Books of Blood (Vols. 1-3)

"Until I read Clive Barker, I wasn’t aware that there could be a space for gays or any kind of queer sensibility in horror. I nearly chose Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse , which touched me in a similar way, for this list (though only those with strong stomachs should approach that one!). I like Stephen King very much, but the vast majority of his books are written from the point of view of white heterosexual males. I remember reading Clive Barker’s stories and noticing a sexually active gay couple in one of them. One of the men meets a tragic ending but that’s not because they’re gay—the tragic ending just happens to be inevitable to the narrative. That opened things up for me. I think it’s important to note that the horror genre offers more than fear; it can also offer solace and experimentation, because it’s a genre that transgresses and goes where others won’t. “Until I read Clive Barker, I wasn’t aware that there could be a space for gays or any kind of queer sensibility in horror” The thing I like so much about Books of Blood , and what I find so terrifying about its stories, is Clive Barker’s relation to the body. He’s not scared to tear it open; he’s not scared to metamorph it into shapes that are unthinkable, impossible. In ‘The Midnight Meat Train,’ there’s a butcher that stalks the New York subway, making food out of the people who are left behind. In ‘The Hills, the Cities,’ there are two cities that come together as physical bodies made out of its inhabitants and proceed to fight each other. In ‘The Body Politic,’ there are hands severing themselves and staging their own attacks on the rest of the body. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . They’re all visceral and suggestive images. Barker is a man who is obsessed with mythology and religion as well. A lot of that comes through in his writing, themes of martyrdom, sacrifice and fundamental transformation. With Barker you have a sort of secular form of the gothic that feels very modern and refuses to engage with the neat Manichean divide of good versus evil. His monsters are predominantly likeable or, at the very least, humane. No, I think that’s quite unique to him and a few others. Kathe Koja, my final book choice, is someone who has sometimes been affiliated with Splatterpunk, despite writing a little later. With Barker and Koja, there’s a metaphysics behind the violence that is perhaps missing from some of the other Splatterpunks. I don’t want to generalise because they were all were doing different things. Some of the Splatterpunk writers were less visionary: their politics were not particularly progressive or interesting. This doesn’t invalidate their fiction, which is fascinating in its resoluteness to test the boundaries of the acceptable. But with Barker, there’s always an expansive aspect. His approach leads to new ways of thinking about our relation to corporeality—its fallibility, but also its capacity for change. One of his works, the novella The Hellbound Heart , which was made into Hellraiser , explores all of these areas: pleasure and pain as transcendental aesthetic experiences, the limits of the flesh and of our senses. These ideas are very unique to Barker. And there’s very little fat to his stories too. That’s one of the reasons they have passed the test of time. They’re still incredibly effective."