"Barker, Clive - Books of Blood 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

Clive Barker Ц Books Of Blood Vol 1

Original copyright year:1984
Version: 1.0
Date of e-text: 22/01/01
ISBN 0 356 20229 1 (Hardback)



Every body is a book of blood;
Wherever weТre opened, weТre red.
To my mother and father
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks must go to a variety of people. To my English tutor in Liverpool, Norman Russell, for his early encouragement; Pete Atkins, Julie Blake, Doug Bradley and Oliver Parker for their good advice; to Bill Henry, for his professional eye; to Ramsey Cambell for his generosity and enthusiasm; to Mary Roscoe, for painstaking translation from my hieroglyphics, and to Marie-Noelle Dada for the same; to Vernon Conway and Bryn Newton for faith, Hope and charity; and to Nanndu Sautoy and Barbara Boote at Sphere Books.
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
By Ramsey Cambell

THE BOOK OF BLOOD

THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN

THE YATTERING AND JACK

PIG BLOOD AND STARSHINE

IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES
INTRODUCTION
by Ramsey Campbell


THE CREATURE HAD taken hold of his lip and pulled his muscle off his bone, as though removing a Balaclava.Т Still with me?
HereТs another taste of what you can expect from Clive Barker: СEach man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the cityТs thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.Т
You see that Barker is as powerfully visionary as he is gruesome. One more quote, from yet another story:
СWhat would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?Т
I quote that deliberately, as a warning to the faint-hearted. If you like your horror fiction reassuring, both unreal enough not to be taken too seriously and familiar enough not to risk spraining your imagination or waking up your nightmares when you thought they were safely put to sleep, these books are not for you. If, on the other hand, youТre tired of tales that tuck you up and make sure
the night light is on before leaving you, not to mention the parade of Good Stories Well Told which have nothing more to offer than borrowings from better horror writers whom the best-seller audience have never heard of, you may rejoice as I did to discover that Clive Barker is the most original writer of horror fiction to have appeared for years, and in the best sense, the most deeply shocking writer now working in the field.
The horror story is often assumed to be reactionary. Certainly some of its finest practitioners have been, but the tendency has also produced a good deal of irresponsible nonsense, and there is no reason why the whole field should look backward. When it comes to the imagination, the only rules should be oneТs own instincts, and Clive BarkerТs never falter. To say (as some horror writers argue, it seems to me defensively) that horror fiction is fundamentally concerned with reminding us what is normal, if only by showing the supernatural and alien to be abnormal, is not too far from saying (as quite a few publishersТ editors apparently think) that horror fiction must be about ordinary everyday people confronted by the alien. Thank heaven nobody convinced Poe of that, and thank heaven for writers as radical as Clive Barker.
Not that heТs necessarily averse to traditional themes, but they come out transformed when heТs finished with them. СSex, Death and StarshineТ is the ultimate haunted theatre story, СHuman RemainsТ is a brilliantly original variation on the doppelganger theme, but both these take familiar themes further than ever before, to conclusions that are both blackly comic and weirdly optimistic. The same might be said of СNew Murders in the Rue MorgueТ, a dauntingly optimistic comedy of the macabre, but now weТre in the more challenging territory of BarkerТs radical sexual openness. What, precisely, this and others of his tales are saying about possibilities, I leave for you to judge.
I did warn you that these books are not for the faint of heart and imagination, and itТs as well to keep that in mind while braving such tales as СMidnight Meat-TrainТ, a Technicolor horror story rooted in the graphic horror movie but wittier and more vivid than any of those. СScape-GoatsТ, his island tale of terror, actually uses that staple of the dubbed horror film and videocassette, the underwater zombie, and СSon of CelluloidТ goes straight for a biological taboo with a directness worthy of the films of David Cronenberg, but itТs worth pointing out that the real strength of that story is its flow of invention. So it is with tales such as СIn the Hills, the CitiesТ (which gives the lie to the notion, agreed to by too many horror writers, that there are no original horror stories) and СThe Skins of the FathersТ. Their fertility of invention recalls the great fantastic painters, and indeed I canТt think of a contemporary writer in the field whose work demands more loudly to be illustrated. And thereТs more: the terrifying СPig-Blood BluesТ; СDreadТ, which walks the shaky tightrope between clarity and voyeurism that any treatment of sadism risks; more, but I think itТs almost time I got out of your way.
Here you have nearly a quarter of a million words of him (at least, I hope youТve bought all three volumes; heТd planned them as a single book), his choice of the best of eighteen monthsТ worth of short stories, written in the evenings while during the days he wrote plays (which, by the way, have played to full houses). It seems to me to be an astonishing performance, and the most exciting debut in horror fiction for many years.

Merseyside, 5 May 1983
THE BOOK
OF BLOOD


THE DEAD HAVE highways.