Clive Barker (1) (1952–)

I last read The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker back when I was a teenager. I loved it then. I wasn't sure how I'd react to it as an adult.

I'm happy to report the writing holds up really well. It stands the tests of time and experience. This novel is still staggeringly imaginative, exciting, and moving.

What makes this novel unique—what makes many of Mr. Barker's novels unique—is a narrative structure built on an escalating series of crises and climaxes. The conflict that opens the show more story would be the climax of an entire novel in the hands of a lesser writer. For Mr. Barker, however, it's just the beginning. Then he ramps up to another conflict and climax, and another, and another—building tension and emotional investment to a fever pitch.

His vision is so sweeping, so huge, so detailed and encompassing, he needs multiple crises and narrative climaxes in order to hold it all and do it justice.

His imagination works on a grander scale than the rest of us. It impresses me as much now as it did when I was younger.

Unfortunately, there's one aspect of The Great and Secret Show that doesn't work for me as an adult:

The love-at-first-sight romance between Howie and Jo-Beth is a lot harder for me to accept this time around.

I know it's supposed to reinforce a sense of Fate that's central to the mysteries of the story, and it's necessary to fuel one of the major conflicts between characters. On that level it works fine.

But Howie's actions demonstrate a painfully adolescent concept of love. I can't find the same emotional power in it that it wielded when I was younger. Indeed, I'm a bit embarrassed to recall how moving their relationship was for me when I was, myself, adolescent.

Mostly, though, as an adult, what I see in Howie now is yet another man who thinks it's romantic to ignore when a woman says no and to bull through every attempt she makes to set limits. Yet another man who's certain that he knows what she wants better than she knows herself. Yet another man whose concept of persistence blurs the line between romance and stalking.

It made me deeply uncomfortable. I suppose, though, I should be impressed that Mr. Barker remembers so clearly what love feels like as a teenager and depicted it so accurately.

Otherwise, I found this book to be just as enjoyable now as it was when I was teenager. It was a most welcome discovery. show less

The Hellbound Heart is a fast-paced novella constructed out of clean declarative prose. Frequent five to ten word sentences. Skeletal prose, no excess meat or clinging viscera left dangling on the bone. Makes the putrid and repugnant horror of it all the more palatable to one of discerning De Sadeian tastes. It is as awful as it is arcane; as gruesome as it is grimoireish; as good as anything Clive Barker has ever written—and that's saying a lot.

The Hellbound Heart is what happens when show more you foolishly play with a Rubik's Cube-like contraption known as Lemarchand's box, an esoteric craftwork; open it, if you dare. If you do, welcome to hell, Motherfucker! "How dare you play with things you don't understand," the Engineer—a.k.a. "Pinhead", the prickly entity's name in the movie—intones in this dangerous meeting, with his sadistically self-defiled, unmerciful fate. You've been hooked, literally, hoodwinked and chained, for in this abysmal slaughter house hellscape a Cenobite's pleasure is your present and eternal pain. You can escape if you somehow summon fresh human flesh to consume in a grisly consummation that results in resurrection. Ummm.... I loved it. show less

“Her voice was raw with the dust, and bitter. He liked the sound of it. Women who had anger in them were always so much more interesting than their contented sisters.”

Three months. 824 pages. Incalculable beers. One wife. I wish I’d gotten my new pair of Red Wings before starting this book. I’ve been spending my reading sessions with them laced up over thick winter socks, pacing the kitchen amongst pan and cutlery clatter, over the whirring of the oven range fan, the howling show more liquefication from the food processer, and all the while the skin on my feet silently screaming under that unforgiving oxblood leather. These boots would’ve been broken in by now.

Do I regret the time spent on this tumescent fantasy/horror/erotic tale? Of course not. I got to read to the wife, and it offered moments of originality. But did it need to be so long? Well, maybe. Somehow, though, after all those pages, over five dominions and the In Ovo as glue between them, the world Barker created seems smaller than the sum of its parts. Sometimes more is less. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is just . . . more. I felt the terrain, the miles of the journey, the aching heel on my left foot as it desperately tried to heal itself between crushing sessions within the Spanish boot. I don’t feel the passage of time, however. No weathering, no wrinkles, no grand wisdom gained from all that trudging. Sometimes a long book is just a long book whether you feel it in the muscles or not.

The book was heavy, though. The hardback version, switching arms between pages, recto and verso, really tested my bicep and trapezius muscles. Oh, the concepts . . . I guess there was some depth, some interesting creatures, magic and whoop-dee-doo and nearly unpronounceable place names. Holy Hapexamendios! But what was it all about? All that flexion of muscle, both back and tongue, and barely enough food for the lobes of the cerebrum, desperately reaching across their own dominions to touch, ignite fire, burst imagination both vital and vibrant. Mass does not equal breadth.

Am I being reductive? You bet I am. It’s my specialty. The distillation of concepts into a weird, pithy, vibrating whole. You know, like those creepy gelatin molds from the Sixties. The more complicated the ideas, the more pages of notes, the greater the research will always serve as more vegetable matter to blend into a potable soup. Whirring. Liquefaction. Unrelenting shoe leather squeezing feet on their restless paces between opposite ends of the kitchen.

Whether more is more or more is less, I still enjoyed the read. The explicit sex told in exhaustive, laughable detail . . . the mountain of characters who largely will go unremembered, buried at the base of that mountain . . . the vistas on other worlds, in other dominions, feeling all too Earthlike, no more unfamiliar than the prairies of Nebraska, populated with beings stretched, ripped, and recombined from Dali’s canvases.

I don’t know, I don’t really want to talk about the details of the book. Anyone can go to Wikipedia for that. Or read the book itself. It’s worth it—just barely. I can’t help, though, feeling what Clive Barker must’ve felt when starting this project, entering the second dominion and taking all those pages to get there and realizing that there were hundreds more to go. Man, that would’ve been enough for me to hit the button to the Cuisinart then and there. Proof, for me, that grand ambition doesn’t always yield great art. I’m being hard, I know, but Jesus my feet hurt. And my brain doesn’t. After all those pneuma-blown pages, maybe that’s the point.

And I do truly, deeply, madly love reading to my wife. Three months of time well spent. Those beers were super tasty. And man, you should see my biceps right now.

“He had visited the studio on and off through his time with Vanessa—he’d even met Martine there on two occasions when her husband had canceled a Luxembourg trip and she’d been too heated to miss a liaison—but it was charmless and cheerless, and he’d returned happily to the house in Wimpole Mews. Now, however, he welcomed the studio’s austerity. He turned on the little electric fire, made himself a cup of fake coffee with fake milk, and, under its influence, thought about deception.” show less

Lmao, what a wild ride. So, I've only seen the newest Hellraiser movie, and honestly didn't know what I was getting myself into, but Barker is so funny and has such a way with language that is gorey and romantic and creepy, it's enthralling. I love his light jabbing at heterosexuality and his dialogue with pain/ pleasure. The ending is so satisfying, I stan a revenge plot.