​Barker's penchant for exploring the “humanity in the monster” (and vice versa) is well established in his back-catalogue of published works. Whereas contemporaries generally concerned themselves with more traditional and morally absolute portrayals of “evil” as an external phenomena, to be feared for its transgressive, “beyond the light of the fire” qualities, Barker tends towards the less conservative in his assumptions: 

His rogue's gallery of various mutations, abhumans, subhumans, demons and demi-gods generally contains little that is motivated by pure spite or proscribed notions of elemental evil; almost every entity one can name has its own peculiar motivations -and even philosophical justifications- for acts and behaviours that might, ostensibly, seem malevolent or sadistic. 

Moreover, Barker expresses a noted tendency for exposing enshrined and systemic malevolence within established culture, politics; our very natures as human beings. Amongst his most monstrous and irredeemable creations tend to walk little more than human beings who have stumbled onto some miraculous or otherworldly sphere, but are unable to appreciate or engage with the transcendental promise they represent. Rather, they become desecrators, vandals and murderers in their various confusions and inability to control or comprehend what is not part of their enshrined assumptions; what defeats the children's-crayon-drawing of a world they have come to operate in. 

The Nightbreed, the central entities of the novella Cabal -not to mention the much-maligned film of the same name-, are the epitome of that concept: 

Superficially a species of undead monsters that live beneath graveyards, abhor sunlight and feast on human flesh, they are neverthless presented as sincere miracles; a species born of the outcast and unwanted amongst humanity, those visionaries that have no place or purpose in the sunlit world, and so seek out -or are summoned to- the gates of Midian, an underground city that has qualities of Hieronymous Bosch's portrayals of Hell, embellished with a elements of Dante, Goya and Giger for good measure. 

It's here that they come before the wounded god Baphomet and, in a deliberate inversion of Christian baptism, are exposed to its blood; a substance that has the capacity to undo the humanity of worthy souls, to render them as mythic and monstrous reflections of who they truly are. Those who become Nightbreed are abstractions of themselves; not quite part of the waking world but not entirely closed off from it either; the monsters of urban myths and fairy tales, the demons of religion and the phenomena of ghost stories. Liminal entities, they are capable of shifting form and state, adopting some semblance of humanity or even exhibiting the vampire's trick of becoming beasts or sentient mist. 

Whilst entirely monstrous, the book takes enormous pains to invest them with the most acute humanity, rendering them as sympathetic, identifiable; outcasts who have found some measure of their own strange Eden. 

Meanwhile, the waking, human world is painted as a grey and ghastly place of enshrined abuses and hypocrisies, every power structure and tradition called into profound question, notions of “normal life” being exposed as anything but, where the rampaging, bloodthirsty lynch-mob is the essential and inevitable expression of that world's neurotic desire to sustain itself. 

As in Weaveworld, as in The Abarat, as in Coldheart Canyon, Imajica, Galilee and numerous others, the most pernicious, cruel and unthinkingly violent villains in this story are fundamentally human (or were at one time or another). 

Those who stand outside of the fishbowl looking in, or who manufacture some means of escape, are  celebrated as rare and unique specimens. This is one of the few horror books of its era that takes as its protagonist a man who is manifestly and profoundly unwell; the enigmatic Boone, introduced to us as an uncertain and confused young man who suffers lapses in memory, periods of lost time, profound confusions in which he doesn't know who or where he is. It is this unlikely pilgrim with whom we travel the road to Midian, witnessing his adoption by the “monsters” of that place, whereas the human world at his back has given him nothing but pain, betrayal and cruelty. 

