THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE NIGHTBREED

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. 

​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. 

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