Imaginarium 2012
Rannu Fund
Chiaroscuro Reading Series
FLUID LEVEL LOW!
The more liquid we are, the more we can fill the Intar-Tubes. Please help us FLOW!
2012 Goal
$5,000
$4,000
$3,000
$2,000
$1,000
Newsletter
Mister B. Gone
reviewed by
Mister B. Gone
Clive Barker
published by HarperCollins
250 pages
ISBN 978-0-00-726261-8
$ 13.95 U.S.
Burn this book.
Now who could resist that as the first line of a book?
I know I couldn’t.
Clive Barker burst onto the scene back in the early eighties and was, for a time, like the Elvis of Dark Fiction.
But Clive has long since left that building.
However now, well, now it looks like he’s coming back into this big place where we all toil; some in the basement and sub-basements and the networks of caves under there, some in the middle number listings, some, rarer few, up in the lofts and penthouses, with their big bloated dirigibles full of fantastical hot air moored to and drifting above the roof. Well, Mr. Barker is at least loitering out near the front door. (The long awaited The Scarlet Gospels, the collection that turned into a novel, suggests that he may, eventually, kick a few doors in.) The chap he is loitering out there with is one Mister B. Gone and he looks like troub– Oh . . . they’re in the foyer now . . .
With Coldheart Canyon Barker seemed to be warming up, entering the darker waters once more. Although that book had its lighter aspects and definite fantasy elements.
Now comes this little book. An entrée, a preparatory text, a comical hymn (composed by a drink and devil ravaged monk) before the main proceedings of the Gospels.
This is Clive doing stand-up comedy. But he’s standing on a scaffold, smiling, with a noose in his hands. You might call it black humour, depending on your mirth meter’s setting. For all its grim little chuckles there is subtext there.
It is a gallows humour piece, giggles at the gibbet, a road movie for demon lovers.
What awaits you?
Claws and fangs "as sharp as grief".
"Agonies made of love".
A war between Heaven and Hell.
"Flayed anatomies descending in rains of excrement and gold".
Demons, spirits, angels. And allied slaughters.
Beseechings, threats, bribes. From the black little mouths that are the book’s words.
A house high on a hill. With a huge tree beside it. "The house is a thousand years old, at least, and when the wind comes up out of the south, smelling of oranges, the tree churns like a vast green thunderhead, except there is no lightning out of it, only blossoms."
A pair of demons whose party tricks include entering the wombs of pregnant women and frightening the foetus to death. Raising the dead en masse in danse macabres, destroying inventions and other daemonic subversion.
"I would sit with the widow-women at their hearths, and staring into the flames licking the chimney’s throat, I’d beg them to tell me the shapes that the Old One had taken, in times before time, so that I would know what face I should make for myself to stir up terror in the bowels of victims yet unborn."
Sympathy from the devil: "After a time I came to feel some measure of sympathy for those animals that were little more than slaves, their inarticulate state denying them the power to protest their enslavement, or tell their stories at least. Oxen yoked and straining as they labored to plow the unyielding ground; blinded songbirds in their plain little cages, singing themselves into exhaustion believing that they were making music to pleasure an endless night; the unwanted offspring of bitches or she-cats taken from their mothers teats and slaughtered while she looked on, all unable to comprehend this terrible judgement."
Oh, and a holy/unholy licensing debate.
After some details of his miserable life in the Ninth Circle, Jakabok Botch is trawled up out of Hell by some fishers of men and their mercenaries. The rest is a quick, sometimes sketchy, travelogue of his adventures on the road, and off it.
Describing ultimate evil, Hell and such subjects can be self defeating because of the very nature of the concepts. Barker himself (if anyone is worthy of interviewing demons it is he) has failed to adequately describe or embody Hell in the past, most notably on film, (the Gospels may change that), yet he describes its earthly precincts superbly.
Perhaps it is a safer bet to use the comic approach, as he does here. Though this book is not short on venom and the visceral.
Not as compelling as some of the books from Barker’s early, golden, years (The Books of Blood, The Damnation Game, Weaveworld) it is, nonetheless, engaging fare, until the anticipated The Scarlet Gospels turns up. Then he will no doubt explore the premises from basement to roof.
So, before burning Mister B. Gone (to see what rises with the smoke) read it at least once. There’s a good end line as well.
Me, I have to go now and feed the furnaces some more.
The words await you.