The Damnation Game

Clive Barker's first full novel (1985) is imaginative and very different from most novels of damnation where the devil or demons and a defined external hell are central themes while a Faust-like character trades his soul for something that proves insubstantial in the long run.

A dark fantasy set in a world of addiction, sleaze and failure, it has flawed humans and half-alive corpses in a chess game played against a wealthy sociopath, Whitehead, by Mamoulian whose own petulant negativity gives him no heroic aspect unlike say Rice's 'Memnoch'.

The book cannot be called subtle even though it is creative in the telling. There are few deep meanings but Barker does manage to hint at the evil being closer to the Christian good than many might show more like. In this, he is as subversive as Philip Pullman was to be in children's literature.

Part of the cleverness of the story (because it allows the plot to progress through the will of the living dead) lies in not having the reanimated entirely lose all will and reason independent of the reanimator even if their faculties seem to have rotted down to instinctive base urges.

However, while the author subverts our expectations throughout much of the novel, he also has a tendency not to take a theme or idea and bring it to a satisfying conclusion. One suspects that Barker was still thinking in segmented short story terms at this time.

For example, the first half of the book develops a strong theme of gambling, games-playing and chance. While this is returned to (although almost in passing in favour of other themes) at the end, the imbalance between its importance in one place yet not another is noticeable.

The book is certainly entertaining (assuming you have a taste for evil, decay and putrefaction) but it seems to lack an almost indefinable 'thing' to hold it together as a fully cohesive work. Yet this is a quibble. It is still a book that marks a very original and effective writer in the genre.

As to the evil at the centre, it is powerful and dangerous but also limited. Barker solves a common problem in the horror genre of how evil monsters seem to be so powerful and often fail at the same time by creating a credible monster operating between the human and the supernatural.

Mamoulian is no demon but simply a very lucky (or is it unlucky) man with a void at his centre whose experience has placed him in a position - never fully defined or explained - of power between our world and the world on the other side of death.

He is an unnatural bridge bringing life (as the animating soul) to death and death to life and creating mental terror and illusion by transferring the other world into the perceptions of those who live in this world. This enables subtle play with ideas of soul transmigration.

His extreme transgressive self-animation brings no wisdom. He starts off as a limited low life (rather like Marty, the 'hero', and the billionaire Whitehead) and transforms least over time, in his case, a very long time. He is cunning but his dark arts replace intelligence. He is negation.

The conflict between Mamoulian and Whitehead is the conflict between a sociopath who is limited but has 'powers' and one who does not have such powers but is intelligent. Marty has no powers and is not very bright but is certainly not a sociopath.

If the villain is a nasty bit of work as we would expect, the 'hero' is a not-too-bright petty criminal drawn into a world that becomes truly visceral, one of death and putrefaction in life. He ends up a hero but only because he is a bit dim.

Barker's supernatural is finely honed to become a credible collapse in boundaries rather than a wilful intervention from outside. His hellish other world is something that we slip into with death and should never return from. Mamoulian changes that iron rule of existence and non-existence.

However, Mamoulian cannot change the laws of nature (Barker is quite old-fashioned in seeing a world of souls separate from matter) so what he restores to life freezes or slows down but does not reverse aging or decay. He is not God or a god, nor Devil nor demon.

There is a spoiler problem here because the precise history of the tempter, the complex qualities of a hell that travels alongside us without necessity for God and the insubstantiality of the bargains being made are revealed only slowly. As a result, not much can be said that provides more detail.

The romantic aspect is conventional, matching the horror with some realistic sex, even if the relationship between the dim and the damaged tends to confirm a rather gnostic view of love struggling against materiality. The material world, of course, contains its own future rot within it.

Grand guignol takes over by the end and what starts as a dark thriller with a mystery at its centre transforms by the end into some seriously schlocky horror with no holds barred. This is not cosmic horror but a tale of decay and grubbiness between worlds that reflects on our own.

