​Going massively off-piste for this one, in terms of both subject and medium: 


Barker's forays into media other than the printed word have always been. . .problematic, to say the least. Several attempts to bring his peculiar brand of imagery and storytelling to video games have resulted in projects that fell through before anything beyond rumour could manifest, whilst those that actually make it to some state of completion tend to be either buried by a total lack of marketing or -as in the case of Jericho- are so hideously flawed on a technical level as to alienate all but the most die-hard fans of the man's work (yes, hands up; I finished Jericho. Once. And never again). 


Undying is simultaneously the exception to and the epitome of that trend; an obscure PC title from the early 2000s that has developed something of a cult following in the decades after; a first-person horror adventure in which Barker carries the player through a tale of gothic horror and peculiarly Lovecraftian metaphysics. The game made next to no impact upon original release, despite intentions for it to be an expanded franchise involving short stories, comic books and numerous sequel and spin-off titles. Withering into relative obscurity mere months after it hit the shelves, it is barely remembered now even amongst Barker's own fanbase, but has started to slowly accrue more and more prominence in recent years thanks to the efforts of certain YouTube “Let's Players” (most notably Helloween4545, who, despite finding humour in its flaws, waxes enthusiastic about the experience in his own “let's play.”). 


This is an enormous shame as, despite being quite crude to present-day eyes, at the time of release, the game included elements that very, very few horror titles did, including an environment that shifted and warped around the player, a fantastic mechanic called “Scrye,” in which the player could activate a kind of “psychic mode” to see and hear spectral or paranormal phenomena they might otherwise not be able to perceive (this is the source of some of the game's most atmospheric scares and much of its unspoken, environmental storytelling) and dynamic, atmospheric music that shifted in tempo and intensity depending on situation. 


Barker doesn't tend to concern himself with the tropes or constraints of established genres or traditions to any great degree; usually, when his stories include or operate within such, it is only so he can lampoon or dissect them with his characteristic panache. 


Undying certainly has elements of the deconstructionist about it, but it is also extremely earnest in its gothic trappings: 


Set shortly after World War 1, the plot involves ex-soldier and paranormal investigator Patrick Galloway, who is summoned to the rambling estate of his old commander and friend, Jeremiah Covenant, last survivor and presiding incumbent of the Covenant name. There, he finds that Jeremiah is a sickly and haunted man, who believes that his long-dead siblings have returned from the grave to haunt him. 


Investigation into the matter reveals that there is absolutely something abstruse at work within the crumbling folly of the Covenant estate; staff and groundsfolk talk of sightings of strange creatures and spectral manifestations, some even claiming to have seen the dead Covenant children in various states and conditions. It isn't long before Galloway encounters one of the children himself; the distracted, spectral form of Aaron Covenant, one of twins, who obsessively wanders the manor, seeking elucidation on his undead and tethered condition. Various journals, psychic phenomena and encounters reveal that, when they were but young, the Covenant children discovered a book of occult lore in their Father's library, and that Jeremiah led them to a small island off the coast of their family's own, where a ring of standing stones stand atop a raised barrow. Called there by some unseen force, they performed a forbidden ritual culled from the book, which damned them from that moment on: 


In the years later, each and every one of The Covenant children met with tragedy, from the sickly and anaemic youngest daughter Lisbeth succumbing to a wasting disease, to the fiery and unruly Ambrose Covenant (played by none other than Barker himself) hurling himself off of a cliff edge rather than face retribution for his numerous crimes. 


However, it also becomes apparent that the curse they invoked is far from done with them; that they have been caught up in a metaphysics none of them comprehend, but which all of them have their own peculiar designs on. 


The Covenant Children are the abiding focus of the game and the source of much of its intrigue; from the first instant, hints and suggestions occur of what might have become of them, how they might manifest when they are eventually found: 


Activating the “Scrye” ability in the Covenant estate's portrait gallery causes a family painting to shift and warp, revealing the hideous conditions they have come to occupy in their undead states. Journals from various sources throughout the game detail how the Covenants variously came to their ends, and how their shadows lingered long after they were passed. 


Nevertheless, it's some hours into the game itself before Galloway encounters one of them in the flesh (there's a sub-plot involving using occult means to travel back into the island's past, to retrieve a weapon of profane significance that is the only means of slaying the otherwise immortal revenants). 


Lisbeth Covenant, being the youngest and the sickliest, is responsible, it transpires, for the most numerous enemies in the game: the strangely-canine -yet also vaguely humanoid- demonic entities known as Howlers; distorted reflections of the dogs that Lisbeth loved so much in life. She surrounds herself with the creatures in her catacomb home, amongst the bones of her ancestors and the animate corpse of her own Mother, who died giving birth to her. 


