Love and life and sanity were gone, gone like the memory of his name, or his sex, or his ambition. It all meant nothing. Nothing at all.
I first encountered Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series probably over a decade ago now and I absolutely devoured (hmm, poor choice of words there) the first three volumes. For my Halloween reading this year, I decided to revisit them. I’m just going to give you a heads up; I think Volume One is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. It contains six short stories and the only one I consider a weak entry is the first one and it’s really kind of frame story of sorts for the series as a whole, so I don’t necessarily hold its weakness against it. The first proper story is The Midnight Meat Train and with a title like that you’d expect it to be gory and it is, a super hard gut punch of a serial killer story, but the thing you’re about to find out is that it’s really no gorier than Barker’s typical story because Barker has an unflinching perspective on the horrors visited on the body and the clinical prose of a biologist when it comes to the human animal. From there, the book just maintains the high quality all the way through to the end, which is In the Hills, the Cities, the story of a gay couple vacationing in Europe that come across a couple of rural neighboring villages; nothing scary about that . . . except every ten years there is a very special day for these villages, a day of ritual and remembrance . . . and today is that day. I think In the Hills, the Cities is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read and not just of the horror genre, of any genre. It neatly points out what really separates Barker from a lot of his peers in the horror game and that’s his sheer, boundless imagination. I’m not going to spoil it because you should find out the truth about those villages yourself, but I’ll just say that the premise of this story is something that, when first reading it, I had NEVER seen before; I still haven’t seen it again. And it’s key to Barker’s incredible prose abilities that he’s able to make something that could seem laughable feel instead like absolute sanity-crushing terror. That’s sort of always at play in Barker’s works as well. If he’s invested in the frailties of the body, he’s also consumed by the frailties of the mind and the visions of horror that Barker visits on his characters threaten their sanity with their extremity. But he has a gorgeous prose style that is quite unique to him, I think, couching these awful horrors in beautiful evocative prose that sometimes only accentuates the horror and other times plays off of it nicely in contrast.
The three middle stories, which I haven’t discussed, are also all knock-outs of very different kinds, including one of the only comedy horror stories I’ve ever actually liked. It’s worth noting that these stories are pretty nasty in terms of their endings. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that one of the stories ends with every single character in the story dying in a huge conflagration; I don’t think it’s a spoiler because every story in this book could end that way and you wouldn’t be surprised. I bring it up because . . . well, because that ending, where everyone burns horribly to death . . . that’s the story with the HAPPY ending from this book. So, if you like your horror with at least something like a redemptive ending, well, the Books of Blood are probably not for you or maybe they are if you have the stomach for something a little different. But that’s another part of what really elevates this collection. Barker says these are stories written by a young man and as he aged, he mellowed, at least somewhat, and began to explore visions of redemption. Not here though. These stories hit you like hammers; they’re disturbing psychologically and emotionally, graphically horrifying, often quite scary and then they end with a nasty fate for most everybody. But they’re also beautifully written, emotionally evocative, well-characterized and incredibly imaginative. I hope to be digging deeper into Barker in the near future, but I haven’t yet. Still, his Books of Blood retain their incredible power to haunt, disturb, mystify, awe and horrify. 4 stars.
tl;dr – a knock-out short story collection is among the best horror has to offer; Barker is intense, visceral, beautiful and incredibly imaginative in this jaw-dropping debut collection. 4 stars.