Mandy / ****

There is absolutely no denying that director Panos Cosmatos made precisely the movie he wished to when he made Mandy. A movie almost crafted from the ground up for the midnight crowd, Mandy opens in a dreamlike state, coasting  through wilderness to the sounds of a King Crimson song before settling into the hypnotic, quiet rhythms of the relationship between a lumberjack (Nicolas Cage) and his girlfriend Mandy. But when a religious cult breaks up their happy home, Mandy goes from calm to brutal, embracing all of its heavy metal iconography and soundscape and then some, delivering blood-drenched violence all done with the same style of that opening half. It’s all beautifully shot, incredibly colored, operatic to the extreme, and made with little else in mind than those aspects. Does that make Mandy good? Well, that’s up to the audience, I guess. But it’s undeniably the movie that Cosmatos set out to make, because Mandy isn’t really like anything else out there, for better and for worse.

The first half of Mandy calls to mind the dreamlike atmosphere of a David Lynch movie,  which is a comparison I know gets overused anytime a film does anything slightly surreal. But with its slow fades to black, lingering shots, saturated color, and muted dialogue, nothing else really conveys what it’s like to watch Mandy as it immerses you into its mood. Not content to only create a visually astonishing pile of images, though, Cosmatos also works hard to establish an incredible soundscape, layering on composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score until watching Mandy becomes like escaping into a trancelike state. Even when the cult rears its head and Cosmatos lets its leader lay out his philosophy, it’s done in such a hypnotic way that you feel yourself falling under the film’s spell.

All of which seems like it would make the film’s transition to spectacular violence all the more jarring, but somehow, it doesn’t. Instead, it feels inevitable and of a piece of the rest of the movie, especially given how Jóhannsson’s score emphasizes its metal aspects all the more as the movie becomes something like the nightmare child of Boris Vallejo and Heavy Metal. Mandy approaches its violence like it approaches its visuals – more is more, baby, and it’s better to swing for the fences and make an impression. And oh, lord, does Mandy make an impression, splattering the screen with fountains of blood, brutal slayings, and nightmarish creatures.

Which, of course, brings us to Nicolas Cage, who’s harnessed perfectly here, steering into the insanity of it all without ever blinking or holding back. Equally at home in the restrained idyllic first half and the blood-drenched second half, Cage is having a blast here, and Cosmatos uses that over-the-top ability of his to perfection. By the time he’s shoving his face into a pile of cocaine after killing an aroused lizard creature who was watching porn in the next room, it all feels about in keeping with the rest of the movie, and that’s before the chainsaws get involved. (Yes, that says chainsaws, plural.)

I’m still not sure if Mandy is particularly good; that first half is so, so slow, no matter how beautiful it is; beyond that, the second half so excessive and insane that it’s hard to think of it all as a cohesive story of any traditional sort. What’s more, it’s definitely a film whose primary goal is its style; Mandy is, at its core, a revenge film, and doesn’t have much else on its mind. But when you judge it not as a novel story but as a visual experience, it’s so unlike much else out there, and so hypnotic and weirdly beautiful, and so committed to its unique vision, that I can’t help but admire it for all it accomplishes. Is it good? Man, when it looks like this and creates a world like this, does “good” even matter?

IMDb

Bedfellow, by Jeremy C. Shipp / *** ½

Jeremy C. Shipp’s Bedfellow is such a compelling, intriguing premise, and it hooks you in so effortlessly, that it’s all the more frustrating when the book just sort of…ends. It’s not that Shipp gives us an ambiguous ending, or leaves us with questions; it’s that he sets us up for a third act that never arrives, ending the book without any sense of conclusion or finality, and leaving you deeply unsatisfied. And that’s incredibly frustrating, because for a while, Bedfellow is a truly bizarre, disturbing ride.