Encountering her there, Galloway finds her transformed into a bestial succubus, a thing of gruesome appetites and monstrous violence, that remains comically animated and garrulous even after he has sliced her head off (in a reference to Francis Ford Coppolla's adaptation of Dracula, he sets her snarling, burbling head alight and casts it into the ocean). 


The second child is perhaps the least likely; the “black sheep” who, it is revealed, murdered his own Father in cold blood and has returned from death as the leader of a band of murderous pirates and cutthroat criminals with his own understandings and agendas regarding the “curse” that has afflicted him: 


The entirely irredeemable -and ironically named- Ambrose Covenant, who seemingly slays his brother Jeremiah before Galloway's eyes before swelling into a monstrous, ogre-like condition which is one of the more elaborate and tricky “boss” encounters in the game. Like Lisbeth before him, he eventually succumbs and is finally released from the curse that has sustained him in unlife.


Despite being the first that Galloway encounters in his wanderings through the estate, Aaron Covenant, twin brother to the reclusive and sinister Bethany, remains obscure and distant throughout much of the game. 


That is, until you return from an extended sojourn and the heretofore benign haunting becomes one of violent poltergeist activity: 


Taking extreme umbrage with your “meddling” in family affairs, Aaron becomes an unseen stalker who can levitate items such as plates, chairs and knives, hurling them at Galloway as he wanders the halls and chambers of the estate. Likewise, Aaron himself undergoes a monstrous transformation, shifting from a suited and composed human form to a ravaged, mutilated condition that wields the hooks and chains driven through its carcass. In this condition, he stalks Galloway through the manor, and cannot be dealt with in the same way as the other children; he can only be waylaid by timely use of “spirit traps” that temporarily contain him and allow Galloway to make his escape. 


It's only by unravelling the mystery of what actually happened to Aaron that his wayward soul can be laid to rest: 


As it transpires, Aaron was hideously murdered by his twin sister, Bethany, and bricked up in one of the old stables to slowly expire. Discovering his corpse, returning to it the jaw that Bethany tore away as a form of symbolic desecration, Galloway coaxes his soul to return to its corporeal shell, which Galloway then slays in the same manner as the previous Covenants. 


The last of the siblings is Bethany herself, who, unlike the others, is entirely aware of the metaphysics engulfing her bloodline, having summoned numerous practitioners, occultists and magicians to the household in order to explore it. She has married herself to the unfolding transformations taking place around her and has used them to sculpt a dreaming reality for herself; a place that she dubs Eternal Autumn, where she is worshiped as a goddess and has transfigured into a bizarrely plant-like demonic entity. 


With her death, Eternal Autumn dies, Galloway is returned to the waking world and the ring of standing stones where the entire, sorry drama was set in motion so many years ago, only to find that Jeremiah is very much alive, or rather, undead, like the rest of his siblings, and has been using Galloway all along to dispatch the more powerful of his kin so that he and he alone will inherit the power of The Undying King to which they are all bound and which is the source of their immortality. 


Needless to say, it doesn't go terribly well for Jeremiah. 


The Covenant Children are somewhat standard horror fare compared to most we have explored in these articles, and certainly the truly abstruse fauna that bestrew the pages of Barker's written work. Nevertheless, they also represent a rare step into the murky pools of gothic fiction for Barker, each of them inhabiting a particular archetype from the genre (vampires, ghosts, wherewolves et al) that has been subtly rewritten, altered or lampooned. They are each intriguing individuals in and of themselves, quite apart from the wider mythology and metaphysics they serve, with their own -largely tragic- back stories, quirks and agendas, that make them far more than simply another slew of video game antagonists to defeat. 


Their story is one of desperate tragedy, a curse that they unwittingly brought on themselves as children (likely due to external and malign influences acting upon their young minds), that afflicted them throughout their lives and even after into death and beyond. They are representative of a strange metaphysical nihilism that you don't often find in Barker's work, but which is all the more refreshing for that, and one of the main reasons why the game maintains such a sumptuously bleak and fraught atmosphere throughout. 

Amazon Prime Video  hosted the Global Launch Event of upcoming UK Amazon Original series, Truth Seekers at Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square in London/, and Ginger Nuts of Horror was honoured to be asked to attend the launch.  

The event was attended by co-creator/co-writer and series star Nick Frost, along with co-stars Samson Kayo, Emma D’Arcy and Julian Barratt. The cast also participated in a Q&A about the series hosted by EMPIRE’s Chris Hewitt which was live streamed to guests tuning in from home.


• When asked if the series would focus on a comedy or thriller element, Nick Frost said "we didn’t want it to not be creepy or unsettling. You don’t need to do one or the other, we wanted to do both. Being a lover of horror it was important to do justice to the things I was frightened of as a kid."