Meanwhile, another node in the structure of control, the psychologist Dr. Decker -who initially appears as the paternal anchor in Boone's life, the only man willing to grant him some measure of synpathy- is revealed as being the psychotic butcher responsible for numerous random murders for which Boone is ultimately blamed. In this, Decker is Barker's commentary on the awfulness of proscribed notions of sanity, his equivalent of Nurse Ratched, only more terrible and monstrous by far. Furthermore, after his initial encounter with The Nightbreed -whom, despite his own overt monstrosity, repel his assumptions of a certain and stable world-, Decker is able to whip local law enforcement and towns people into a lynch-mob frenzy against them, the closing chapters of the story involving a full-blown pogrom in which the children of grey normality, those in love with the certain and banal, gleefully and sadistically rain down hellfire on the changeling city of Midian, murdering Nightbreed by the score, destroying the dream of Eden they once knew. 

In this, Barker's commentary is overt: humanity is the monster and the monsters are the most human of all. Our systems and traditions of control, of assumption, the worship of banality and comfort and enshrined authority, sicken us more profoundly than we can ever know, turning the most passive of us into murderers and sadists at the flutter of a flag, the cry of a tribal hymn. 

Meanwhile, the strange amongst us; the minorities, the outcasts, the neuroatypical. . . well, Barker makes no bones about the fact that we are blessed, even in our ambiguties, even in a world that would see us hounded, driven from the sunlight into dirt and darkness and, ultimately, murdered where we stand. 

The Nightbreed are Barker's manifesto, arguably far moreso than the eminently more iconic and recognisable Cenobites (more on those particular super-sadists a little later); they are the interior life of strange and absurd imagination, monstrous nightmares and idle, erotic fantasies, expressed in flesh and anatomy; a condition that Barker has expressed a yearning to achieve in and of himself, though he knows that it is physically impossible. A yearning that we all share, to some greater or lesser degree: 

To be free of our earthbound and defined conditions, to sprout wings, become weightless and soar away from the trivia and petty confinements of our existence. 

In that, The Nightbreed are as much creatures of fantasy as horror, realisations of our dreaming life as well as our nightmares. Barker makes it plain where his own sympathies lie, and the dynamic they represent will recur again and again, elaborating throughout his work. 

​Most people's preconceptions of angels, in the Abrahamic sense of the term, derive from renaissance assumptions of their forms and natures (that is, they tend to be vaguely humanoid, winged figures that descend from on high on beams of sunlight). 


However, anyone who has actually read the likes of, for example, The Books of Ezekiel and/or Revelations, certain Kabalistic or occult texts or even casually glanced over the poetry of William Blake, will know that angelic entities are far from so mundane or proscribed in traditional mythology. Biblically, they are described as “. . .fiery wheels of passion,” immense, flaming entities that resemble mechanisms of fire and starlight upon which multiple sets of wings flutter and numerous eyes burst with blazing scrutiny. They are far more elemental, ineffable and terrifying beings than present-day proscriptions imply, and it is that original complexity which preoccupies and obsesses the imagination of Clive Barker. 


For a creator so positively identified with the infernal, angelic and semi-divine entities occur quite often in Barker's work. Even the most iconic entities associated with his name, The Cenobites of Hellraiser fame, are self-described obliquely as “. . .demons to some, angels to others,” and are often couched in language that is as reverent and transcendental as it is grotesque and horrifying. As well as Sacrament's Nilotic, a vaguely-defined angel of death occurs in the closing chapters of the novel Coldheart Canyon, whilst entities that entirely defeat parameters of the divine or infernal bestrew The Books of the Art. 


Perhaps the most iconic of Barker's angels is also the most horrifying in its purity; the elemental force of unmaking whose presence pervades the narrative of the seminal Weaveworld, and whose ultimate manifestation is perhaps the closest to biblical descriptions of those most abstruse and elusive of entities. 


From the opening chapters, the over-arching terror of The Scourge is well established; antagonist Immacolata, a creature of semi-divine provenance herself (purportedly descended from none other than Lady Lilith and “. . .the first state of magic”), dreams of the entity as it slumbers, of the terrible, scouring fire it will bring when it awakes.


This is no bringer of peace and miracles, no harbinger of revelation. The creature is an unreasoning, elemental force of utter annihiliation, such that even a creature as genocidal and remarkably lethal as Immacolata fears it. 


