Book Review | Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell by Paul Kane

Late 1895. Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Dr John Watson are called upon to investigate a missing persons case. On the face of it, this seems like a mystery that Holmes might relish, as the person in question vanished from a locked room. But this is just the start of an investigation that will draw the pair into contact with a shadowy organisation talked about in whispers, known only as the Order of the Gash.

As more people go missing in a similar fashion, the clues point to a sinister asylum in France and to the underworld of London. However, it is an altogether different underworld that Holmes will soon discover—as he comes face to face not only with those followers who do the Order’s bidding on Earth, but those who serve it in Hell: the Cenobites.

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The great detective applies his inimitable intellect to a murder mystery like none other in Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell, a surprisingly credible commingling of Arthur Conan Doyle's classic characters and the soul-shredding subjects of The Scarlet Gospels. That's right, readers: Clive Barker's Cenobites are back—and they may actually have met their match.

Holmes himself has seen better days, I dare say. In the wake of the great hiatus, during which period he disappeared to mess with his nemesis, he's alive and relatively well, but without the dastardly Moriarty to match wits with, he's grown a bit bored. And as Dr Watson warns:

When Holmes grew bored, it was usually only a matter of time before he took up his old habit of drug use [...] however his penchant for his seven-percent solution of cocaine, administered via a needle he kept locked away in a polished Morocco box, was the least of my concerns after he returned, it transpired.

The black dog of Holmes' habit is troubling, to be sure, but still more worrisome to Watson is the fact that his closest acquaintance's "malaise was gaining momentum." Said detective is dismissing fascinating cases with no explanation and plying his elementary trade in plague-ridden areas. "If these were in fact efforts to feel something, to feel alive," Watson worries, "then they might well kill the man instead."

It's a relief, then, that "this dangerous road he was heading down: this terrible testing of himself" seems to cease when a couple come knocking on the door of 221B Baker Street. Laurence Cotton's brother Francis has gone missing, is the thing, and the police aren't taking his disappearance seriously—despite the screams the housekeeper heard emerge from the loft he was last seen locking.

At the scene of the could-be crime, our chums uncover a void in the decades-old dust that suggests the involvement of a small box, and soon scent "an odd smell of vanilla" masking an undercurrent of what must be blood. From just this, Holmes is convinced that Francis has fallen victim to some dark deed indeed, but the mechanics of his murder are mysterious—as is the motive of the killer or killers—and that comes to fascinate a fellow famed for his ability to explain anything.

The Scotsman Abroad | On Barker's Bite

Remember when Clive Barker mattered? 

Time was, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Stephen King and his kith and kin as one of the heavy hitters of popular horror. In the late '80s and all through the '90s, his seamless weaving of the stuff of sex together with the inevitable perversity of death led to a string of critical and commercial successes including Weaveworld, Cabal, Imagica and Everville. But over the years, the man became a brand. The macabre amalgam of visceral violence and exotic erotica that set his narratives apart from the pack at the start had, by the time of its samey culmination in Coldheart Canyon, diminished his fiction. Barker was about to lose his bite—such that it was a relief, really, when he changed gears completely.

As a long time admirer of the aforementioned author, and a die-hard fan of the Hellraiser franchise—up to and including the stupidest sequels—I had high hopes for The Scarlet Gospels, which sees Clive Barker taking ownership of the High Priest of Pain for the first time since, I think, the first of the films.

If anything, my expectations were raised when, after something like a decade on the drawing board, The Scarlet Gospels saw the light of day this past May—and what do you know? It was relatively well received. Most of the reviews I perused were good going on great, so when I finally got around to reading Barker's first proper horror novel—excepting Mister B. Gone and the Abarat books—in nearly fifteen years, I was basically beside myself with excitement.

And you know what? That first chapter? Fucking. Fantastic. Classic Clive Barker.

But from there on out, I'm afraid, The Scarlet Gospels is "business as usual, at best." And the rest of the time, "it reads like an unsightly reminder of a writer past his prime."

Strange Horizons has my full review. Please do click on through.

Book Review | Chiliad: A Meditation by Clive Barker

Welcome to the world of Chiliad, an astonishing two-part novella by the incomparable Clive Barker. A brilliantly composed narrative filled with unforgettable images, this visionary meditation on time, history, and human suffering is surely one of Barker's most distinctive — and distinguished — creations.

Chiliad consists of two interrelated stories, stories filtered through the melancholy imagination of a narrator perched on the banks of a river that flows backward and forward through time. The first movement, 'Men and Sin,' takes place in the millennial year of 1000 AD. The second, 'A Moment at the River s Heart,' occurs exactly one thousand years — the length of a 'chiliad' — later, as the new millennium approaches. At the heart of these stories are two savage, seemingly inexplicable atrocities, each of which reaches across the centuries to reflect and connect with the other. As the narratives unfold and time becomes increasingly permeable, Barker creates a dark, sorrowful portrait of the ancient human capacity for cruelty and destruction. Writing always with lucidity and grace, he addresses a host of universal concerns, among them the power of guilt and grief, and the need to find signs of meaning in the chaos that surrounds us. In the process, he examines the endless chain of consequences that inevitably proceed from a single act of violence.