• On working with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost said “there is an ease to us when it comes to how we work. It’s comfortable, like an old pair of jeans you shouldn’t put on again until you’ve washed them.”

• Emma D’Arcy said “I went on a journey with a cat medium to track down my cat and things got stranger when we started knocking on peoples doors. We never found the cat…she might have just been bad at her job.”

• When asked what it was like working with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, Samson Kayo said “they’re actually quite cool and we gelled together quickly.”

• Julian Barratt describes the series as “the ultimate mash-up of genres.”

As we are near the end of the Halloween season, Amazon will be gifting us with the new series, Truth Seekers, created by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, the stars of Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours of Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End).

The story follows Gus (Frost), a broadband installer with a passion for the paranormal. On his off time, he researches and investigates haunted houses with little success. It is not until Gus is forced by his boss, Dave (Pegg), to partner with a new employee, Elton (Samson Kayo), that he starts experiencing real supernatural occurrences. The team is rounded out when the pair are joined by Astrid (Emma D’Arcy), a young woman being haunted by malevolent entities. The series also contains the acting talents of Malcolm McDowell as Gus’ father, Susie Wokoma as Elton’s reclusive sister Helen, and Julian Barratt as Dr. Peter Toynbee.

While Ginger Nuts of Horror creator, Jim Mcleod has already done a brilliant review I will only echo his words that this is a masterful example of horror comedy. It is this perfect blend of hilarious moments, great dread, and dealing with trauma in a very authentic way. This series has led me to consider breaking my own rules and add to my “favorites movies of 2020” list. The justification is that the 8 episodes play like a four-hour film, and the beautiful part is -- the story they tell is complete for those like me, who find it more difficult to binge multiple seasons worth of filler. Do not let that fool you, the series leaves enough seeds and lore to easily continue if given the chance. Which I hope they do.

Truth Seekers may be Frost’s vehicle, as Pegg is only a minor role, but their stamp is all over the show, with a maturity only gained from life experience. It’s clear that it’s filled with passion from every aspect of its creation, and provides a meditation on theories after death by Frost, who always considered himself an atheist but finds himself open to more possibilities as he’s gotten older and begun to face his own mortality. The series treats us with a script and actors that aren’t playing for laughs or scares but instead are authentically reacting to the situations like we do in life. It even allows for many to play against their usual casting type such as McDowell taking over a lot of the comedy, while cult comedian, Barratt tries his hand at a seriously sinister character and succeeds.
​
With all episodes dropping October 30th, Truth Seekers is the perfect way to wrap up your Halloween season, and offers a necessary evolution to the Cornetto trilogy, who Frost himself stated, he has no desire to return to those previous roles.

Craig Draheim 

The Abarat is Barker's affectionate homage to Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland; ostensibly a series of children's books set in a fantastical archipelago in which every hour of the day is represented by a symbolic island, whose nature, ethos and inhabitants reflect certain qualities of that hour. From the carnival island of Babilonium (6:00PM) to the paradoxical wonder of Jibarish (11:00PM), every island is a trove of strange sights and miracles both enchanting and cataclysmic. 


Gorgossium, The Midnight Isle, is the realm of all human nightmares; every horror, dread and neurosis makes its home here, and is represented either by the phenomena of the island itself or a creature that inhabits it. Despite the intended audience of the books, Barker brings his full pedigree to bear when it comes to emphasising the unfathomable horrors of this place, Gorgossium being the place where all human fears manifest, from the most absurd to the most disturbing. As one might expect, his affection for the island and its aspects is plain; he takes extreme relish in describing the myriad monsters and homonculi that infest the shadowy isle, not to mention the strange culture of bleakness and inverted virtue that presides over it: 


Gorgossium is, after all, a condition of elemental negativity; it sustains and thrives when human beings fear the unknown and imbue the shadows with monstrosities of their own imagining. Thus, the island's culture makes a virtue out of negativity: fear, anxiety, neurosis, doubt; all celebrated and encouraged in Gorgossium's strange culture. Affection, empathy, love; all regarded with contempt and disgust, the latter of which cannot even be spoken of without grave consequence, as the subject of today's article learned to his cost. 


The Carrion Family are the hereditary rulers of Gorgossium, and, as you might expect, manifest every evil and wickedness of that condition. Whittled down and withered over the aeons through despair, suicide, hereditary sickness and good, old-fashioned murder, the Carrions now number only two members; the ancient and supremely malevolent Mater Motley, a witch who makes servants from sewn-together sacks of discarded skin and has enormous occult power at the tips of her talons, and her grandson, the Prince of Nightmares, Christopher Carrion. 


