years before and bore their son. These serpents mean to claim their son, even if they have to kill every person in town to get him.

The storytelling here is not very tight and the plot has all the charm of a Godzilla movie. Easily the weakest story in the book.

The New Murders in the Rue Morgue
A man travels to Paris to help out a friend who has been accused of murder. This man supposedly told the late, great Edgar Allan Poe a tale of murder in Paris that led him to write The Murders in the Rue Morgue. When the man arrives in Paris, he is horrified to find that the murders depicted by Poe have been replicated. However, the culprit as moved up at least one notch on the evolutionary ladder.

This was a great story with which to close this second volume. Horror writers love to go back to their roots and add something to the Poe canon. Barker’s story captures that same mood – cold and uncaring – that Poe achieved in his story. Barker succeeded in modernizing it without bastardizing it or making something foolish of it. Bravo!

Book to Movie: The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

Book to Movie: The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
Screenplay by Jeff Buhler
Directed by Ryuhui Kitamura
Based on the short story, The Midnight Meat Train from the collection, Books of Blood, Vol. 1 by Clive Barker

The story title sounds graphic and the short story met that expectation. The essence of the Barker story is in the movie, but the characters are quite different and the resolution quite different. Instead of an accountant reading the newspaper articles about a killer butchering New York subway commuters, we have a photographer who stumbles into the messy affair.

Leon (played by Bradley Cooper) is a photographer aspiring to make it big as an art photographer. He tells a boutique owner he wants to “capture the heart of the city,” and spends his nights capturing the gritty side of New York life. One night, he comes across several young men preparing to rape a young model on the escalators in the subway. He photographs them and points out that if they hurt or kill him, it will all be recorded on a video camera just over his head. The men flee and the woman boards the train. Leon photographs her getting on the train.

The next day, he reads that a model has gone missing in the city. He sees the picture and recognizes the model as the woman he saved the night before. He develops his prints and notices a man wearing a distinctive ring in the photo. He is confident that ring is a clue and takes his photographs to a detective who examines them and is suspicious of Leon, thinking he may have created the photos for the purpose of becoming famous.

Meanwhile, a real life butcher of humans is stalking the city. His name is Mahogany (played quite well by hulking British actor, Vinnie Jones) and he is as methodical as a surgeon in his work. He boards a certain train when he is on the hunt. That train, as we find out, is quite special. He then waits until there is just one person in the car with him. He then takes a large meat tenderizer and bashes their skull in. He hangs the body from the commuter handles and proceeds to prepare the meat for his masters’ repast. The train’s engineer is a most obliging fellow. Not only does he take the train to Mahogany’s destination, he’s quick to help out with a bullet when the situation gets out of hand.

Rebuffed by the police, Leon starts stalking the city at night, hoping to find the butcher – much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Maya, who just wants him to concentrate on his art photography. He boards a train and waits. Eventually, he falls asleep, but awakens to the sound of people being bludgeoned. He sees people hung up on hooks and being butchered. He is attacked by the butcher and is knocked unconscious. He awakens in an abandoned subway station. Carved into the skin on his chest are runes he doesn’t understand.

Leon walks up the stairs from the mysterious subway platform and finds himself in a meat packing plant. It’s the meat packing plant where Mahogany works.

Leon does a little historical research in the newspaper archives and finds that there have been hundreds of people reported missing on the New York commuter trains since their original construction. He’s convinced this killer is ancient.

Mahogany is ancient, but he is wearing down and the years are beginning to show. We see Mahogany alone in his apartment, examining his chest. Pustules are growing on his chest and his skin is deteriorating. He carefully removes these pustules and saves them in jars of preservative.

Leon sets out to stalk the New York subways in pursuit of the killer. Wanting to bring the matter to a close, Maya and her friend, Jurgis, decide to break into the killer’s apartment (found through examining Leon’s photos) to gather evidence. There, they find train timetables dating back to the early 20th century with several trains circled in red. As they are gathering their evidence, Mahogany comes home. Maya escapes, but Jurgis is trapped.