In that, it stands as a commentary on the awfulness of certain metaphysical notions of “purity;” The Scourge is apocalyptic fire, that believes itself to be the cleansing hand of God on an unclean and infested Earth. It is the end of all magic, the death of dreams, and the return of the most sterile, monstrous notion of “innocence” imaginable. 


Throughout most of the narrative, it is a speculative entity; one that exists in rumour and myth rather than in actuality. 


That is, until the defeated salesman-turned-prophet-turned-would-be-divinity Shadwell sets out in search of it, having suffered his own, narcissistic form of “revelation” at the hands of the book's miracles and monsters (unable to tame or control them, reduce miracles to commodities, the singularly post-modern antagonist decides that all magic is impure and corrupting, that it must be scoured from creation as a cleansing act for his own tarnished soul). 


Finding it housed in the most sterile environment on Earth, the desert wastelands of The Rub'al Khali, he is granted a vision of the terrible sterility in which it has endured and the consequent madness that has claimed it: 


An image of Eden awaits him there, but a mockingly barren one; its flowers and fecundity made of sand, and therefore lifeless, as The Scourge lacks all capacity to create or bring life, being the elemental end of all things that it presumes of itself. 


Like The Nilotic, The Scourge is not as it is advertised nor what it believes itself to be. Like The Nilotic, it has been poisoned and corrupted by the stories of humanity, believing itself to be the Biblical Uriel, who stands guard at the gates of Eden. It has absorbed the identity proscribed by those stories and thereby lost so much of itself, become a mad and lonely entity in its isolation that now lashes out wildly and destructively in the manner of an abandoned, celestial child. It is a terrifying entity of madness, delusion and unstoppable destructive potential, the lurid descriptions of what it does to its victims, of the unremitting devastation it inflicts wherever it goes, something that Barker takes notable joy in, especially when contrasted to the creative inspirations and Raptures  of The Seerkind, the inhuman entities that are its prey and sole purpose for existing. 


The Scourge is anti-creation, a contrast to all that Weaveworld contains up to the point of its manifestation. Throughout the book, there are lurid examples of both miraculous and horrific creations, phenomena that inspire and arouse and appall, all of them strangely beautiful, even at their most grotesque or violent, but The Scourge comes as the antithesis of them all; a thing that takes no pleasure in anything it does, that is incapable of such, that seeks no satisfaction other than the fulfilment of proscribed purpose, in the manner of an engine (which it is variously described as throughout). 


In terms of manifestation, it is a protean entity of fire and wheels and myriad eyes, sometimes resembling an immense figure, swathed in smoke and storms, another a machine of living light, others a proliferating garden of fiery blooms. 


In that, it is exceedingly close to the traditional portrayal of angelic entities in their parent traditions, much more ineffable and unknowable than the renaissance depictions that come later, and which pervade present-day religious imagery. 


However, Barker's angel doesn't stop there; it is not as it believes or assumes, as the stories of humanity it has assimilated proscribe: 


What it is, exactly, is never explained: only that it is other-worldly, part of a species or race of entities that once inhabited the Earth alongside the Seerkind. Abandoned, left behind by its kin, it went mad in isolation, its desolate qualities born of loneliness, that it expresses in apocalyptic temper tantrums that are capable of charring civilisations to ash and desert, which no magic can withstand. 


But, its ultimate defeat comes from self-realisation: through an act of supreme bravery (and fittingly ironic self-sacrifice), it is shown itself, forced to realise its own lunacy and traumas and thereby transcend them, to become something greater, more beautiful and beyond what the cruel and self-mutilating myths of humanity have made of it. In that, it is another of Barker's more sympathetic monsters, a creature that is as much a victim as anything it mistakenly murders, and as worthy of redemption. 

As an example of how floridly bizarre Clive Barker's imagination is, you need look no further than the eponymous Son of Celluloid, from The Books of Blood.