At once hugely expansive and deeply personal, Chiliad is a compact masterpiece, a resonant reminder of Barker's ability to create fictional worlds that enrich and illuminate our own.

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For more than twenty years, Clive Barker was terrifically prolific. During that period, a year without a new novel by the author seemed—to me at least—incomplete. Sadly, when Barker started work on the Abarat, that was that. Since the first part of the series was released in 2002 we've seen, for various reasons, just two sequels and one short novel in the form of Mister B. Gone. 

That may change in 2015 with the belated publication of The Scarlet Gospels: a return to Barker's beginnings by many measures. A sequel, indeed, to one of his very earliest novellas—no less than The Hellbound Heart, which found fame later when it became the basis of the film Hellraiser. Before that, though... this: an amoral meditation on humanity's spiralling history of violence which certainly whet my appetite for more from the man who helped define dark fantasy.

Chiliad, to be sure, is neither a novel nor new. Rather, it is an arrangement of two tales intertwined with a maudlin metatext about an author who has lost his voice, and though its relevance today remains great, both 'Men and Sin' and 'A Moment at the River's Heart' were previously published in Revelations, the Douglas E. Winter-edited anthology of short stories intended to celebrate the millennium.

That said, the overarching narrative seems particularly prescient here, at this point in Barker's career. We find our unnamed narrator mid mid-life crisis, having forsaken all his old haunts and habits because of a bone-deep despair; a hateful malaise that says, to paraphrase: all he had in his life, and all he had sought to make, was worthless.

But at the river, things are different.

Coming Back to Comic Books | Pinhead Presents Strange Adventures

As I outlined in my introduction to this semi-regular new feature, much as I love the comic book medium, its nature is such that - short a collection or an accumulation of monthlies, for instance, or some other thing I feel warrants discussion - there's not really enough meat about most single issues to justify full-blown reviews, a la the pieces you're seen on Conan and The Frost Giant's Daughter and Red Sonja: Blue so far.

But that isn't to say I can't have a bit of a burble about the comics I've been reading of late, before I forget all about them as I'm prone to, so today... today we're going to try a couple of quick hits.

How d'you like them apples? :)

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First up, so as to ease you strictly bookish sorts in all gentle-like, maybe a month or so ago Vertigo put out the first bumper-sized issue of Strange Adventures, an anthology featuring a fairly astonishing array of talent -- including none other than Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Lauren Beukes, whose batty but brilliant Zoo City was among my highlights of last year. Now her contribution to Strange Adventures, "All the Pretty Ponies," didn't turn out to be my favourite of the nine short comics gathered together in these pages, but it's entertaining enough, and I think reminiscent of Beukes' thematic preoccupations.

The tale of a technology called MindRide, which essentially allows anyone with the credits to take a temporary time-share in another person's life, "All the Pretty Ponies" is a decidedly familiar fable about identity: about yuppies who want to get down and dirty with the poor, and poor people who would give anything - literally anything - to trade places with the upper-class asshats who rent out their minds to see and feel and smell how hard the other half have it. Beukes packs a lot of ideas into what is a very short space, in truth - Beukes' ambition is a credit to her - while artist Inaki Miranda bestows upon "All the Pretty Ponies" pencils so clean as to seem... oddly sterile.

More satisfying, I think, are the humbler, self-contained stories in Strange Adventures -- for instance the curious, heart-breaking beauty of "Ultra the Multi-Alien" by Jeff Lemire of Sweet Tooth fame (more on which in another instalment of CB2CB), and "Partners" by Peter Milligan, who I have fond memories of for his time on Human Target and Animal Man before that, and who invests in "Partners" - the bittersweet story of a friend like no other - an earnest, back-to-basics sensibility that really rang true with me.

On the other hand, I didn't find a lot to like about "Spaceman" by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, the creative team behind 100 Bullets. In fact I don't think there's really not a lot to it to like. If the pair mean to develop "Spaceman" into a series, which for some reason I'm under the impression they do, I'll say they've got their work cut out for them, turning this ugly thing into something people could actually care for.

Then again, I didn't appreciate 100 Bullets immediately, either, so perhaps the last story in Strange Adventures doesn't close out the anthology on such a down note after all. Even if it had, I'd still strenuously recommend that you hunt down a copy of this value-packed first issue. A couple of minor disappointments aside, it certainly makes for a stonking good start to a series I can only hope lasts longer than most such multiplicitous endeavours.