From his earliest appearance, Barker makes it plain that Christopher, despite his hideous and mutilated appearance, is far more than a mere monster: 


A fey and yearning creature, he is consumed by his passions and obsessions, still aching for a lost love that spurned him so long ago, the bitterness and bile that Mater Motley has done everything in her power to cultivate not yet having entirely eaten away his soul. He is the classic Barkerian “humanity within the monster,” here presented in the guise of a children's fantasy villain; a wicked prince and sorcerer who, nevertheless, also exhibits passions, confusions and emotions that readers of all ages will recognise and identify with. Contrasted by his entirely monstrous Grandmother, he is almost sympathetic at times; understandable in his motivations, even at his most monstrous. 


Despite this, he is also a creature of incredible cruelty, a sadistic and treacherous individual who utilises his own living nightmares as instruments of torture and weapons against his enemies. He is a creature born to abjection, into a state where fear and negativity are not only normalised, but celebrated. 


As such, his Grandmother, who raised him following his parent's tragic end (it's not an enormous surprise when it is revealed Mater Motley herself had a great deal to do with that particular event), has done everything in her power to make him her instrument; to abuse and traumatise and disappoint him to the point that he is broken, bitter and has only contempt for the world (when he dared speak the word “love” as a young man, the hag punished him by sewing his lips together, rendering him silent for some years after, the scars of which he still bears to this day). 


Under this state of sustained abuse, his nightmares have swollen to such monstrous condition that he can actively manifest them as living entities of fluid light that seep out of the pipe drilled into the back of his skull (yes, this is all explicitly described in this series for children) and swim around in the strange, glass collar that surrounds his head. Christopher Carrion literally inhales his own worst nightmares with every breath he takes. 


The series presents Carrion in various modes, from the embittered yet yearning prince, still consumed by the embers of an old love, to a rampaging, fury-filled demon, whose very gaze brings death and madness. Whilst ostensibly quite a fragile creature, especially when compared to his deceptively powerful Grandmother, when his passions rise, when he is consumed by his own grief and rage and bitterness, he erupts into a state of nightmare-swathed monstrosity, some of the more climactic moments in the series pitting him against Mater Motley herself; two avatars of elemental evil ripping and tearing at one another with every power at their disposal, in which Christopher demonstrates the extent of his power and the unnuterable depths of his despair. 


The latter is where the true hook for Christopher Carrion lies. He could so easily have been nothing more than a monster; a child of Gorgossium, and therefore a living nightmare that requires no further explanation for its cruelty or sadism than the matter of its hereditary and born nature. 


However, Barker takes enormous pains to explain how Gorgossium -and Christopher with it-, despite being the realm of nightmares, is also a place of wonders. There are things to be learned from what makes us afraid and anxious and fills us with dread. There are secrets of self to be unearthed in the darkness. 


Whilst the books don't go into incredible detail, it is known that part of the reason for Mater Motley's infanticide is that she despised what she considered the weakness of her children; that the condition of peace and contentment they fostered throughout the Midnight Isle flew in the face of her own more rampant malevolence, that would see every island in the Abarat swathed in darkness and become a new home for the children of night. 


Christopher Carrion is a child caught between two worlds, as much as the book's protagonist, Candy Quackenbush, who is the Abarat's equivalent of Alice. On the one hand, he is the child of his parents; a more humanised and considered form of nightmare, in which what seems ostensibly negative can become a source of growth, positivity and even a form of enchantment (something that Barker has been explicitly exercising in his adult fiction for decades). On the other, he is also sincerely the child of Mater Motley, the witch-queen of old night, who insists that fear and dread are expansionist, venomous and violent by nature, that all should fear her family and The Midnight Isle as they once did. 


Christopher is constantly at odds within himself over these contradictory tensions; still in love with a woman he helped to murder, in his bitterness at her rejection, and in contempt with himself for what he has been taught to define as that weakness. 


It's also worth noting that, for all their ostensible villainy, neither Christopher Carrion nor Mater Motley are portrayed as the series' most contemptuous antagonists. Far from it; for all of their negativity, they are natural by-products and expressions of The Abarat and the hour of the night they were born to. 


Compared and contrasted to both of them is Rojo Pixler, the de facto master of Pyon (3:00AM) and one of the few entities within The Abarat entirely shorn of magic, visions or anything even remotely miraculous. A thinly-veiled parody of corporate materialism and faux-enchantment, Rojo Pixler is the Walt Disney of The Abarat, who has turned his island into a giant theme park that deals in plastic, synthetic light and merchandise, and whose expansionist intentions shame anything Mater Motley can conceive of, despite his affable and charming facade. 


He is very much comparable to Shadwell from Weaveworld; a grubby little man who, having discovered a realm of miracles, sees only potential for profit and control rather than transcendence; an archetype that recurs throughout Barker's fiction and for which he has nothing but contempt. 