Conceptually alone, the creature is strange beyond the most Jungian nightmares of most horror writers. Like most of Barker's monsters, it begins with humanity, its absurdity lent a certain wry wit and wider cultural resonance by its -extremely- humble origins:


Following a flight from police, wounded and bleeding, a convict finds himself trapped in the crawlspace behind a cinema's screen and the outside world. Sealed in, bleeding, unable to call out for help, he dies and is forgotten, never found.


Unbeknownst to the man himself, he wasn't terribly far from death anyway; a cancer was slowly growing in his body, a cancer which outlasts him, surviving where he does not, absorbing the raw emotion and inspirations that audiences project upon the cinema screen behind which it swells and gestates, becoming not only sentient, not only animate, but a thing of joyous and murderous miracles.


Freed from its parent flesh, it exhibits the miraculous capacity to make the dreams it has absorbed momentary realities, becoming silver-screen heroes and villains and monsters and lovers, even temporarily altering reality around itself to reflect those illusionary backdrops.


This is the manner in which it stalks and inveigles its victims; by granting them an instant of cinematic fantasy, even of paradise, before it plunges its tendrils through their eyes, feeding on the fantasies that spark in their brains, the stuff of human passion and imagination now all that can sustain it.


The Son of Celluloid establishes so many of the themes that will become common to Barker's creations in the years to follow; its sickly, human origins and gestation are redolent of the same process Frank Cotton suffers during his escape from The Cenobites in both Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart.


Likewise, its capacity to give people dreams and fantasies that are, ultimately, ephemeral and instruments of predatory manipulation, will recur again and again in various stories, most notably in the magical jacket of salesman Shadwell in the novel Weaveworld.


As for The Son itself, it is an example of a monster that Barker himself clearly adores; a creature that is rendered in poetic, almost romantic terms, the fantasies it provides humanity, the murderous embraces it shares with them, rendered with the particularity and passion of love scenes. There is an intimacy and engagement to the act that both Barker and the Son itself understand, that is far more than mere murder or a predator seeking out prey.


The Son, like many of the monsters in The Books of Blood, is a dreaming entity, that seeks to understand its place in the world beyond what has been proscribed for it. In that, it is not dissimilar from the humans it simultaneously indulges and preys upon. Like many of Barker's antagonists and monstrosities, it is an eloquent and garrulous monster, that enjoys pleading the case for its existence to those it encounters, speaking to them through illusionary lips about its condition, their own; how they are reflections of one another, for better or worse.


A meta-textual entity, it is a creature born of stories, sustained by stories, that gives stories back to those it has been fostered and sustained by. It is keenly aware of the poetry of its existence, what its existence means with reference to the story in which it occurs. This lends the entity a unique flare of wry wit, despite its grotesquery and the sheer violence of its intimacies, that so many contemporaries of the era lacked.


Here we also see the beginnings of an extremely complex, ambivalent relationship Barker has with the medium of cinema; simultaneously enraptured by its power to move and bespell yet also supremely cynical regarding the processes and systems of its production, the casting of the very soul of cinema itself as a sentient, human cancer has more than a little satire about it, as does the fact that it is, ultimately, a parasitic, vampiric entity that utilises the fantasies it conjures to brutally feed upon those it enraptures. These themes would only escalate as Barker himself became enmeshed in those self-same cancerous systems later in his life, culminating in the novel Coldheart Canyon, which is the man's loving but trenchant satire on Hollywood and its entire industry.


Like so much in The Books of Blood, The Son of Celluloid is a creature of thematic infancy; the seed of concerns that Barker would elaborate on much more fulsomely later in his career. Even so, the entity stands apart from most in Barker's bestiaries as a truly unique creation, the like of which could so easily have been absurd to the point of risibility, but which Barker treats with sufficient tenderness and care as to be not only credible, but strangely compelling; as fascinating as it is horrific, as miraculous as it is grotesque.