As Bedfellow opens, the Lund family is dealing with a most unusual house-breaker – that is, one who’s coming through the window while they’re all sitting there watching TV. But after a bit of confusion, Hendrick, the family patriarch, calms everyone down. After all, this is just Marvin, everybody – you know, Marvin? The one who saved our son Tomas from choking tonight? He’s just needing a place to sleep off his drinking, and we can help with that, right? So of course Hendrick’s wife Imani and his older daughter Kennedy all accede to that. Simple enough, as a start.

But what about the next morning, when everyone is commenting on how they’ve known Marvin ever since he helped Tomas with a hurt leg several years ago? Or when they start talking about how long Marvin and Hendrick have worked together? Because, see, with each new chapter, exactly what the Lund family’s connection is to Marvin keeps changing, getting stronger and stronger, and the only ones who know are the readers. Shipp keeps slowly evolving that relationship, doling out the revelations in passing comments or old memories, and only gradually helping us to understand that whoever – or whatever Marvin is – he seems to be able to rewrite the past to make the present fit. And that means no one around him ever notices.

But Marvin’s harmless, right? Well, apart from his weird fixation on a nightmarish story about a duck with knife blades for a bill. Or the “miracle” he keeps promising. Or the gaps in people’s memories. Well, okay, maybe Marvin isn’t harmless…but what in the hell does he want?

That’s the ongoing question of Bedfellow, along with exactly how Marvin does what he does, and what happens when it all unravels. But all of those things are things that Shipp himself seems uninterested in, building all of the tensions to a head, then letting out one bit of horrific release before abruptly ending the story in a way that doesn’t really resolve anything. And while there’s an argument to be made that leaving the story this open-ended aids in its unease and atmosphere, never answering any of our questions and leaving us baffled as to what Marvin and what he wants, that doesn’t really help Bedfellow feel more complete.

And that’s frustrating, because I loved the slow unraveling of reality that Shipp creates here. Yes, the book takes its time peeling back layer after layer of reality, but given the strange conceit that Shipp’s working with, that can be forgiven. And by the time we hit the second major act, when Marvin unveils his “miracle,” things get even more bizarre and unsettling, sending the story into even more bizarre territory. All of which would be great without the deeply dissatisfying ending – or lack thereof – that ends up making you feel like you only were given two-thirds of a good story. Not that we need answers, but that we need closure and conclusion – that’s the problem with Bedfellow, and it’s a frustrating and big enough issue that it made me put down the book not eager to talk about how weird and mind-bending it was, but warning people not to read it without being prepared for an anticlimax for the ages – which, in the end, tells you what you need to know about the book.

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A Collapse of Horses, by Brian Evenson / **** ½

It’s hard to convey the feeling of reading Brian Evenson’s stories to someone who hasn’t read them. I once described him as if Edgar Allan Poe stories were written by Cormac McCarthy (albeit with punctuation), and that’s not necessarily the worst description out there. Like Poe, Evenson’s writing dives into psychologically complex and broken narrators, giving us stories whose veracity and reliability is hard to pin down, and making the mental state of the narrator the story in of itself.

But there’s more to Evenson than just unreliable narrators. Indeed, what makes his stories so haunting and unsettling is the way that he hints at larger worlds and nightmares without ever overexplaining or clarifying every detail. We never know why the narrator of “A Report” has been imprisoned, or his ultimate fate, or even the nature of what’s going on in the next cell – but the story works not in spite of these things, but because of them, using the unanswered questions to enhance the unreality and unease of the situation. We don’t know exactly what happens to the milquetoast reluctant tourist of “A Seaside Town,” but we know it’s wrong on some fundamental level. We don’t know what’s in the basement glimpsed in the childhood of the protagonist of “Past Reno,” but we see the way that lack of certainty has echoed forward throughout his life.

