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.