Imagine, of you will, an angel, of no specific mythology or denomination; an abstract entity that manifests certain elements of the “Divine Androgyne” as it appears in art, philosophy and various occult mythologies. 

Now, imagine that a human sorcerer somehow manages to snare that entity and utilises his art to split the creature into two, making it alien to itself in an effort to control it; that these two halves manifest the archetypes of male and female as proscribed by human culture and tradition down the centuries. Imagine that the entity, in its divorced and unknowing state, learns what it means to be “male” and “female” by observing humanity, by absorbing the stories and ideologies of those archetypes, seeing how men and women behave with regards to one another, their children, the wider world. 

What kind of monster would the entity thus become? 

That's what Barker conjures and explores in his seminal novel Sacrament, the story of a young man whose path intersects with the two halves of The Nilotic throughout his life, and whose relationship therewith shapes every aspect and element of his sense of self. And vice versa. 

The “male” half of The Nilotic becomes a man that calls himself Jacob Steepe; a high-handed, paternal figure who is simultaneously a sage, a teacher, a mentor, but also a creature of unfathomable violence, infanticidal inclinations and an especial species of nihilism that informs his entire ideology. The female, meanwhile, becomes Rosa McGee; a fertile, sensual and maternal figure, given to strange fancies and moments of the most sublime hysteria, who is the very antithesis of all Jacob represents, but also his complement; a symbolic representation of a certain natural order that Will Rabjohns breaks not only by dint of his interference in their lives, but also because he is one of Barker's rare gay protagonists. 

As Steepe himself states at one point: had Will not turned out gay, then the tensions between them in the latter's adult life would not exist; he would have become consumed with the proscribed narratives of “manhood;” i.e. would likely have become a husband, a Father, and that would have somehow excluded him from seeking out The Nilotic once again. 

Instead, Will rediscovers the pair and embarks on a lethal, shamanistic journey in which he not only seeks to uncover their natures, but to perhaps heal what has rendered them so apart from one another and, ultimately, themselves. 

By his nature, Steepe is Barker's unflattering examination -and condemnation- of traditionally enshrined and proscribed assumptions of “masculinity;” that Steepe has learned his genocidal and murderous inclinations by observing how men act, how men are, throughout the long centuries of his existence, is a damning indictment of what tradition and history has taught men to be; calling into stark question the diseased meta-narratives that inform our assumptions of self, our perspectives, our behaviour. Through them, Steepe has defined himself as a murderous and misanthropic creature, whose only purpose is to see the world burn in a fire of his own making. Even his own children, that he sires with Rosa on a number of occasions, are treated as refuse; quietly murdered by Steepe after they are born, under the falsehood that they are somehow damaged or diseased. 

Steepe stands as one of Barker's quieter, less elaborate monsters, but also one of the most trenchant and effective: he is manhood and “masculinity” made manifest, and it is a highly unflattering portrait. 

Rosa, by contrast, is somewhat more sympathetic, though just as capricious and cruel in her own right, at times: a florid and fecund thing of appetites and fey whims, she treats the world more as a nursery or playground, indulging in Steepe's brooding obsessions and fascinations with “purpose” in the manner of a long-suffering wife or Mother, both of which are roles she occupies for him and others throughout the story. Whereas Steepe is egocentric, obsessed with notions of purpose and proscribed destiny, Rosa is playful, joyous and indulgent. She is the archetypal female balance to Steepe's learned and inherited proscriptions of masculinity, as dangerous in her own way in that regard, as she is also a creature that is lost and poisoned by the stories she has assimilated, rendered more or less insane by her severing from her essential self. 

In that, the Nilotic represents a particularly philosophical kind of horror; that which derives from being prey to the meta-narratives and traditions that are acting upon us before we are even born: in Barker's estimation, there is nothing to be derived from them but a form of self-enslavement and enshrined evil; through them, we come to accept the prisons we make for ourselves and that have been established for us, based on factors ranging from our biological sex to our social class. Will Rabjohns, by contrast, is the stone hurled through that particular stained glass window; the vandalistic element that dares to unsettle the machine. Steepe, being the arch-priest of that engine, cannot abide Will's disturbing quality, and therefore becomes murderous towards him, despite having been the abstract Father figure who has shaped so much of who Will assumes himself to be. 