In other words, Evenson isn’t using ambiguity to raise plot questions – indeed, he has little interest in exploring the central questions of his book. Did the narrator of “Click” commit a crime? Unknown. Is the answer to the science-fiction murder mystery “The Dust” the right one? Maybe, but maybe not. No, what Evenson is interested in is undermining our perceptions of what’s real and true – in undermining our sense of reality and our ability to trust that our senses and our minds are capable of interpreting the world around us. That’s maybe most directly addressed in the title story, in which the narrator continually is either running from the reality of the world around him, or else being asked to not believe in the reality of it – and Evenson doesn’t give us an answer one way or the other.

If all of that makes these stories sound unsatisfying or unfulfilling, I don’t mean to give that impression. Evenson’s stories are masterpieces of mood and atmosphere, building a strange, unsettling world in only a few pages, to say nothing of creating complex narrators whose mental states are both compelling and disturbing. Their goal is not to tell clear, concise stories; their goal is to leave you feeling as though reality is slipping away from you, creating horror not on a visceral or gory level, but on a more existential one that lingers with you long after the short burst of any given tale.

Evenson is not a conventional horror author by any means. His prose is jagged and stark; his worlds alien and hard to grab onto; his characters fractured and distressed. The horror he gives you doesn’t come from killers (though they’re here) or creatures (although they, too, have a part to play), but something deeper and more human. This is literary horror, yes, but not literary horror that’s ashamed of its genre trappings – instead, it is horror with a focus all its own. And if you’re open to that, you’re in for one of the great horror writers of modern times – but be prepared for his tales to get under your skin and stay there for a very long time.

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Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky / *****

It’s hard to know exactly how to describe Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Russian science-fiction classic Roadside Picnic in any way that can convey the haunting, oppressive, surreal mood of the novel. Made up of four sections, each separated by periods of time, the novel unfolds in a small town near an area called the Zone, which was left behind after an alien visitation unwitnessed by any humans – indeed, the only evidence of their arrival and presence was these leftover Zones, scattered around the globe. But in the small North American town of Harmont, where the novel unfolds, men known as “stalkers” lead expeditions into the area (some legal, some not) to retrieve the alien leftovers for profit.

But what exactly are these leftovers? What was their original purpose? Study them though they might, the scientists have only barely begun to understand anything about these objects. “I’m absolutely convinced that in the vast majority of cases we’re using sledgehammers to crack nuts,” says a scientist at one point, illustrating how infuriating and bewildering it is to be so close to mind-expanding technology, but unable to know anything about it.

And that all goes double for the Zone, a bizarre, nightmarish area whose outward normality belies bizarre rules, deadly traps, bending gravity, and more. These are areas in which normal rules no longer apply, where the very rules of science seem to no longer hold true. But why are these Zones here? Are they testing us? Are they windows into a larger world? Or, as the same scientist says, are they simply the refuse and trash of aliens who stopped for a roadside picnic on our earth, and saw us as ants and animals – not even worth speaking to?

That’s a bleak philosophical backdrop to a novel, but seems fitting for a novel written in 1972 Russia – after all, this is a culture known for its weary, laughing acceptance of all the cruelties of life, and Roadside Picnic is no different, American setting or not. Whether the book is a critique of the Russian system or an allegory for the corruption of capitalism or simply a science fiction story, I leave for each reader to decide for themselves; yes, there’s a long history of censorship of the novel, but as Boris Strugatsky explains in the fascinating afterword, it was never quite clear exactly what was wrong with the novel, other than maybe its tone. But whatever the deeper meaning, Roadside Picnic ultimately feels like humanity coming to terms with its own insignificance, and trying to make peace with what that says about us. Are we just base animals, scrabbling for money and self-interest? Could we be more than that?

All of this makes Roadside Picnic sound existential and crushing, I know; indeed, if you’ve seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s film version of the novel, Stalker, you might expect something weighty and heady like that. Instead, Roadside Picnic is remarkably down-to-earth, engaging with its ideas through drunken conversations and private musings, all while living through its primary lead, a stalker named Red whose incursions into the Zone are tense, unnerving, and unsettling, all without much ever truly happening. Indeed, one of the things that makes Roadside Picnic so effective is the way it suggests so much without ever explaining anything, allowing the reader’s mind to fill in the gaps of this world around the edges, while giving us an interesting, relatable, down-to-earth character we can empathize with. After all, all Red wants is to provide for his family, and exploring the Zone is what he’s good at.