Whilst the murderous, monstrous and unholy Carrion family are rendered with varying degrees of enthusiasm and sympathy, Rojo Pixler is entirely contemptuous; a man who inhabits Wonderland but who wants nothing more than to stamp his corporate logo on it and sell it off, piece by piece. 


In that, Carrion and Pixler together, contrasted to one another within the constraints of the same story, serve as a sincere and trenchant criticism of all that Barker regards as truly evil in the world and the hearts of humanity: 


Carrion and his hordes are the enchantment of darkness; the fascination with ghost stories and nightmares. They are bleak romance and the seduction of the abyss. In that, they have poetry and meaning; a symbolic resonance that Barker regards not only as desirable, but essential. 


Pixler and his synthetic miracles, his corporate aestheticism, his narcissistic materialism, by contrast, is wholly and irredeemably corrosive. His intentions, his -for want of a better- “philosophy,” will see the death of all that makes The Abarat enchanting and miraculous. He is the commodification of magic and dreams, the reduction of imagination to ephemeral, plastic waste and the enslavement of the self to endless cycles of material consumption. 


Carrion and his family might be the manifestation of all nightmares; incarnations of mythological and fairy-tale evil, but Barker proclaims that to be eminently preferable to the very real, corporate corrosion that Rojo Pixler manifests. 

A rare and strange specimen for this entry, my loves, deriving from the mythic, “original city” of Primordium (as a writer myself, I envy Barker's penchant for conjuring the most evocative and appropriate names for his creations), from a franchise that represents a perverse marriage between the imagination of Barker himself and Spawn creator, Todd McFarlane: 


The Tortured Souls. 


A 1990s line of extremely elaborate action figures, The Tortured Souls were adult collector's pieces that took the self-mutilated aesthetics of Hellraiser's Cenobites and ramped them up to the power of N. Each and every figure in the range is a work of the most lurid and sadistic detail, creatures that have become much more -or less- than human by their various scarifications, excoriations, additions and alterations. 


Whilst the line started relatively modestly, the earliest iterations resembling some of the more elaborate children of the Hellraiser franchise, it quickly evolved beyond those bounds into flights of the most obscene and delirious body horror, incorporating creatures that resemble stitched-together, sado-masochistic lovers, that sprawl out on demented surgical tables whilst implements as much of torture as surgery pluck living demons from their sliced-open bellies. 


Barker was not only responsible for much of the lurid detail of these figures, but also contributed a back-story for them, portions of which were included with each figure, later comprised in the -excessively rare- novella Tortured Souls: Tales of Primordium. 


In that story, Barker recounts how, having seethed and sweated over creation for the first six days, in a fevered and delirious funk on the seventh, God created a thing that should never have come to be: 


This unwanted mistake is Agonistes, the Father of The Tortured Souls, an ancient and malformed entity that represents all that is antithetical to creation. Even so, the novella does not present Agonistes in a negative light; far from it. Despite his origins, his grotesque malformations, he is portrayed as a patient, sagastic figure to whom those in desperation or extremis come for some measure of relief. 


Judging them either worthy or not, Agonistes either rejects them and sends them on their ways or takes his surgical array to them, reshaping them with arts that cannot create, but which can hideously pervert and desecrate the work of his creator. Those that arise from these transformations are The Tortured Souls, creatures that are touched -by proxy- by some measure of tainted divinity, and which generally seem to have higher purpose than the novella itself explores. 


Doctor Talisac, on the other hand, is one of the many denizens of Primordium who is portrayed as outside of this metaphysics, one that seeks to set himself up as an opposite power, to tread on the sacred territories of gods and angels, no matter what he murders in the process. 


A surgeon and geneticist without equal or any notion of parameter, his speciality -when not tending to the narcissistic needs of Primordium's aristocracy- is the breeding of abominations and monsters, creatures that the good Doctor proclaims are merely stepping-stones to his ultimate ambition: a messianic vision in which he intends to give birth to a sublime lifeform, something that transcends all notion of life and metaphysics that has come before, and which will reshape the world according to some unspoken, Utopian design. 


However, one glance at the figure of Talisac himself (not to mention consideration of his supremely unpleasant name), demonstrates that, whatever visions the good Doctor entertains of tomorrow, they are more products of madness than any divine inspiration: 


A naked and withered figure, he is suspended by hooks and chains woven through what remains of his face to some gruesome pain-engine, an aparatus that resembles a gallows and abattoir instrument, a thing of serrated blades and protruding spikes, that, despite the wounds it inflicts upon his lacerated anatomy, also keeps him alive by various drips, feeds and umbilici that weave throughout his flesh. 