Maya goes to the same detective that Leon talked to earlier and presents her evidence. The detective is dubious and directs Maya to take the train home and forget about it. As Maya leaves to board the train, the detective gives a knowing look. She’s in on it just like the subway conductor.

Maya board the train and finds the midnight meat train’s storage car. There, she meets Mahogany and learns that Jurgis has been hung up like a side of beef. Leon enters the car not knowing Maya is there. He attacks the much larger Mahogany. But Mahogany is old and not a physical match for Leon. Leon throws Mahogany from the train as it comes to a stop.

The subway platform at the end of the line for the midnight meat train is littered with bones. Maya and Leon look out with horror when the engineer enters the car and tells them to accompany him off the train and away from the meat. They exit to the platform. There, Mahogany makes one last attempt on Leon before Leon stabs him with a pointed bone. With his dying breath, Mahogany utters, “welcome.”

As this unfolds, dozens of zombie like creatures enter the station and board the train where they attack the meat with gusto. As they dine, the conductor explains that these subhuman underground dwellers are an ancient race who have always dwelt beneath the ground and beneath the city. The butcher and the meat train serve to feed them to “keep the worlds separate.” The engineer then reaches inside Leon’s mouth and pulls out his tongue while Maya screams in horror. The engineer then eats the tongue.

The engineer then grabs Maya and forces her onto a makeshift altar made of bones. He reaches inside her chest and rips her still-beating heart out of her and looks at it lovingly before eating it. He then tells Leon he’s to be the new butcher.

The movie ends with the detective handing the train schedules she received from Maya to Leon. He’s about to get on with his life’s work.

While the short story was clever with a bit of sleight of hand coming from Barker, this was not a well made film and the screenplay had many deficiencies. The most glaring was the resolution – who got the meat.

In Barker’s story, it was the old, distinguished people of New York who fed on the human flesh. In return, those ancients of Metropolis gave life and vitality to the city. That is an intelligent, thought provoking resolution. The screenplay dumbed it way down to some sort of cross between a zombie and a reptile. It wasn’t even really a mystery since there weren’t any real clues offered as to why the butcher was doing what he was doing.

It also suffered from poorly developed characters. Mahogany was well developed with his silent and exceptionally meticulous habits. The sharp contrast between the man who fussed over every detail of his perfectly tailored suits and the man who bludgeoned people as blood splattered all over him was effective.

We got enough development of Leon to know the guy wanted to be a great photographer. Maya and her friend Jurgis got virtually no development. We didn’t care when they died. In what was supposed to be the climax of the movie, we watched as people we didn’t care about died while a director and screenwriter insulted our intelligence with a dumbed down ending. Tack on the cliché of the still beating heart and its all rather anti-climatic.

The marks on Leon’s chest were never explained. The director hints that perhaps Leon may be undergoing some sort of metamorphosis when they show us a love scene between Leon and Maya when Maya is shocked at how rough Leon is with her. The mysterious ring and its symbol are never explained. Not everything in a movie needs to be explained, but when they are offered up as clues, they must be explained.

I’ll give the director credit for not making the movie an exercise in gore. It is violent. It is bloody. But it is not gratuitous and the movie, while not very good, does not rely on the gore factor to carry it. Though they came up short, the writer and director tried to have the story carry the movie.

The movie was a bomb in the theaters, grossing short of $4 million while costing $15 million to make. The title no doubt hurt it because that title just screams guts and gore. A new title would not have saved this film however. While I’d not call it awful, it certainly was not a good film and not worth visiting more than once.

Books of Blood Volume One By Clive Barker

Books of Blood
Volume One
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1983

Introduction
Horror writer Ramsey Campbell introduces us to Clive Barker and his writing. Campbell promises us violence and sex. He promises disturbing imagery. He promises horrible villains and ghastly creatures. He also promises us soaring and lofty prose flowing from the pen of a man who knows how to write the English language and how to craft a good story.