I’m not wild about the ending of the novel in some ways, which seems like it comes from a different story entirely, eschewing the more existential and weirdly practical questions of the rest of the book for a quest for a mythical object which may or may not exist, but demands much. There’s something fascinating about where the Strugatskys choose to end the novel, though, which ties into that larger question of what exactly we are as a human race, and whether we truly can overcome our limitations. It’s a compelling ending, even if I’m not sold on the way we get there.

But even with that, it’s hard to really convey how much this strange, slight novel will stick with you, informing how you see the world and creating a haunting, grim world that you’ll think about for a long time after you finish the pages. Its ideas, its worldbuilding, its imagination, and its characters all live and breathe, giving you a novel whose ambitions and ideas linger beautifully and whose classic status is justly deserved.

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Ubik, by Philip K. Dick / *****

It’s hard to write about Philip K. Dick in general – what new can be said about a writer who was so influential and who’s inspired so much writing? And that goes doubly for Ubik, one of Dick’s most acclaimed novels. And yet, here I am, trying to describe one of the best novels written by one of the most fascinating and interesting science-fiction writers who ever lived.

Those of us who love Philip K. Dick usually concede that it’s not the craft and the prose that draws us to his work; it’s the complicated, mind-blowing plotting (usually more evident in his short stories) or the rich, thoughtful philosophical musings (a staple of his novels). Ubik is the best of both worlds, though – a head-scratching, dizzying display of plot twists, confusion, and surreal touches that all come together perfectly, all while anchoring itself in musings about the afterlife, causation, time travel, and the nature of consciousness.

Trying to describe the plotting of Ubik is a fool’s errand, but more than that, it would remove the pleasure of unraveling the book’s mysteries for yourself. Suffice to say that the book gives us a future in which company’s provide anti-psychic services in an effort to protect corporate secrets, which has led to what amounts to underground warfare between the psychics and those trying to thwart them. Into this comes a whole new talent that could change the game – but first, a most unusual contract comes across the desk of the leading anti-psychic agency, one that’s going to make the next few days exceedingly strange.

If that sounds vague, well, good – as I said, much of the pleasure of Ubik comes from unraveling all of its disparate pieces and seeing how Dick toys with his audience. But more importantly, for all of its rich plotting, Ubik is packed with fascinating world details, from a society where everything is automated and linked to your credit report to mortuaries where people are kept in a half-life state so you can speak with them for years after their death. And it’s those aspects that make the book so fascinating, as Dick plays with our ideas of the afterlife (here, he’s drawing in no small way on Tibetan beliefs) and how it will play out, but also our own self-awareness. Few authors were as fascinated by the malleable nature of reality as Dick was, and Ubik brings that in spades, as characters unravel, fall apart, and see the world devolving in front of them. The very question of “what is real?” becomes central not only to the plot, but to the lives of our heroes, as they attempt to figure out any sort of purpose or meaning to their existence.

There are better written Dick books out there (A Scanner Darkly); there are richer novels (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is my favorite); but few marry Dick’s playful side with his thoughtful as well as Ubik does. In many ways, it’s the platonic ideal of a Philip K. Dick novel, and maybe an ideal gateway into his work for those who’ve never experienced it. More than that, it’s just a blast of a read, with enough substance to satisfy those wanting a bit more than pure pulp.

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mother! / *****

No matter what you think of mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s surreal, go-for-broke horror / black comedy / allegory / surrealist exercise / cinematic experience, you certainly can’t say that Aronofsky is phoning anything in. A director who’s almost always plunged into excess and operatic style touches with glee and abandon (the sparse, stripped-down The Wrestler aside), mother! is pure Aronofsky: stylish, mind-bending, impeccably executed, and utterly, 100% unique.

