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.