And therein lies the poetry of Sacrament's most abiding theme: in order to be who they truly are and who they can become, the characters must abandon the states and stories proscribed for them: they must become something other, which means transcending all they value and regard as sacred within their assumptions of self. 

In that manner, Steepe and Rosa are ultimately healed, becoming one principle again; the angel that was rent apart and set separate from itself, and Will Rabjohns becomes something entirely other, beyond any easy classification. 

That is the state Barker would have us realise through his work; his various metamorphic monsters and transcendental visions of abomination: not the horror of those conditions, but the potential they imply, and nowhere is that more true than in The Nilotic. 

As a kid I was afraid of quite a lot of things. I had a very vivid imagination and it was all too easy for me to imagine the witches face grinning at me over the edge of my bed. Or the skeleton head with a black cloak and bony hand in the crack between the door and the door frame, watching me as I brushed my teeth. It honestly felt like if I looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink, there he’d be watching me. Luckily he never was. The skeleton was not the only cause I had to be anxious of the bathroom. I hated the sound of the toilet flushing, as the system roared I’d run from the bathroom to my little bedroom as if a monster was chasing me. Having an imagination so inclined to imagine monsters, I was naturally afraid of the dark. I remember switching the light off and running to my bed and diving under the covers. I’d lay there, not daring to uncover my face for fear of what might be out there. I used to believe that nothing could get me in my bed if I stayed under the covers.
​
There was also one major cause of disgust in my childhood. This is going to sound really odd but I really hated fingernails. Even as an adult I don’t like to write, speak or think the word because it makes me cringe. As a kid I used to think that if I could change one thing about myself, it would be to not have fingernails. I’d struggle to look at peoples hands, long fingernails were the worst. I used to consider them the most repulsive thing in the world. As an adult, as long as they are clean, I don’t mind them but not wanting to look at certain hands followed me to my late teens.


The Haunting of Hacket House is available to pre order now at
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So proclaimeth Clive Barker, and, in that understanding, the man has gone on to imagine one of the most colourful and complex menagerie of monsters, infernalities, demons, evil demi-gods, skewed sorcerers and other-worldly entities in either horror or fantasy. 

From the iconic Cenobites of Hellraiser to the messianic nihilism of Lord of Illusion's Nix, Barker has a penchant for flourishing his antagonists with wit, subversive humanity and more than a mite of sincere understanding. It is rare, rare indeed that his monsters are merely monsters; Barker's visions of evil are far more complex and abiding than that. Whereas contemporaries tend to err more on the side of traditional tropes and templates, Barker takes said templates, tears them up and stitches them back together in fascinating and wholly more ambiguous configurations. 

Nowhere is that more apparent than in The Great and Secret Show's dark demi-god, the man-made-infernal that is The Jaffe. 

Like many of Barker's antagonists, The Jaffe is not one of the initiated, in terms of his origins; he does not come from auspicious beginnings, he is not a child of rite or prophecy. In point of fact, the man Randolph Jaffe is less than nobody; a broken, lonely, vacuous soul whose life only sustains because he lacks sufficient imagination or inclination to end it, he is thrust by circumstance (or possibly the manipulation of far darker interests) into a shamanistic quest across the face of the USA in search of secrets that operate beneath the thin veneer of proscribed and waking life, finding for himself the revelations that alter his state of being, his sense of purpose, until finally meeting his counterpart in the form of disgraced and dreaming scientist, Wesley Fletcher. In an unholy marriage of their respectve disciplines -Jaffe's occultism and esoterica, Fletcher's scientific vision and philosophical understanding-, they concoct a formula which has the potential to speed a human being's evolution not into some ascended physical state, but into a condition of utter abstraction. Simply put, those exposed to the formula -which Fletcher christens The Nuncio- become metaphysical echoes of their own most essential natures. Accidentally exposed to the stuff, Fletcher himself becomes a thing of dust in sunlight; a living dream that has capacities to coax the dreams of others into some semblance of ephemeral being. 