None of which is to say that you’ll necessarily like this movie, to be fair. Really, mother!’s mixed reception is completely understandable, even without taking into account the film’s completely misleading and inaccurate marketing campaign. This is a film that defies easy categorization, and one that starts off as grounded, strange drama before escalating to madness and operatic allegory without ever looking back. It’s a film that’s best appreciated as an experience, taking it all in as one would a poem, and trying to interpret it all, rather than embracing it on anything close to a literal level. And that’s not something that a lot of people are comfortable with – and that goes double if you’re expecting a conventional horror film here.

But for those who are open to what Aronofsky is doing, mother! is gloriously insane and  gleefully anarchic – a reminder of what cinema and film can do that no other medium can do. Even in the early going, Aronofsky’s control of staging and mood is impeccable, but as the film hits its astonishing, chaotic final act, it becomes something wholly else: wild, careening, ambitious, surreal, terrifying, exciting, and overwhelming. And, most importantly, in Aronofsky’s hands, it becomes something captivating and unforgettable – a surreal nightmare turned real, an escalating portrait of madness, mania, and selfishness.

Much has been made out of the question of what mother! “means,” which is simultaneously a compelling question and a fully inadequate way to describe what makes the film great. Yes, there’s no denying that in many ways, the film is a religious allegory, one concerned with how our relationship with the divine is still eternally selfish and driven by our own needs; that the film deals with climate change and the way we abuse the gifts of nature is all a part of that. And yet, at the same time, couldn’t it all be a scathing look at the life of celebrities and public figures, and the difficulty in drawing a line between private and public? Or couldn’t it be a portrait of codependent relationships and what happens when you invest everything in someone else and have nothing left of your own? To which I’d say: yes, and yes! Or maybe no! So much of the joy of the film comes from the way its meaning, like so much art, is in the eye of the beholder. mother! won’t hold your hand, it won’t give you a guide; it’s up to you to decide what it means to you, and really, I’ve yet to hear a take that didn’t resonate with me.

But even though mother! all but demands you spin time unpacking and understanding it, doing so doesn’t get me any closer to unpacking the experience of watching this movie, and conveying the astonishing impact it has on a viewer. It doesn’t capture Jennifer Lawrence’s incredible performance as she reacts with confusion, bewilderment, unease, and horror at the unfolding insanity around her, nor does it capture the way Javier Bardem can embody both wrath and beneficence perfectly. It doesn’t come close to giving you a sense of the film’s gloriously dark sense of humor, as scenes constantly go in unexpected directions. (The brilliant crew at The Next Picture Show podcast did an amazing episode about the way the film evokes the work of Luis Buñuel, focusing on The Exterminating Angel; I can’t recommend it enough.) It doesn’t give you a sense of the unease as people reveal their darkest sides, as brotherly squabbles turn bloody, or movements of love become all out battles to the death. And most of all, nothing I can write can explain the excitement, uncertainty, and sheer wildness of the film’s final act, which is one of the boldest, gutsiest, and most astonishing sequences I’ve seen in years.

mother! isn’t for all tastes, pure and simple; as my friend Adam said, I bet a lot of CinemaScore people would have gone lower than F if allowed. But I’m so glad it exists; at a point where it feels like almost every movie is a reboot, a sequel, or a franchise, mother! is defiantly unique – a middle finger to easily quantifiable films and a love letter to what cinema can accomplish. No, it’s not for everyone, and that’s what makes it great. Because if it’s for you, trust me, you’re in for an experience you will never forget, and a film that helps remind you of why you fell in love with film in the first place.