Perhaps the most distressing element of the good Doctor, however, is what swells from his ruptured belly: 


True to his Utopian dreams, he has made himself the host of his most ambitious experiment, seeking to be the “Mother” of a sublime and virgin birth; the genetically cultivated and occultly-conceived child that he believes will usher in a new tomorrow for Primordium. A clear, placental sack allows the faintest glimpse of something foetal and coiled inside, an inhuman child that the Doctor “feeds” in terms far beyond any biological matter or synthetic nutrients he might provide:


It is also a child of the metaphysical, this creature; the antithesis of Agonistes and its own creations, that Talisac believes will eradicate them all from the face of history; the perfection of that original imperative, a life that will transcend all that has come before, and serve to redefine the concept, once it slopes from his own infernal womb. 


Unfortunately for the Doctor, his creation is both a sublime success and hideous failure, the malformed, mutilated thing's first act one of cannibalistic patricide, in which it devours its creator in the moments following its birth, taking Talisac's uniquely twisted species of genius with it. 


In terms of grotesquery, The Tortured Souls are in a league of their own, even when it comes to Barker's bestiaries: every effort has been made to make them as elaborately hideous as limitations of design and material can allow, their anatomies twisted, torn and infibulated beyond all reason. 


Talisac is amongst the most epically misfigured, a creature whose perpetual agony is clear from a cursory glance, but which closer examination of which reveals a myriad of truly sadistic details. That the Doctor has done this to himself out of some sense of misplaced metaphysics -and the fact that he seems extremely happy in the condition when he briefly occurs in Tales of Primordium- makes it all the more distressing: 




He is Barker's take on a Victor Frankenstein archetype, one that eschews the broken and feverish inspirations of the original -not to mention that creator's immediate regrets-, instead falling in love with the very concept of his own creations, who seeks not merely to recreate life or even to perfect it, but to transcend all prior notions thereof, to recreate the world with his genius. 


He is also another of Barker's creations that represents the man's distaste for certain aspects of our cultures and traditions: 


Far beyond the overtly Nazist eugenics the Doctor echoes through his experiments and agendas, he is the attempt to harness the miraculous for utilitarian and myopic purposes. For all of his apparent Utopianism, the Doctor seems to misunderstand the nature of Agonistes and his origins, portrayed as a demented shadow that deludes itself with messianic ambitions or dreams of godhood. For all his genius, Talisac is, ultimately, a broken man, whose ambitions of reshaping the world come to nothing but ignominous cannibalisation by his own monstrous offspring. 

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020 PART TWO: THE LIX​
​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE BODY POLITIC
​ THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE MAGDALENE (AKA “MAMMA PUS”)
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE JAFFE
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: 2020 THE SON OF CELLULOID
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE NILOTIC
​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE SCOURGE
THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE NIGHTBREED
​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020:  THE MADONNA
​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE GHOSTS AND CHILDREN OF COLDHEART CANYON

​Barker's relationship with the film industry has always been fractious, to say the least. To someone so consumed by their own imagination, who wishes to create beyond bounds and without recourse to petty constraints, middling doubts and the imperative to pander to the widest possible demographic (always a recipe that results in the blandest work imaginable), the bastions of cinema are often dreary, depressing places, if not outright hostile. 


His novel Coldheart Canyon is the ultimate expression of that; published long after he'd bowed out of any direct involvement in film making (prefering instead to champion other film makers with more of a head for the proscribed processes and more of a will to jump through their various hoops), it is his excoriating critique and expose of the absurdity of Hollywood culture, a delightfully prurient raking-of-the-muck in which he brings to light not only the self-mutilating absurdity the systems put people through for the price of fame, but also the secret histories that it would much, much rather forget. 


Here, the ghosts of “Old Hollywood,” those sainted and shining figures that occupy the positions of post-modern saints and prophets in our cultures, are explicitly revealed in all of their sordid infamy, every concealed vice, every indulgence and addiction and abuse revealed and put on display. 


Because, according to this mythology, the ghosts of Hollywood are still very much present, anchored there by the promise of perpetual youth and vitality and pleasure. From Greta Garbo to Rudolph Valentino, every shining, sacred star is here, and presented non-too-sympathetically. 


To Barker, the cult of aesthetics and superfice that pervades Hollywood is grotesque, indicative of a spiritual malaise that treats potential miracles not as transcendental, but as commodities; a pathway to a more elegant facelift or nip-and-tuck, rather than a means of realising dreams or transcending the banal concerns of waking life. 