Jaffe, on the other hand, finds that his essential nature derives from his darker impulses; he becomes a shadowy entity of mysteries and occult secrets, a demi-god of fear, forbidden desire and mysterious omens. Just as Fletcher is able to coax entities of fantasy and transcendence from the thoughts of humanity and make them -temporarily- physical, The Jaffe, as he comes to call himself, calls to every sublimated fear, unspoken dread and desire, crafting monstrosities from them that Barker renders in much more exquisite particularity than Fletcher's dreaming hordes. 

The pair embark on a war of antithetical metaphysics across the face of the USA, The Jaffe endlessly attempting to steal and subvert the reality-warping magic known as The Art whilst Fletcher attempts to block his efforts. 

The notion of extremely normal, flawed men becoming semi-divinities is something that crops up again and again in Barker's fiction; he is not interested in some frictionless, “perfect” other-worldly entity, rather human beings who have come to occupy some state of abstraction, and thereby become manifestations and principles of certain human drives. 

The Jaffe is a terrifying entity in and of himself; a thing of elemental horror, whose aspect is one of dread and disturbance, capable of producing insane horrors on a whim and whose ambitions are nothing less than apocalyptic (in every sense of that word). 

However, it is what he represents that is perhaps most troubling: 

The metaphysical war between Fletcher and The Jaffe is Barker's unflattering -arguably misanthropic- assessment of humanity's inner life and spiritual state in the closing decades of the twentieth century, which casts a long and ominous shadow into the eras beyond: 

Whereas Fletcher, the angel of light, healing, transcendence, contemplation, is depicted as an almost impotent, weary thing that can barely hold himself together, The Jaffe, the very reflection of all that is dark, obsessive, narcissistic and destructive in humanity, is rendered as particular, ambitious, strong and certain. He is the one who drives the war between the two, who has plans and intentions for The Art and humanity's dreaming life. 

Likewise, the creatures they craft from humanity's dreams and nightmares -Hallucinogenia and Terrata respectively- are stark and negative judgements on the neglect we have heaped upon our own internal lives, the filth we have allowed to pollute and warp the states of our souls: 

Given the chance to manifest their absolute fantasies, their most beautiful, transcendent imaginings, what do the children of humanity provide Fletcher?; Soap opera characters and game show hosts, movie stars and pop singers and pornography idealisations. The Jaffe coaxes creatures from the psychological muck of humanity that are immense, elaborate and obscenely potent, whereas Fletcher, operating in a garden that has been allowed to wither and actively poisoned by forces of politics, commercialism and cultural proscription, can barely raise enough bodies to use as ablative shields against them. 

In that, Barker provides a fairly on-the-nose and none-too-hopeful commentary on the fundamental condition of humanity: 

We have reached a point where our hopes and dreams cannot fight or even outlive our unspoken dreads and horrors, our obscene desires and self-interest. 

Interestingly, Barker's rendering of The Jaffe is far from judgemental in this regard; if anything, he relishes the monster's company and the atrocities he conjures. Fletcher, by contrast, is often absent and, even when he does occur, portrayed as a distant and ephemeral thing, barely held together, barely able to retain his grip on the world he no longer has any anchorage to. The base and the horrifying holds more fascination for us as a species than that which might foster our transformation or transcendence. Fletcher is the dying soul of 1960s Utopianism, perhaps the last ember of that movement, 

The Jaffe is therefore horrifying on levels far beyond his portrayal and significance within the story alone, and one of the more trenchantly despairing encapsulations of humanity to be found amongst Barker's bestiaries.