IMDb

Possession / **** ½

The last time I saw Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession was back in 2012, at a midnight screening of what turned out to be the American cut of the film (something I didn’t know at the time). Watching it, I talked about how so much about the film shouldn’t work, but at the same time, it had a way of sticking with you, of haunting you with its insanity and surreal visions. And once I found out that what I saw was an attempt by American studios to turn the film into something more “conventional” (an insane idea, as you’ll understand if you’ve seen the film), I was even more intrigued by the idea of seeing the original film, to see if the flaws were in the film itself or a result of the re-edited cut.

So let me put this simply: if all you’ve seen of Possession is the American release, you haven’t really seen the film, any more than, say, if all you’ve ever seen of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was the “Love Conquers All” version. Because what was a haphazard collection of moments and scenes surrounding a nasty divorce becomes far more cohesive and emotionally coherent when presented in order, and while the film would never in a million years be viewed as “conventional”, it’s far more understandable and emotionally constructed than my first experience.

Mind you, Possession is still a surreal, bizarre experience. Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani both start the film on an acting level of basically 9.5, and then go way beyond the pale as the film continues. So all the theatrical overacting that sort of overwhelmed me on the first time is still there…but when presented in a more coherent order, it all works better, giving a through line to the emotional development that makes it all work, with each scene building off of the last (more or less).

But even that emotional intensity doesn’t quite prepare you for how purely weird Possession can be, putting all but the most Lynchian of Lynch films to shame. This is a film that’s about a nasty, bitter divorce, yes, but it’s also got espionage, murder – oh, and tentacle monsters, deployed in some most unusual ways. It’s undoubtedly an art film’s approach to divorce – it’s using its theatrics and excesses to explore the hurt and the anger and the betrayal that comes with such an end of a relationship, and it uses its horrors as a stand-in for all of it, turning the emotional pain of abandonment and the need to control one’s spouse into something more operatic and nightmarish. It’s a film in the vein of Buñuel and Polanski (especially Repulsion), but also one that clearly paved the way not only for Lynch, but people like the Coens (whose cuckolding lover in A Serious Man feels heavily inspired by a similar character here).

The result is a film that’s incredibly hard to explain, and also hard to easily “recommend” in any conventional way. It’s an incredible experience, make no doubt about it, and the emotional heft that it conveys through its surrealism is far more effective than any more conventional method would ever be. But it’s also a film that’s cranked so far over the top, and can be so aggressively strange, that it won’t work for everyone. Indeed, even as someone who loved the film a lot, there are undeniably points that I just threw my hands up and gave up on following things, or felt like the film was so unrestrained as to be a bit grueling. So, no, it’s not for all tastes.

Here’s the thing, though –  it’s telling that for those who can attune themselves to its rhythms and moods, it’s incredibly beloved, giving an emotional punch that few films can match. To me, it’s maybe one of the all-time great films about divorce, for all the pain and introspection that brings with it. But none of that makes for an easy watch – which may be part of why the film’s honesty and punch is so effective. And it says something that for all of my confusion, for all of my frustration, the film is packed with moments from the film that haunt me and I can still remember in pristine detail – a nightmarish mental and physical meltdown in a subway tunnel, the chilling reaction of a child to a crumbling marriage, a disturbing union between a woman and a monster, a brutal exchange of hatred between Neill and Adjani in the kitchen – the film bypasses all logic, all reason, and strikes right at the emotional centers of your brain. It’s the joy of art in that Lynchian sense, where you don’t need words or logic – just images, mood, and emotional heft. And that’s what Possession gives you in spades. Taken all in all, you won’t see much else like it…but you won’t be able to forget it either.

IMDb

Books of Blood (Volume 1-3), by Clive Barker / *****

For a long time, every Clive Barker book came stamped with Stephen King’s approval, in the form of a pretty stellar endorsement: “I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker.” But over the years, that stamp came to mean less and less; Barker mellowed with age, and seemed less interested in the horrors of his early books and instead focused on visually astonishing fantasy worlds (Imajica and Abarat being the obvious go-tos here). Beyond that, Barker’s health has kept him from being as prolific as he once was; as a result, his once iconic presence in the genre has faded over the years, to the point where many these days haven’t even read a Barker work at all.