Overall, Barker writes well. There are few places where one is tempted to speed-read to leap the bounds of convention. The bulk of the book has one fully engaged but it is not a story for those with a sensitive stomach. show less

This is dark, horrifying, and smart. For fans of horror or Faustus-related legends and works, this novel is a must-read, but I'd recommend it also to readers who simply enjoy a thought-provoking read and can deal with the darker areas of the imagination. Barker's characters and plots are beautifully crafted, and it's easy to see him engaging with the horror genre and traditions of horror in a way that many writers don't do. Simply put, Barker has thought about the end-goal here, and he's carefully crafted this book in a way that makes it transcend horror literature and genre. Fans of Neil Gaiman will appreciate some of his moves here, but it's worth noting that while the book is an easy read, this book is a heavier read than any of show more Gaiman's texts. If you make yourself take the time to think through the ideas that Barker presents here, the book becomes richer with each page, as well as more horrifying. I don't have any doubt that this will become a classic of horror literature, but it's also an incredibly beautiful and smart read if you can take the rawness of it all. In other words, highly highly recommended. show less

Barker's self contained universes would be split into trilogies by other authors. Sometimes he manages to fill an entire world into the pages of a single book. Sometimes, like here, that universe is only half realized, and in trying to spread its wings beyond being just a horror story, it ultimately sinks the project. It could have been a much tighter written 300 page novel without losing anything at all.

Barker knows how to write creepy stuff. More importantly, his stories are not just attempts at seeing how high the gore-factor can be pumped; he finds a way to inject some morale truths and enough ambiguity to keep a reader thinking.

Martin Strauss is prisoner released into the care of an eccentric millionaire. His job is to provide for the rich man's needs. Martin is mystified by the electric fencing and high powered lights that surround the mansion he is to serve in but his figures it's the kind of paranoia that comes being being obscenely wealthy. As the story unfolds, and Martin begins to peripherally see more of the dark nature to his new residence, it becomes clear that he's simple inhabiting a prison of a new kind, one with the show more grandest types of punishment and redemption.

With the impending close of Border, I managed to score this copy for less than 2 bucks. Had the story been so-so or even something I couldn't finish, I knew I could consider it "no biggie" because of the cost, but that's not how it went with this tale.

This ones worth whatever price you find it at. show less

“Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned. In an earlier age Pandemonium - the first city of Hell - stood on a lava mountain while lighting tore the clouds above it and beacons burned on its walls to summon the fallen angels. Now, such spectacle belongs to Hollywood. Hell stands transposed. No lightning, no pits of fire."
- from Clive Barkers’ “The Damnation Game"

Clive Barker’s first full-length novel is magnificent. It’s dark, intense and mostly unrelenting in it’s steady construction of supernatural horror. While full of gut wrenching show more visuals and causing a limitation of my ability to fall asleep, this novel beats with a heart of literature under it’s skin of genre horror.

Barker builds his story and characters layer by layer. Some might feel the early going is a bit slow but I would argue that the greatest of meals are those that take longer to make.

I’ve only recently discovered how pervasive is H.P. Lovecraft’s influence in modern horror. Not sure how this stayed off my radar for so long, but let’s just be glad that I finally figured out. “Damnation Game” in imbued with the spirit of Lovecraft. Just take a glimpse at a couple of passages from Barker, and his Lovecraftian storytelling of an otherworldly evil that lives just beyond site of the visible world and just on the edge of the great Void.

“It was, for a moment, not her who started out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him - he knew this to his marrow - with hatred in its bowels."

“He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality."

If there’s anything to downgrade my rating it’s Barker’s awkwardly rapid transition of the budding affair of our two protagonists from tentative emotional exploration to full on can’t-live-without-you intensity. I either missed a paragraph or two, or Marty and Carys fell hard and fast after the first time they ‘hooked up’.

It’s a relatively small complaint, however. The story is terrific; the plot solid; the finish satisfying. Highly recommended. show less

Not a bad book, this has Barker's flavour and that is a very good thing.

I rated it three stars for the plot. It doesn't really... tell you anything, and the finale was very anticlimactic.

Granted, this is a story from 1985 and as such started a lot of tropes that would be used later in other novels..... but this book just felt like it was missing something.

Read at your own peril. There are better Barker books.

Not finished yet, but if anyone sees me reading this and decides to give it a shot, I would like to say to you: PLEASE, give it until page 200 or so. PLEASE. The book starts off slooooow. If it started off any slower, I would have burned my copy, rather than merely throwing it across the room in disgust.
But!
But, once Marty Strauss is settled in at Whitehead's place, the story picks up and gets GOOD! And I mean good in a scary, somewhat-gory way. So please! Keep reading!

UPDATE

Finally finished. Good story. Creepy. Gory. Evil. Don't know if it's one of the best horror stories of all-time (I got this book from a list of top 50 or 100 best horror novels) but I did enjoy. Like I said...Don't give up on it!