A Masterpiece of Horror: Reviewing Clive Barker's "Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three"

The appeal of a Barkerian monster is something next to impossible to explain, but as real and palpable as can be. This is my prime takeaway having for the first time fully completed the first three volumes of his iconic Books of Blood.

It is safe to say that Pinhead is the first real, full-blown villain I rooted for in a movie. As I said above, the appeal is next to impossible to explain, considering I was a child under the age of ten when I first saw Hellraiser. In Bravo's 100 Scariest Moments list (Hellraiser makes the 19th place) Barker himself states that the character, even though he never does anything nice or decent in the complete series, still gets fan mail from women who want to bear his children. I wouldn't go as far as that, but I see a certain elegance, an honesty in the priest from hell. I am intrigued and as a consequence Pinhead has been a figure whose dark aesthetic and humor has left a mark on me.

Hell supposedly is a place of unspeakable torment and pain, sure, but the lines between pain and pleasure can be and are blurry, and nobody represents this paradox better than the Cenobites, making them the arguably most interesting horror villains ever. This is not a writing on Hellraiser (or, in its book form The Hellbound Heart) though, so before I will take the notion of "enticing monster" from here and go on with reviewing Books of Blood Volumes One to Three, I wholeheartedly recommend you watch Under the Skin, an interview with Hellraiser actor Douglas Bradley, aka Pinhead, just because he is so awesome and has a thing or two to say about the nature of these monsters.

Back to Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three. The wide range of monsters, and the various interactions and understandings among these supernatural monsters and humans lie in my opinion at the core of this short story collection, just as it does in Hellraiser, but in different ways.  I have, in the past year, already in-depth reviewed the first story of the collection, The Midnight Meat Train and compared it to its film adaptation. The crux of that story is an agreement between weird little shrunken people and the city of New York, of which a human representative, the Butcher, provides them regular food, which is human meat.

This red thread leads us to the second story The Yattering and Jack, in which a pact is breached, a past pact between Jack's family and Beezlebub. The Yattering, a minor demon, is sent to haunt Jack in return, but all his efforts, including killing his cats and tormenting his daughters are in vain since Jack takes it all with good humor. The hilarious piece of writing does not end well for the Yattering, let me tell you that much.

Just as in the case of Jack's cats, the paranormal touch doesn't always have to affect humans either, like in Pig Blood Blues in which a ghost possesses the body of a sow. It can also present itself to us in the most unexpected, the most peculiar forms and shapes and settings - Undead actors overtake a Shakespeare play. Satan regularly sends his envoys to compete in the London Marathon. A hoard of monsters parade through a town and claim their son who was born from sex between the boy's mother and the monsters. A cancerous tumor comes to life through the emotions generated by the movies shown in the cinema the owner of the tumor died in. Rave, revenge, animals living as humans, men switching places with their doppelgangers... There really is no limit to Barker's imagination, and in each story, as strange, scary, repulsing and gory they might be, you can always find a pinch of humor.

Ironically, my favorite story of this collection is not one of supernatural terror, it is one of human depravity; Dread. I can't emphasize enough how important limits are for horror and anything can be horror if stretched enough to cross certain borders. Dread is a story where a curious man experiments on people with fears, he exposes them excessively to what they fear most and sees where that leads. He tests their limits and what is beyond those limits. This is the kind of story that truly sends shivers down your spine, it is disgusting and my stomach churns thinking about it. Apparently it has been filmed too, so I might make a comparison of the two in the future.

There is a reason the Books of Blood collection is the pièce de résistance of horror literature, a classic, a standart of dark fantasy. My verdict is that these stories are pure gold, and I can't wait to read and discuss the forthcoming volumes.