Black Static

Tonight, Again, Clive Barker's first collection of short stories since the game changing Books of Blood, was originally published by Subterranean Press in 2015. This 2018 deluxe trade hardcover limited edition comes courtesy of Short, Scary Tales Publications. Actually short story might be a misnomer for most of these pieces, which are vignettes and prose poems in the main, thirty two of them packed into a mere 160 pages, with accompanying illustrations by the author and the occasional blank page for design reasons. While horror is evident in some stories, a muted and often not so muted eroticism seems to be the prevailing mood. In essence the book reads like a collection of fables for adults, as if Aesop had channelled the Marquis De Sade and the author of The Story of O, or a cross between the wit and whimsy of Richard Brautigan's short stories and the graphic detail of the Henry Miller of Opus Pistorum. Enough, with trying to define Barker through other writers. Let's get to the meat of the matter. 

Title piece "Tonight, Again" sets the tone with its word picture of a man who can open his flesh to others so that they may lick his beating heart. There are vampire elements to the story, as one of the characters observes, but also a touch of masochism and a metaphor for how we are used by others for their pleasure and can come to value the experience, the outré elements of the narrative highlighting the emotional response it engenders. Poem "I Love You" does what it says on the tin, a simple declaration of love to the grave, effective and moving. Longer piece "Craw: a Fable" tells how young Francesca's fascination with a mysterious beast that stalks her leads to the downfall of her whole family. As with several of these tales, female sexuality is identified as something impossible for mere men to contain or control, and in this case a catalyst for destruction when those mere men attempt to do just that. The story is beguiling, as we share our heroine's obsession with the monster, and with a twist that asks exactly who is stalking who in this thrilling piece.

Marianne is "Afraid" of lover Vigo, who is not what he appears to be, but only by letting go of her fear and her past life and accepting what he has to offer completely can she move on. With some fascinating and compelling imagery, this is a story that looks at how fear of the other can hold people back and shows the rewards that are on offer when we simply let go. Short piece "Moved" is a fictional illustration of contextual differences, with a juxtaposition of two characters who have a different attitude to wind because of their backgrounds. Similar themes are on display in one pager "I Imagine You" where what might seem perverse to you and me is in fact the first sign of cooling off for a couple whose love life is already extreme. Eight liner "If the Pen is the Penis" brings home the similarity between literary creation and the act of conceiving a child in a way that is witty and engaging, while not labouring the metaphor. "Touch the Rod" is similarly slanted, possibly hinting at the health benefits of masturbation, or perhaps with a make love not war agenda.

"Martha" is in some ways a replay of "Craw", with a young woman's burgeoning sexuality seen by her male relatives as something of which to be afraid if it cannot be controlled or restrained. One cannot help but feel sorry for Martha, given the way in which others react to the changes she is going through, and in this way perhaps the story can serve as a metaphor for society's approach to female sexuality and the position of young women. The first person narrator of "Tit" is infatuated with that part of the female body and has the words to catalogue his obsession and the many ways in which it manifests. Normality is the exception rather than the rule in "The Freaks", with a man who can only feel exceptional and valued in the company of those who are emphatically not like him. Poem "Cruelty" gives us a word picture of a man who can only be turned on by something most of us would regard as shameful, Barker noting that 'nature is even crueller than politics'.

Having entered an unhappy marriage to escape her family, Ellie finds a new use for her wooden "Dollie" and lives alone and entirely happy until a ripe old age. There is a feeling of the triumphant about this story, that the protagonist is not willing to simply accept her misfortunes, that she finds a way out and discovers that, ultimately, she doesn't need anybody else. A photographer likes to take pictures of penises for "The Collection", the story celebrating the diversity of the male member while in the figure of the narrator presenting us with a character whose motives are more ambiguous than he would possibly like us to believe. "What May Not Be Shown" opens with a series of illustrations of cultural differences, but then moves on to mark the things that are truly abhorrent to us all, those that come via the slaughterhouse and the mortuary. Although his words feel declamatory, Barker appears to be deriding our supposedly finer feelings, asking us to embrace all of life, even that which our sensibilities shy away from.

