 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. 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   Comments are closed.
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