The Book of Blood
Much as Ray Bradbury set the stage for his collection of tales in the Illustrated Man, Barker introduces a “narrated man.” A fake medium sits in the upstairs bedroom of an allegedly haunted house. The young man claims he can conger the dead to come to him and write their stories on the wall of the room. All over the room are messages from the obscure dead and dead celebrities. On the floor below is the paranormal researcher who has hired him and now knows he’s a fake. But one evening, the dead do arrive and do inscribe their tale. They inscribe it in the flesh of the fake medium. When the dead are done with him, their narratives are etched into his flesh. The paranormal investigator is going to read and research each of those narratives for this book.

It is a bit of a rip off of Bradbury, but still an affective device for setting up his stories. Very early in the book, we see that Barker has a flourish for setting a scene. He’s not as hung up on the straight narrative as writers such as Stephen King and Bradbury. He is a great mood setter with a taste for fanciful use of the language. The opening story primes the pump for what I hope will be a great book of tales.

The Midnight Meat Train
There’s a butcher loose in New York City and he’s carving up human flesh and hanging it on hooks in New York’s subways. One evening, an accountant on his way home from working late falls asleep on the train. He awakens to find himself in the presence of the butcher’s latest victims. He cowers in fear to the end of the line where he finds a previously secret subway station inhabited by some of the oldest and best families of New York City for whom the repast has been carved.

Not an especially new take on the cannibalism story, but entertaining nonetheless. Barker’s narrative has us wondering if our accountant and the butcher are one in the same. In the end, we find out what keeps New York alive and fresh through the centuries.

The Midnight Meat Train was made into a movie in 2008

The Yattering and Jack
A minor demon is assigned by the overlords of Hell to torment a man to drive him to do evil. The demon is frustrated because no matter what mental anguish he inflicts upon the man, he blows off the misfortune and goes about his mundane life. The demon doesn’t know that the man is aware of the game afoot and the man gets the demon to sacrifice his “soul” to accomplish his mission.

This story had a comedic bent to it and was mildly entertaining. It’s not the usual violent, emotionally turbulent stuff Barker is known for.

Pigs Blood Blues
A retired policeman starts work as a shop teacher at a British reformatory for boys. One mousy boy tells the teacher that one of the inmates who reportedly escaped, is still on the grounds and talks to him at night. This poor boy is the target of other inmates who beat him and subject him to verbal and mental abuse, so the retired cop initially dismisses the story. However, when he visits the school’s farm, he meets a most unusual pig – and the true master of the school.

Pigs, with their cloven hooves, are often symbols of evil in horror. Witness poor Carrie as she is doused in pig’s blood by her tormenters. Barker’s pig is larger than life; an unholy embodiment of torture, hatred, and abuse. This was a great story that requires careful and close reading to get the point of the narrative.

Sex, Death, and Starshine
A director is putting on a Shakespeare production in a dilapidated theater. His star is a no talent soap opera refugee, but he’s involved with her sexually, so he’s keeping her. The rest of his cast is uninspired and the theater owner plans to demolish the theater after the play. One evening, after a particularly abysmal dressed rehearsal, he is visited by an odd theater enthusiast who has a new leading lady in mind. Only problem is, she’s dead. But the show must go on and it does with a dead actress leading the way. All her dead friends are there for her curtain call.

This story had a real gothic flavor to it although it was set in modern times. At times, the writing was a bit raunchy, but not over the top. Frequent point of view shifts were sometimes confusing, but otherwise, this was the best story in the book.

In the Hills, the Cities
Two gay men are on romantic holiday in Yugoslavia when they get lost on rural roads. They hear in the distance an incredible thunder rippling across the ground. They arrive in a clearing to find the carnage of thousands of men, women and children with a man putting the wounded out of their misery. They have come across the once a decade battle between two Slavic cities. Only the people of these cities have found a most inventive means of engaging each other. They fight as “one.”

Wow! What an incredibly inventive concept! People of a town serving as body parts of a much larger being with a singular intelligence and will doing battle with similar people of a similar construct. This well paced story never let up. We go from the tedium of bickering between lovers to the race against the plodding beast bent on destruction. Absolutely brilliant!

This book launched Clive Barker as a writer and attracted the attention of greats like Campbell and King. Barker would go on to publish five more Books of Blood as well as several horror and fantasy novels.