"Two Views from a Window" relates the conversation between a disabled man and his dog as they watch the woman in a flat on the other side of the road get fucked by her prodigiously endowed lover, one witness relying on sight and the other on smell, so that we get overlapping impressions. It's a bawdy, Rabelaisian exercise that drags the reader along gleefully to the marvellous and ironic end note, with plenty of imagery to indulge our prurience and a soupçon of reflection to add season. "Men in the Aisles of Supermarkets" are fantasising about sex with other men, in supermarkets and pretty much anywhere else. This poem celebrates the sexuality of gay men and its diversity, but at the same time there is an element of sadness to the text, an awareness of the gap between fantasy and reality, the demands of social conformity. Hardy is engaged in sexual archaeology in "A Blessing", his fetish transmuted into an occupation much to his delight, and that of the reader who can't help but feel enjoyment at the openness of Hardy's engagement with his subject matter, the freedom from guilt and convention.

The female protagonist of "Unrequited" is haunted by sexually violent dreams of her dead husband, who she never loved, and her exorcism takes the form of a realisation about the link between violence and unrequited passion. This is an interesting piece for the way in which Barker takes a trope of the horror genre and turns it on its head, though I'm not quite sure that I can agree with his character's final inferences - to my mind men seem quite capable of violence regardless of whether they're being well fucked or not. "Another Genesis" gives us an alternative account of the creation story and what went on in the Garden of Eden, one that is rather more sympathetic to the serpent than the accepted text. It is a fascinating exercise in turning things head over heels, one that questions those truths we take for granted and which have shaped western society and by extension the world regardless of our belief in them. "Inside Out (Wasteland)" concerns a man with a magical butt hole, the story a piece of weirdness for its own sake, with imagery that redefines our posterior and its role (I'm thinking of the shit and come up smelling of roses analogy). Fifteen word poem "I Have My Art" is pretty much a zen Koan, or the Barker equivalent, but at the same time I guess it does offer some invaluable advice to the pioneer in artistic endeavour.

Perhaps the saddest story in the collection, abandoned by her father at an impressionable age, "Aurora" has embraced sexual degradation, allowing herself to be used by men. It is a simple word picture of a damaged personality, but the final line pulls out the rug from under the reader's feet and shows us how this child-woman really feels about her lot. "Whistling in the Dark" concerns the reason a woman has for changing her gynaecologist, and is rather slight unless you take the title as a metaphor for the ways in which even experienced men guess at the vagaries of the female body. "The Common Flesh" iterates the differences between cock and cunt, before remarking upon the commonality of death. It is a truism, but aside from Barker's provocative wording, a truth that is slightly banal. "Mr. Fred Coady Professes His Undying Love for His Little Sylvia" gives us details of the relationship between a large man and his wife, a midget, including what goes on between them sexually. A true confession piece it sucks you in with a wealth of prurient detail, the stuff we would never be so gauche as to ask though most of us are dying to know, but underlying that is a current of sadness, an awareness that not everything here is fated to end happily and maybe, just maybe, the narrator is fooling himself about what took place in their marriage.

"The Phone Call" gives us the text of a borderline dirty phone call, with a final line that turns the story in a different direction entirely, calling into question the roles of victim and abuser to the reader's delight. In "The Multitude" a man is sexually aroused by the predations of an insect swarm, the story another of those that exists for no real reason except to mark and celebrate the diversity of human sexual experience. Poem "A Monster Lies in Wait" is perhaps the antithesis of Nietzsche's famous aphorism about those who fight monsters, asking us to consider who the monsters truly are. In "An Incident at the Nunnery" a fanatical nun is silenced by the men of the community when they get tired of her constant denunciations of their evil ways, though one of the band of brothers could well be the Devil and their method for 'curing' her is sexual in nature and to my mind rather dubious. Parts of it read like something inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, or maybe, going from the sublime to the ridiculous. a through the peephole scenario. "The Genius of Denny Dan" tells of a man who is omnisexual and in search of the perfect, unending orgasm. Engagng as this all is, it comes with a subtext about hypocrisy and how a failure to be honest about our sexual feelings can cost us so much. Final story "A Night's Work" is a series of dreams about creativity that unfolds rather like a set of Russian dolls, marking the fact that whatever we can put into words will never truly capture the splendour of the vision that inspired it.

Accompanying the text, as already remarked, are a number of black and white line drawings by the author, pictures of men and other beasts with absurdly large cocks, erect and spurting, like a Robert Mapplethorpe of visual art, and definitely cause for concern when you are reading the book on public transport where anyone can look over your shoulder and take offence at what they see. Barker is back on form, and while this might not be exactly what you expect from him, the book is an obvious addition to his oeuvre, a volume that looks perfectly at home on a shelf with The Books of Blood and their kindred. 'Tales of Love, Lust & Everything In Between' is what it says on the cover and that's what we get. While individually some of the stories might seem slight, they give you much to ponder and collectively form a whole much grander than the sum of their parts. I loved it.