Thirteen For Halloween 2020 Part Two: The Lix

The Lix are not only physically and constitutionally repulsive, but represent something psychologically vile (a characteristic quirk of almost all of Barker's monsters, even these lesser species): they are as much Freudian entities as anything else, reflecting certain neuroses and fears, morbid disgusts and self-loathings we have regarding the essential, animal processes of our own bodies: 

Fair warning before we proceed: 

Barker is a creator whose name has become synonymous with images of bodily mutilation, elaborate gore and the elasticity of anatomy. Many of his most beloved creations -some of whom will be featuring in this series a little later- are products of this principle obsession; a desire to test the boundaries of form and blow apart preconceptions of anatomy. In most examples, that factor is as glorious and evocative as it is horrific, treading a fine line between the monstrous and the miraculous. 

However, the man also has a singularly unashamed love of the down and dirty, the shockingly disgusting and grotesque. From the portrayal of barely-formed, skinless Uncle Frank from the Hellraiser franchise to the eponymous Son of Celluloid (more on that particular specimen later), Barker's imagination for the repulsive, the execrable, the nausea-inducingly vile is almost unequalled. 

And nowhere is this more apparent than in The Lix. 

I know for a fact that those of you familiar with The Books of The Art (The Great and Secret Show and Everville) just suppressed an involuntary retch. The Lix. In a series infested with phantasmagoria, in which it's a rare chapter that doesn't include imagery of the metaphysical, the Blake-like in its hallucogenia, The Lix bring the reader crashing down from their flights of fancy, their considerations of the impossible and transcendental by exemplifying how “magic” in this mythology can be put to the most obscene use as well as the ascended. 

Entities summoned by particular sorcerers through the most unclean of rites (in this instance, the mad and hermetic occultist Kissoon, one of the series' many, many antagonists), The Lix initially appear as masses of strangely featureless snakes that vary massively in size and shape, that swamp their intended victims in their grotesque masses and murder them either by strangulation, suffocation or by biting them to death with their many-fanged mouths. 

In that, they might seem like fairly standard horror/fantasy monstrosities; the kind of creature that wouldn't be out of place in even more innocent or infantile fantasy. 

However, when we learn of their constituents and the means of their making, we come to appreciate just how earnestly Barker wishes to appall us by their conception: 

To quote one of the victims of The Lix themselves, Kissoon creates the creatures from “. . .his shit and semen,” defecating and masturbating the creatures into existence. They are, by nature and by aspect, entities of waste; things born of shit and ejaculate, combining both the elemental potential for life with the sincere, morbid lack of it. 

In that, The Lix are not only physically and constitutionally repulsive, but represent something psychologically vile (a characteristic quirk of almost all of Barker's monsters, even these lesser species): they are as much Freudian entities as anything else, reflecting certain neuroses and fears, morbid disgusts and self-loathings we have regarding the essential, animal processes of our own bodies: 

They are the religiously-conceived and afflicted-on-us “sin” of Onanism, the bodily-dismorphic disgust of our own waste processes made manifest, animate and actually lethal; their demeanours animalistic and aggressive, their repulsive lengths coiling and twitching with  obscene and murderous energy. 

Given their creator's peculiarly misanthropic ideologies (Kissoon has nothing but loathing for the human animal, which he regards as a waste of its own evolution, and intends to wipe clean from the face of the Earth, leaving life to arise in a perhaps more suitable form at some point in the distant future), they are also expressions of profound contempt for humanity; the species own rot and wasted potential turned upon it, which is a consistent theme throughout the series (note how Kissoon's Lix and The Jaffe's Terata both dynamically exhibit similar traits and qualities and are born through similarly occult procedures). 

But the true power of The Lix lies in the visceral reaction they provoke. The Books of the Art are pervaded by Barker's peculiar brand of metaphysics; even their more horrific visions and entities tend towards the semi-divine or near-infernal, all of them transcendental to some degree (keep an eye out later in the series for some especial specimens). The Lix provide a contrast to that, by providing a horror that is unambiguous, base and grounded in our most neurotic, atavistic animal processes. In that, they also represent a sly nod to Barker's own back catalogue, the creatures highly reminiscent of many to be found within The Books of Blood, that tend towards the similarly fleshy and repugnant in aspect. 

There are plenty of entities in Barker's bestiaries of more significance, of greater profundity and complexity than these squirming, Freudian grotesqueries, but there are very, very few that excite quite the same degree of repulsion. 

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE BODY POLITIC