THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2021 IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES BY CLIVE BARKER

IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES BY CLIVE BARKER [FEATURE]

10/11/2021

Speaking as an LGBTQ youth only just blossoming into his sexuality, finding two gay guys as the protagonists of a horror story blew my mind and imagination wide open; here was evidence that it could be done, that horror stories could include and be about us beyond stereotypes and proscribed roles as either morally didactic victims or monsters. It also provided demonstration to me that we could be represented in the fullness of our sexuality, as creatures consumed by their desires in the manner of our straight counterparts.

Thirteen For Halloween 2021
In The Hills, The Cities By Clive Barker

Article by George Daniel Lea

To have attempted to publish a horror story in the mid-1980s that featured LGBTQ characters at all would have been an act of career suicide for many. To achieve mainstream success with a collection of short stories that features not one but several works in which the protagonists are LGBTQ is nothing short of miraculous.

Whilst Clive Barker -another name that is going to feature prominently in this series- rarely writes directly about the experience of gay men (and never in a manner that conforms to any cultural proscription), when he does, he always has the effect of elevating the conversation:

Rather than preoccupying himself with the dictates and parameters of accepted political discourse -that, by his own admission, he finds crude and unsatisfying-, Barker dares to stray beyond the ideological parameters set for us by heternormative, cisgender culture and tradition. The result is an earnestness and style of conversation on the nature of being LGBTQ that even many directly involved in those areas may not immediately recognise or understand:

In The Hills, The Cities is arguably one of the most iconic-and certainly the earliest- examples of that very phenomena:

A rumination on LGBTQ culture and our status as individuals in relation to tradition, history and proscribed society, the story features a two-pronged opening that may well be the introductions to two distinct -and, ostensibly, irreconcilable- narratives: Whereas one concerns itself with the peculiar traditions of the eponymous "cities" -obscure Yugoslavian cultures that observe very strange customs indeed-, the other is an almost domestic drama, describing the travails of two gay men as they explore the hills in search of culture, poetry and romance.

For many straight horror readers who came to Barker by way of King or his cinematic work in the form of Hellraiser, this may well have been their first experience of gay characters, certainly as protagonists, and certainly in a manner that treats them as complex and ambiguous human beings rather than archetypes.

Both characters -Mick and Judd- embody certain qualities of British gay sub-cultures of the 1980s; one older, more paternal, worldly wise and academic, the other younger, more romantic and idealistic.

From the off, it's clear that these two and the dynamics between them are the works of a gay man; one who understands the "types" they embody and the cultures they refer to. It's also clear that Barker is unabashed in presenting his audience with imagery intended to shock; whilst scenes of male homosexuality may be commonplace in horror now, they were next to unheard of at the time, especially presented in the graphic intimacy with which they are here:

Barker does not conceal or apologise for the images or appetites on display. If anything, he revels in them, and in the effect he surely must have anticipated they would have on his readers.

Speaking as an LGBTQ youth only just blossoming into his sexuality, finding two gay guys as the protagonists of a horror story blew my mind and imagination wide open; here was evidence that it could be done, that horror stories could include and be about us beyond stereotypes and proscribed roles as either morally didactic victims or monsters. It also provided demonstration to me that we could be represented in the fullness of our sexuality, as creatures consumed by their desires in the manner of our straight counterparts.

Placing these two men in a setting and culture where they are alien and which is actively hostile to them is also no mistake; Barker seeks to emphasise their "outsider" status, as trespassers on sacred soil, but also to glorify it in a way more traditional horror fiction would not: In certain respects, they become the witnesses to the horror that tradition and conformity have wrought; they see the massacre and madness respectively of two entire civilisations, a hauntological nightmare wrought by narratives that neither can truly fulfil or embody.

Their "outsider" status is as much metaphor as literal fact; by dint of their homosexuality, they are denied the place and narrative purpose that their straight counterparts enjoy, and so come to the gates of the eponymous cities in a strange state of innocence, even purity. Their status as operatives outside the proscriptions and narratives of tradition, far from reducing them to victims -as it would in a more conventional horror story-, makes them pilgrims, even shanans; travellers in the unknown, seekers after the mysterious, and uniquely placed to observe and comment upon the insanities that are part and parcel of the phenomena we label "society."

These are themes that Barker would later expound upon in weightier work such as Sacrament (keep a weather eye out later in the series for that particular gospel), but that here occur in putative, less specific form.

Whilst the images of the composite "giants" formed from the eponymous "cities" -Popolac and Podujevo- and the violence they wreak on one another might be viscerally and aesthetically stirring (visions the like of which one might expect to find in a dark fable or fairy tale), it is what they represent in contrast to the story's queer protagonists that is the source of a far deeper -and more profound- horror:

The collective madness, the subsequent violence and directionless rampage of the surviving "giant," is the madness of civilisation itself. Whilst Barker has roundly denounced and eschewed proscribed politics in his later work (opting instead for the more fruitful and potent realm of metaphysics), here, he draws metaphors that cannot help but be notably political in application:

Barker's presentation of "society" and its traditions is one of collective, received insanity, of inevitable violence and calamity. There is an outsider's nihilism here that only one born -or cast- beyond that particular fishbowl can appreciate.

Whilst foisted beyond the parameters of that structure and systems by dint of their homosexuality, Barker takes pains not to present simplistic or stereotypical representations:

Whilst Judd -the more accomodationist of the two, who actively bemoans the state of queer culture in which he is forced to operate-, ultimately finds himself destroyed by the monsters he somehow seeks to emulate, the younger and more idealistic -the romantic boy who is very much a proxy for Barker himself- is transformed by his exposure to it, regarding it with a pilgrim's passion, blindly following in its wake at the story's conclusion, finding himself caught up in it, becoming one with it.

And yet, there is a sense of ambiguous and gallows irony at the story's conclusion, despite the fairy-tale, mythic wonder of the great giants, the genocidal scenes of violence: Mick's pursuit of the lunatic giant is ultimately impotent. He is a young gay man who has been denied the meta-narratives that society actively proscribes -and imposes upon- his straight counterparts, and so impotently and self-destructively chases after something that is, by nature, insane, violent and destructive: the very emobidment of tradition and history that would see him murdered and consumed, that now wanders without hope, direction or a possibility of tomorrow, destroying everything in its path.

The conclusion of the story is deliberately ambiguous, but also an excoriating condemnation of the abiding desire in all of us that define as LGBTQ to be part of systems we know are sick and cruel and violent. Barker celebrates the romantic naivety of his proxy whilst also sadly commenting upon the self-destructive dissolution he courts in wanting to be part of the monster we call "society."

In that, he effortlessly delineates the juxtaposition in which we all find ourselves; the Gordian Knot we often drive ourselves to near-insanity attempting to unpick.

Further Reading

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