City of the Gods of Horror

Quaid's striving to out-Lovecraft Lovecraft in Clive Barker's torture chamber short story "Dread" from the Books of Blood: Volume 2 has left me struggling with a real literary paradox lifeless and stiff like a corpse now. I visualize the Mengelean experiment as a hyper-Surreal nightmare manifested through the images of psychological torture pricking sadistically at Stephen's childhood traumas. Except Stephen is delivered from his dread, and Quaid is left to learn his:

Another creak, as it came up the stairs towards him, the ridiculous dream. It had to be a dream. After all, he knew no clowns, no axe-killers. So how could that absurd image, the same image that woke him night after night, be anything but a dream?

... leaving Quaid's mind driven to madness by archetypal clichés of Horror fiction. Creaking stairs. Haunted dreams. Caricatures of past Horror: Stephen King's It, The Shining or Frederic Brown's Here Comes A Candle.

Stephen returns in his resurrected, impoverished, pauper-like condition to Quaid's House of Torture with an axe, driven by the violent John the Baptist-like fate of Old Man Crowley at the homeless shelter, like an avatar of Vengeance. And Quaid's nightmare is realized:

Then it appeared, the face of a fool. Pale to whiteness in the light of the moon, it's young features bruised, unshaven and puffy, its smile open like a child's smile. It had bitten its lips in its excitement. Blood was smeared across its lower jaw, and its gums were almost black with blood. Still it was a clown. Indisputably a clown even to its ill-fitting clothes, so incongruous, so pathetic.

Stephen out-Stephen Kings Stephen King. And Quaid, like Barker, goes straight to Hell with his vision of Pandemonium, City of the Gods of Horror:

There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams comes true.

The Lock Up

The words of the harrowing figure of Quaid in Clive Barker's "Dread" continues to sketch with gloomy chiaroscuro a dreadful something - of pure discarnate fear yet to be realized - in my imagination. I think of Quaid, as a revered caricature of Lovecraft the story-teller subliminally endorsing, in effect harking back with his emphatic words to that original story of the Lovecraftian "beast" of fear:

"I fear, you fear, we fear," Quaid was fond of saying. "He, she or it fears. There's no conscious thing in the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat."

... sounds like Lovecraft himself in Supernatural Horror in Literature. However, Quaid out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft with his twisted invention. He conducts what might only be imagined as a cruel, terrorizing, Pavlovian trial on his opposing classmate, and later mistress, Cheryl. He tells Stephen (the narrator):

"I locked her away you see, Steve." Quaid was as unemotional as a newsreader. "To see if I could needle her into showing her dread a little bit."

Then Quaid shows him the whole slew of photos taken during the experiment of Cheryl's degenerative and eventual break down - how he compelled Cheryl, a strict vegetarian, to consume a rancid old piece of meat. Where I stopped reading tonight ... with much suspense ... Stephen was captured and locked up by Quaid.

Barker's Bible of Horror

These days I've been staying the intellectual course by reading Clive Barker's Books of Blood: Volume One to Three, and so far I've progressed to the Second Volume in spite of the ever-widening dearth of free time.

The strangest thing is whenever I faithfully study while simultaneously reading Barker's incarnadine Bible of Horror from 1984 I can't help hearing the eerie drip, dripping echo of Northrop Frye's words in The Great Code.

I wrote in an essay "The Paranoid Vision: Frye, Lovecraft and Theosophy" a while ago:

Reflecting on the great “kerygma, or proclaiming rhetoric, of the Bible,” Frye proposes that the “human imaginative response, as we have it in literature and the arts, where the language is purely the imaginative and hence hypothetical” (Frye Code 231), have as modern successors, absorbed and evolved into something new beyond the grand cosmic or mythical vision of the Bible.

What I meant to illustrate here are those unacknowledged, and well-proven ancient structures that girt the words of a story (which we come to think of as literary) with the tradition of kerygmatic, or proclaiming rhetoric of the Bible. The very relationship in literature of an ancient book (or canonical) - whether it is the Christian Bible, Necronomicon or Koran - to any modern story-telling is a poetically bonding experience, something which the reader experiences, consciously or unconsciously, in many tales.

For example Richard Condon's 1959 thriller novel, The Manchurian Candidate, as a friend pointed out once, is Hamlet told with the political argot of the Cold War. I also think that Richard Laymon's Body Rides is an anti-heroic and vulgar wet dream psychological-fantasy version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight set in the modern realm.

I was thinking in particular of a character from Barker's tale "Dread" who seemed to pay homage to, with as much self-effacing caricature as endorsement for, the 20th Century Solomon, or Preacher of Horror, H.P. Lovecraft. He writes:

"I fear, you fear, we fear," Quaid was fond of saying. "He, she or it fears. There's no conscious thing in the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat."

... invoking, or rather speaking those very words as though they were learned by rote from Lovecraft himself out of his landmark 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

Temporary Dwellings

A short update: the house is up for sale. A visitor has already come to view the house - late in the evening even though the listing was just put on the market today - and the realtors have scheduled an open house for this upcoming Sunday, also. Looks like I'll have to find a place of my own to live soon, perhaps even sooner than I hoped. What available time I have now I'll be spending searching for a temporary dwelling to abide in, or if my fiancée and I can manage it, even better, a place for us to live.

Everybody's A Book of Blood

Max Ernst, The Temptation of St. Anthony 1945

"Everybody's a book of blood. Wherever we're opened, we're red."