And yet, when you go back to Books of Blood, the short story collection that put Barker on the map, what you’ll find is that they’re every bit as horrifying, as groundbreaking, as unclassifiable, as astonishing – in other words, every bit as great – today as they were when they first burst onto the scene. And even now, nearly thirty years after they were first published, the tales in Books of Blood have lost none of their punch – they’re still terrifying; they’re still surreal and nightmarish; they still feel like nothing written before them, and almost nothing written after them.

Books of Blood is often hailed as the starting point for the “splatterpunk” movement, and that holds true; it’s hard to think of another short story collection, much less a debut, that’s this bloody, violent, and relentlessly disturbing. But more than simply collecting violence, Barker’s astonishing imagination pushes you into places you can’t imagine, and creates worlds that succeed from the way they push reality to its breaking point. The murderer stalking the subways in “The Midnight Meat Train,” for instance, is undeniably terrifying and brutal, but he pales in comparison to the horrors waiting at the end of the train line. The deceptively simple ghost story “Sex, Death, and Starshine” gives way to a ghoulish, horrific tableau by the end; similarly, the uneasy prison horrors of “Pig Blood Blues” are just an appetizer to the bizarre visions waiting at the end.

Indeed, the biggest takeaway from Books of Blood is the awe that Barker’s imagination inspires. In some ways, it’s clear that Barker works in the tradition of Lovecraft – there’s a healthy dose of fantasy and surrealism in his horror – but even that comparison falls short from the fantastical, surreal visions he brings to bear in his stories. The disturbing parade of “The Skins of the Fathers,” the title monster of “Rawhead Rex,” and maybe best of all, the truly nightmarish battle of “In the Hills, the Cities” – all of these defy any sort of description or classification. They’re undeniably horrific visions, but these aren’t easily categorized into zombies or vampires or even Lovecraftian nightmares. No, in Barker’s mind, we mix religious imagery, deeply sexual notions, astonishing theatricality of the Guignol tradition, and so much more, all into something wholly new. And Barker’s incredible, breathtaking prose brings it all to life, putting to lie Lovecraft’s idea that certain things simply aren’t describable. No, Barker describes it all, and even seeing some of these things through prose is enough to bring the reader to the edge of madness.

But even beyond the (horrific) violence and nightmarish, boundary-pushing visions, much of what makes Books of Blood so incredible is the thematic richness of each of the stories. It’s not enough for Barker to settle for simply scaring you. No, his stories illuminate real-world ideas, using his gory theater as a way of exploring bigger ideas. From allegories for societal conflict (“In the Hills, the Cities”) or the sacrifices of civilization (“The Midnight Meat Train”), from feminists seizing power (“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”) or communities of outcasts bonding together (“The Skins of the Fathers”), from the appeal of film and escapism (“Son of Celluloid”) or the fear of primal religions (“Rawhead Rex”), Barker’s stories work on levels beyond the visceral terror and horror they bring to bear. Indeed, with Barker’s outspoken sexual politics (I can’t imagine what reading something this outspokenly gay was like in the early 80’s), fascinating views of society, and rich political ideas, Books of Blood works as much as social commentary as horror.

That being said, make no mistake: this is a horror collection, period. And to put it very simply, I think it’s one of the best – if not the best – short story horror collections ever written. These stories defy your expectations, your rules, your boundaries; they are written with a visual richness that cannot be overstated; they have imagination and sights unlike anything I’ve ever read; they are genuinely terrifying, wholly disturbing, darkly comic, surprisingly heartfelt, and nightmarishly gory. They will terrify you, they will break your brain, and they will expand what you thought horror could contain. They are every bit as good now as they ever were, and an absolute essential for any serious fan of horror fiction, period.

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