By C. Rommial Butler
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Stephen King helped catapult Clive Barker into worldwide fame with this line:
“I have seen the future of horror… and his name is Clive Barker.”
He was right.
Where King helped make horror wildly popular in the 1980s, Barker changed the genre in ways that neither King nor anyone else ever could. He took on subjects and created fantasy worlds that merit him an innovator of the insane, equal to Poe or Lovecraft.
The inversion of the value system of the monster and the man—the troubling question: who's the real monster?—should be credited first to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but Barker takes it to a level of introspection and cultural reflection far beyond anything which came before.
In the novel Cabal, on which the cult classic film Nightbreed was based, Barker explores the idea that the denizens of Midian, creatures of the night, have their own unique consciousness worthy of consideration.
The use of the name Midian is an obvious Biblical reference. Moses flees to Midian from Egypt to escape punishment for killing an overseer who beats one of the Hebrew slaves. There he marries and raises a family until the burning bush tells him to free the peoples of Israel from their bondage.
Later, however, the once fruitful and beneficent relation between Israel and Midian sours, and the descendants of Moses destroy what remains of the Midianites.
We must wonder if Barker meant to invert the values which Abrahamic religion purports to have brought through fire and sword to the pagan horde, or if he is more appropriately pointing out that, ultimately, those who bring the pain can never really live up to their hype.
In other words, can they ever practice what they preach, a loving communion with divinity, through the excoriation and destruction of the creation supposedly wrought thereby?
In the character of the psychiatrist, played to perfection by David Cronenberg in Nightbreed, we have an example of the mask of sanity hiding the true monster while those who only wish to be left in peace are persecuted.
Barker's beautiful wordplay and his tendency to go off on philosophical tangents is what attracted me most to his stories, and though we might at first mistake him, in these early works, as taking a side, I think he ultimately comes around to admitting the ambiguity of morality itself, the way it conditions our monstrous instincts to the ends of self-perpetuating ideologies as well as the tyrants and sycophants who abuse others through them.
In Cabal we see the seeds of this ambiguity in the way the Midianites fail to save themselves or their god, Baphomet, from destruction and dispersion by their insistence on preserving their way of life at any cost.
An ironic take if we consider the Biblical narrative, which details the undue trials of the tribes of Israel escaping slavery in Egypt, and then later excuses their pogroms against those they would go on to conquer, under the banner of the same god.
The last coherent narrative we get from Barker on the subject is Mister B. Gone, where Heaven and Hell are just doing business as usual, and we poor humans are caught in the middle.
This is Barker’s last coherent narrative because he did not complete Abarat or The Scarlet Gospels.
I can’t blame Mark Miller, who ghost-wrote some part of those works due to Barker's health troubles. How could Miller hope to wrest from those stories Barker's profundity of thought, which is such an intrinsic and essential aspect of his work, and so uniquely personal?
Up through Mister B. Gone we see a trajectory of thought too often unexplored which I have mentioned elsewhere here at Horror to Culture: the ambiguity of moral feeling versus the less certain but more practical approach of exercising case by case discernment.
I hope Barker recoups and finishes this train of thought to whatever his uniquely personal logical end may be, but even if he never does, I'm grateful—if not alternately terrified and bemused—for the time I was able to spend in his brilliant mind.
However, there is no better example than Barker to explore the ethics of ghost writing.
Regardless of the pass I'm giving to Miller here, The Scarlet Gospels was a best seller because Clive Barker's name was on it, not because of Miller's writing.
To have published a book in Barker's name not completely written by the man himself is a far greater crime against the audience than say, having someone write an autobiography of a prominent figure—a business mogul or some such—and just letting him or her say they wrote it themselves.
Not only is it a cheat, and a lie, it's just plain wrong. From us is stolen that aforementioned philosophical development which can only ever have come from Barker, and which only a small portion of writers from any generation are fit to exemplify.
So how much more awful would it be to feed a machine all of Barker's work and have it churn out a mimic?
I will not belabor the point, dear reader, except to ask that you mull it over, and consider supporting those of us who refuse to mar the sacred process of writing literature by resorting to AI as a storyteller.
We needn't have anything against artificial intelligence, but rather against our selves for using another mind to reflect a disingenuous and ultimately inaccurate version thereof.
Now if AI were to develop a conscious awareness like ours, we could excuse its attempts on its own behalf!
Wouldn't that be an alien perspective worthy of the likes of Clive Barker?