--Clive Barker's Books of Blood

A night or two ago, I was thinking about how I'd explain, or better express the way I understand this very gory metaphor evoked in Barker's epigraph to the first volume of the Books of Blood. I always tend to think of and see an extended metaphorical expression as something active and animated in terms of the human imagination, instead of breathless and inanimate. His writing style is truly poetic to the very unconscious core, and it was in his stories that I was reminded of the shocking psycho-sexual, Freudian images of Surrealism--particularly having Salvador Dali (below) and Max Ernst (above) in mind. Barker's gory, yet literary elucidation above is like that of the Surrealist painters, whose paintings are never stilted with a stale expressiveness but shock quite animately with eldritch images revealing a deeper unconscious essence of being. I picture Barker as wanting the reader to envision a shape-shifting image in his or her own mind of a Daliesque body--a vivisection of violence: manuscript constituted by mutilated human parts--dismembered arms and hands tattooed with the ink of random sentences, flipping open its own pages made flesh, which are dripping with deep-sanguine blood, while reading.

Salvador Dali, Autumnal Cannibalism 1936

Rising Up and Rising Down

A week later and I'm bogged down with countless things still to do in addition to working five days a week: customizing a new cellphone, finding a place - once my parents sell our present home - to live for my fiancée and I, as well as reading the encyclopedic abridged edition of William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means - a life-time work of anthropology which ought to be as pertinent to the comprehension of our times as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance is to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

I'll post about things literary soon -- and with less pretension, I hope.

The Medieval Endorsement

Before I plan to hand over my sole copy of W.S Merwin's recent new verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to a workmate, who, based on his delight with classic stories like Homer's Odyssey, asked me to endorse other classic literary adventures for him to read, I was killing time before work by re-reading it.

While reading those very potent, mythologically rich descriptions of Biblical and Classical proportions found in the Gawain-poet's tale - of the translatio imperii, of King Solomon's pentangle, of Christ's wounds, of Mary, the Queen of Heaven's image, and of knightly virtues - intuitively, I felt my mind wafting with an idea never conceived of before evoked by some orchestrated ineffable source.

Understanding these ideas in my own bizarre way, I thought analogously of the function of endorsement in advertising - a celebrated name or place of renowned association intended poetically to uplift the value of something above and beyond mundane reality to a far greater mythological significance. We're requested as readers of this medieval tale by the Gawain-poet to conceive of the extra poetic meaning associated with these well-known mythological endorsements.

Freudian Slip

Sigmund Freud

Kept apart in my mind from the affairs of everyday living, my dedicated and scholarly examination of supernatural horror literature has grown into something of a foreboding and occult ritual of night-time reading. Tonight, I was reading one of many brutal and debauched short stories ("Pig Blood Blues") taken out of Clive Barker's Books of Blood together in ever-twining tandem with Richard Laymon's Body Rides. The odd thing or coincidence about these two horror-meisters is this: one is a modern, contemporary British writer with a very literary, well-crafted style who has a large American following, and the other is a latter-day American writer with a very chatty, pulp style who was and is (to quote Wikipedia), "lesser known in North America than elsewhere, as he achieved much of his success in Europe, particularly the United Kingdom."

I was silently agog in my own mind for the longest time with trying to figure out this literary mystery. The attempt to piece together the fragments of dissociative knowledge, in effect literature as a whole, has always been for me - especially as an English major - a very frightening and traumatic but rewarding religious experience. Reading has sometimes opened up "terrifying vistas, and of our frightful position therein," to quote H.P. Lovecraft, in my own own mind. By the bye, these two respective horror writers Barker and Laymon conduct themselves very differently, stylistically, with their words and sentences to convey ideas in their tales: one is symbolic, sophisticated and ornamental and the other, blunt, surreal and tantalizing.

Yet the subjects and plots of their stories seem to me to share a common anthropological interest: a scary almost fetish-like encyclopedic anatomy of 'normative' and 'diseased' human decadence. Everything Freudian and Biblical from the exploration and fears related to: anatomy, sex, pubescence, fantasy, seduction, relationships, incest, superstition, temptation, voyeurism, sado-masochism, rites of passage, molestation, adultery, sexual abuse, fetishes, virginity, bondage, childhood to sexual orientation.

Why Laymon's writing style failed to arouse much commercial success in his own country is likely related to cultural factors in America. His protagonist in Body Rides - Neal Darden - is very much a modernized Gawain figure, whose courteous act of chivalry thrusts him into an underground reality that is gravely caught up in a decadent cycle of worldly temptation, slaughter and other hitherto repressed outbursts of sexuality. The Second Earl of Rochester would have been proud of Laymon.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Since returning home Tuesday morning after spending the long, Thansgiving weekend in Collingwood with my fiancée, her family and friends, for work's sake I haven't felt that keen, self-impelled drive - two failed attempts - to write an interesting blog entry.

Over these past two days - still trying to think of something relevant - I haven't had much luck thinking of something to write about: life itself has felt as though it were lagging before my very eyes.

Yesterday I finished reading Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow, but I just haven't cared to write anything, book-wise. I keep reading new and old books from day to day out of habit - I think, to keep my mind distracted from my daily, worldly concerns - but sometimes my mind just doesn't want to let go of my thoughts, as though waiting till some faraway, promising time or kingdom come.

I'm not too worried, actually; my fiancée has kept me from becoming that seeksorrow I once thought I was.

Feast of Booths

Over the past week, including last weekend, truly, I couldn't think of something worthwhile to write on this blog. And I'm heading up to Collingwood with my fiancée anon Friday night from work, to spend the apt Thanksgiving long weekend celebrating with family, friends and churchgoers the start of the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles). Last year, due to the grave demands of fourth-year university, I had decided not to attend the Feast of Booths. This year, I'm looking forward to spending personal and social time with my fiancée, as well as our mutual friends, recuperating from the scarring lives of bosses, supervisors, co-workers and inebriated customers from the bar.