“In the Hills, the Cities” (1984)

[spoilers?] Full disclosure, I remain dubious about the Clive Barker project at large, but Stephen King’s clarion blurb, “I have seen the future of horror,” still resonates enough for a fulsome career by Barker, the painter, theatrical impresario, baker, chef, chief bottle washer, and short story writer. Or, at least, short story writer is how he started when he made it to horror lit, specifically with the six-volume Books of Blood collection, before going on to write a bunch of novels, series, screenplays, etc. The slightly cringy Books of Blood credo goes, “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.” The general sense I struggle with is that I’m not sure Barker is a good short-story writer and I still believe short stories are the soul of horror literature. With some exceptions Barker’s stories tend to be uniformly long, minimum page count 30 and ranging up to near 100. No problem there—H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Aickman frequently went long too. But Barker’s stories are also just a little saggy. There’s a lot going on, including extreme violence (dubbed “splatterpunk”), but it tends to run monotonous for me. On the other hand, the things Barker dreams up are uniformly weird, unexpected, crazy, startling, and original. He’s not borrowing from old traditions, though he harks to them, sometime quite explicitly, but rather he is more shooting to create his own. This much-anthologized oddball from the first volume of the Books of Blood set is as good a place as any to start. It is set in the Soviet-era Yugoslavia—Serbia and Kosovo, I believe—and the two main characters, the “English gentlemen,” Mick and Judd, are a gay couple on a honeymoon type of road trip through central Europe. Barker is normalizing gays in this story, not sensationalizing them, or using them to add some element of horror, which is refreshing. They just are what they are—a couple who bickers passive-aggressively the way couples do on travels and then later enjoys makeup sex.

Eventually we arrive at the story’s main conceit, which is kind of hard to explain, let alone believe. Is it a spoiler to reveal the ideas? For centuries, two neighboring cities of “tens of thousands” have perfected a way of fighting in which they strap themselves together—men, women, and children, Barker emphasizes—into lumbering humanoid forms that do battle with each other in hand-to-hand (so to speak) combat, rock ‘em sock ‘em style. Useful illustrations can be found on the internet. Barker has someone explain: “Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews ... ligaments ... There was food in its belly ... there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best-voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering.” He has that right. I don’t believe it. Yes, there are certain faint echoes of the movie The Wicker Man and of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” But in general it seems beyond ridiculous to me and it’s just getting started. I was constantly distracted by the impossibility of it. The soles of the feet, consider, are made up of the biggest, heaviest men, who are smashed to pulp dead. Lots of people die even on the victorious side. Apparently it is considered an honor. Mick and Judd wander into this strange battle and find the remains of the defeated city with literally thousands of corpses. Barker is enthusiastic and gets carried away with the concept, piling on with detail (babies replicate teeth inside the mouth, stuff like that). But for me he is plainly overdrawing on his suspension of disbelief account. Good start, good middle, protracted from there—it’s no way to write a story (but what do you do anyway with ideas like this?). But you better not take my word for it. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer give “In the Hills, the Cities” their stamp of approval by including it in their estimable and valuable anthology The Weird. Barker himself picked it for Masters of Darkness, an anthology where that’s the concept, writers picking their own stories and explaining why. "In the Hills, the Cities" is all over the place. The implication is that it’s a masterpiece. My strained credulity could well be a minority view.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 1 kindle)
Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.