From a comic I have my fingers firmly crossed for, to another new series whose fate I feel almost totally apathetic about: from Boom! Studios, Clive Barker's Hellraiser. There've only been three issues to date, and one brief prelude which you can read for free here, yet already I feel like this is not an ongoing for me. First and foremost, I really, really, really don't like the artwork. Though I understand that there are some who would and will champion it, the work of former Hellblazer penciller Leonardo Manco reminds me a great deal of Barker's own paintings, and truth be told, I don't much appreciate those, either. Much as I can get behind the idea of such authenticity, in practice Manco's lurid dirty/filthy/nasty roughs leave me, alas, entirely unmoved.

Tim Bradstreet's covers, however, are incredible. Go on - embiggen that thing!

As to the tale itself, well... this might surprise you, but I'm actually a pretty devout fan of the Hellraiser franchise, not to mention the other work of Ser Clive Barker. I know the sequels got pretty terrible, particularly after the Hellraiser series went direct-to-DVD, but all the same, I had my modicum of repulsive fun with them, and that was alright. I even met Doug Bradley once, and that was alright too.

Anyway!

In and of itself, the premise of this comic book is interesting enough. It wisely disposes of the mythos beyond the second Hellraiser flick, Hellbound, and sets in motion two interconnected narratives. In the first, twenty years after the events of that film, Kirsty Cotton has become a bit of a crazy Cenobite obsessive. In fact she's gotten a whole gang of survivors together, and when someone tips them off as to the location of a certain Cenobite artefact, off they pop - but of course they do! Meanwhile, back at the hell-ranch, Pinhead seems to have tired of the myriad pleasures of forbidden flesh. He wants to be a man again; just a dude without a thousand needles stuck in his skull, you know? And that's not a lot to ask, is it? Sadly, the other Cenobites don't seem particularly pleased about Pinhead's surprising change of heart...

Particularly given Clive Barker's seal of approval and indeed input in the plot, I'm nominally interested in seeing where all this funny business is headed. Sure enough it's a novel direction for the comic to take, but I'm afraid that three-and-a-bit issues in, the execution (no pun intended) of Boom! Studios' Hellraiser ongoing leaves me quite, quite cold, all told.

So I'm not in. But I'm not out just yet either. What I'll do is hang about till the end of this first arc, at the least... see if Monfette and Manco's collaboration grows on me at all. I just can't say I'm holding out a hell of a lot of hope.

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That's it for this edition of Coming Back to Comic Books, everyone. The good and the bad, eh? Maybe next time we'll do the ugly, make it three for three!

News Flashing | Clive Barker and the Absent Rainbow

I do believe I've mentioned Revelations here on The Speculative Scotsman before - see, no, I don't mean the book in the bible, why would you think that? I mean Revelations, the website, which superfans Phil and Sarah Stokes have been keeping on behalf of the great Clive Barker since the cenobites were but a pinhole of a twinkle in his eye. They have unprecedented access to the man himself, and with great power, as we all know, comes great responsibility. Thus, every couple of months, Phil and Sarah sit down with Clive to talk about what the man's been up to in the intervening period.

The last interview was conducted in August, published in November, and read - by me - just there. And it appears, after years of yammering about art and the like, there's finally been some book news: Clive has delivered the final manuscript of Abarat 3, the third volume of a quartet a decade in the making and now set to run for five books rather than the requisite four. Still no publication date, but the publishers - the Joanna Cotler imprint of HarperCollins in the States - have been champing at the bit for this book, so I'd wager we see it sooner rather than later: this Winter or next Spring seem likely plausible release windows.

But wait, there's more.

The thing Clive had been working on instead of Abarat 3, "a home for all the previously uncollected short stories together with a whole bunch of new pieces of short fiction" called Black is the Devil's Rainbow, has suffered something of a setback. Evidently sick of waiting on delivery of the final new story in the collection, HarperCollins' adult division - Clive's publisher since 1986 - have called it quits with the Weaveworld author. Not. Good. News.

Sounds like the man's been through the ringer, rather. He has my sympathies.

At least there's something positive to report as regards The Scarlet Gospels, a new Pinhead project that grew from a novella into something far larger: writer Mark Miller - no, not that one - came onboard last Summer to edit the 2,000 page-long manuscript which Clive had completed, saying "the book is well on its way. The Scarlet Gospels are almost here."

Which would be ever so nice, in truth. I love Clive Barker's work, and I'm a patient guy - if you're going to take five years to finish your next novel, that fine... just don't go promising we'll all be reading whatever it is in a few short months when the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, they say, and still offer better odds than the release date of Clive Barker's next book would fetch.

Anyway. Grumpy hat off, hopeful hat... on. Abarat 3 is where?