Therefore, the ghosts of Coldheart Canyon are sybaritic in the extreme, engaging in every sordid pasttime they did whilst alive (and myriad more besides). They cannot conceive of anything other, since it is how they lived their lives, their indulgences one of the few things that brought fleeting pleasure or relief from the spiritual void at their cores. One of the many, many means by which they have staved off ennui over the decades is by indulging in sexual escapades that weren't possible whilst they were flesh and blood, but which are now easily accommodated (however unlikely): 


Finding new lovers amongst the exotic fauna that inhabit the Canyon (everything from escaped pet tigers and ostriches to coyotes, lizards and more besides), they have sired a distinctly Barkerian brood of abominations that are neither ghost nor beast, neither living nor dead, but that boast elements of their parents anatomies perversely intermingled. 


As well as being horrors in and of themselves (their activities more rapine than cannibal, for the most part), the children represent Barker's contempt for Hollywood and its enshrined saints; they are the ultimate manifestation of their self-interested indulgence, their lack of grace or elan beyond what fashion and lifestyle magazines demand. The marriage of the bestial and the misshapen to culturally enshrined avatars of celestial beauty is a direct and excoriating stab at the heart of Hollywood itself. Combined with Barker's portrayal of various actual and imaginary movie stars as pampered, preening, self-indulgent narcissists capable of the utmost atrocity if it means they get a few more moments of ephemeral adoration, Coldheart Canyon presents a wryly bitter take on the culture from its diseased innards, from the perspective of one who has passed through them and witnessed every species of disease the sickly beast suffers from. 


The children themselves are, despite their various malformities (creatures that resemble hideous marriages between silent cinema heart-throbs and syphilitic ostriches, archaic Hollywood sex symbols and skinless panthers), almost passive in comparison to their parents; the various ghosts of Hollywood itself that litter the eponymous canyon, where they were granted a taste of the truly miraculous for perhaps the first and only time in their enchanted -but generally miserable- lives (and were damned by their failures to comprehend its possibility or import).


It is not the unasked-for children that the novel treats with contempt or distaste; rather the scions of dead Hollywood itself, the meat-grinder culture that worships aesthetics and has no wider philosophy beyond reducing human beings to products. 


Antagonist Katya Lupi is a remnant of the first iterations of that engine; a silent movie star that has generally been forgotten by Hollywood at large, save as an historical artefact, a curio whose lustre has faded over time. Despite this, she is still very much alive -unlike most of her contemporaries-, and the cold-hearted Mistress of ghosts and children both; the presiding empress of the canyon purportedly named after her most abiding quality. It was she who accidentally discovered the metaphysics that has suspended the ghosts in their desperate, unliving conditions, that has allowed her to live many years in youth and beauty far, far beyond her natural span. 


And, in terms of monstrosity, the children are barely comparable: 


A self-indulgent, preening narcissist, a product of Hollywood at its most perverse and out-of-control, she still has ambitions of returning to the waking world, beyond the strange nightmare she has come to inhabit in Coldheart Canyon, despite the fact that she is anchored in place, little more than a ghost herself, by her dependancy on the metaphysics that has sustained her and the dreaming-life of the canyon down the decades.


She is the very epitome of all that Barker loathes in Hollywood's myths of itself; one who appears, initially, to be spectral amd sublime, who comes to both the book's protagonist and the reader as a bringer of metaphysics, a keeper of hidden secrets, but who is slowly revealed as little more than a spiteful and egotistical child, who has evolved no further than the point of her own self-indulgence. What metaphysics she brings she does not understand, nor does she have the imagination to conceive of its import beyond the merely aesthetic and in terms of its usefulness as an instrument of control:


Having addicted her various lovers and contacts throughout the ages of Hollywood to its effects, she now wields it over them as both a promise and sublime threat. The ghosts are as much addicts in death as most of them were in life, clamouring for entrance to the house and access to the miracle it contains, so that they might bathe in its rejuvenating energies as they once did, when flesh and its decay were sincere concerns. 


Meanwhile, the children they have unwittingly -and obscenely- sired roam the emptiness of the canyon, creatures that should never have been; not quite human, not quite animal, not quite living and not quite dead; infernal marriages of contradictions, the by-products of a culture that Barker insists lacks all humanity, coherence and certainly all metaphysics. In that, they perhaps the most sincere and overt reflections of its unspoken monstrosity, the truest of its children, beyond what media and culture insist through their tailored, touched-up and air-brushed syntheses of superficial beauty. 

The Books of Blood are a veritable treasure trove of non-standard monstrosity and ambiguous horrors. Most of the stories that comprise them involve entities and phenomena that are highly problematic to categorise, belonging to no particular tradition or subgenre familiar to its audience. Likewise, they tend to trespass on thematic territories that horror in the era in which they were published generally did not; transcending mere conditions of dread or shock or grotesquery for flights of transformative or bleakly transcendental metaphysics. 

And nowhere is that more apparent than in the eponymous Madonna. One of the many stories in The Books of Blood that serves as a sincere outlier, punching through any genre-proscribed boundaries of horror, fantasy, science fiction and numerous others to become a thing all of its own. Is it disturbing? Oh yes, despite the fact that there's very little overtly horrific in any part of it. Is it also strangely inspiring, almost Utopian in its implications? Oh, very much so!

