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.