This is one of those rare and strange stories in which Barker explores an aspect of his own politics, in this instance, that relating to gender, patriarchy and much more besides. 

As is Barker's wont, far from engaging in such matters with reference to proscribed dynamics or assumptions (which, by the by, the man himself acknowledges always favour the existing status quo, no matter how horrific that might be), he elevates the conversation into realms most readers could not have anticipated: 

Here, we have tacit commentaries on Thatcherite self-interest and acquisitiveness at any cost, the manner in which the most corrupt and brutal of men (in particular) rise within that status to positions of authority and influence, whilst those ground into the dirt by want and poverty are forced to scrabble about, seeking discarded scraps from their overloaded tables. 

More than that, Barker comments upon the state of gender politics in the late 1980s UK, in which women are almost absent from political discourses barring one notable exception (that, ironically, served to reinforce and cement traditional notions of patriarchy for decades later), in which women are generally disregarded as commodities and men are enjoined to identify with their proscribed “maleness” and “masculinity” in a matter that is wholly damaging. 

The eponymous entity is an other-worldly (and yet entirely congruous) element within this state of crumbling, poverty-riddled cities, a cultural wasteland in which all is concrete, plastic and material ownerhsip. The creature's condition is never explicitly explained, neither in terms of anatomy or nature. All we as the reader know is that she is not merely “female,” but the epitome of that concept: a fluid, labial, fecund thing that endlessly births strange and alien children and has no need for any “Father” to conceive them (she is described as being capable of “. . .making children from rain,” if she needs to). In that, she is simultaneously a reference to archetypes of “Mother Goddesses” that appear in numerous traditional mythologies and yet entirely her own creature, an example of Barker subtly lampooning an archetype that exists in male-proscribed and patriarchal tradition but inverting its implications (something we will see repeated again and agan throughout his career). 

This gelatinous, metamorphic entity is tended to by what appears to be a cult of women who seemingly manifest reflections or projections of male desire, but not in the ways that those they snare expect: 

Despite the overt sexuality of these attendants, those who sleep with them experience transcendental visions, in which they are catapulted from the confines of their own skulls and set to explore their anatomies as though they are landscapes in and of themselves; every pore a chasm, every curve a hillock, the visions serving as signals of a state of metamorphosis that will utterly undo everything they have ever known:  

The men who sleep with these women become more of their number, waking to a condition they might have never even dreamed before or been conditioned to actively despise as lesser, as “weak.” This is certainly true of the story's antagonist; a notably small-minded, thuggish Thatcherite who ends up killing himself after being so disgusted by his rebellious anatomy that he takes a knife to it, attempting to sculpt himself back towards some condition of manhood. 

As for the protagonist of the story, she finds herself not appalled or disgusted by the condition, but awakened by it, as though it was always hers, as though she was never comfortable or correct in the anatomy that accidents of biology imposed on her. 

In that, she becomes one of Barker's many, many protagonists that are not merely murdered or driven mad by what they encounter, but come to occupy entirely other conditions of mind, of self, of existence. There is a horror to that, to be certain; a Lovecraftian dread or fear of the unknown, but, whereas Lovecraft leant into the all-too-human horror of his own metaphysics, Barker does not, instead emphasising the hopefulness and potential of such transformations, providing a commentary on the concept of sex, gender and one's identification with such matters that would be ascended and revolutionary now in 2020, let alone in the 1980s. 

This latter may, in fact, be why the story -and its eponymous divinity- are less well-remembered than some of the other, ostensibly simpler offerings within The Books of Blood; unlike most stories, this one provides no iconic or clear visual hook, no cleanly defined concept to visualise or with which to engage. 

Instead, the story reflects the nature of The Madonna itself; despite its ostensible grit and dirt and psychological realism, it is also a fantastical flight of metaphysics, in which all presumptions of identity are upset, where everything that anchors us in the grey waking of our lives is torn away. 

The Madonna -and her changeling children- imply some other existence, some potential other-state, just beneath the grey surface of our assumed realities, one that, if embraced, will hurtle us away from every assumption of what we know and enshrine within ourselves, such that what seemed certain and absolute only moments before reveals itself as little more than a reflection on water. Via her, Barker dares to say to the reader: “set down what you presume to love, what you presume to know, and consider that what you consider alien, strange or disturbing might in fact be a gateway into other states and conditions, better and more potent by far than those you live from day to day.” 

In that, she amongst the earliest examples in his fiction of the ambiguous and distressing -but often hopeful, Utopian- strain of metaphysics that will come to define much of what he creates in the years following.