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Roots and Beginnings: “In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker
Every writer, I think, can name something that’s more than their favorite piece of writing – to them, it is writing. It’s what writing feels like, looks like, works like, tastes like, sounds like, acts like. It’s the book or story or chapter or passage or essay or article or blog post or whatever it is that does exactly what you want to do every time you sit down and start typing. And no matter how many times you return to it, it will always reveal itself to you anew, because even though you feel so very close to it, it is not yours. It came from the mind of another, and so will always be alien and fascinating. From the mind of another it speaks with your voice.
“In the Hills, the Cities” is the concluding story in volume one of Clive Barker’s landmark series of short-story collections, Books of Blood. As you might expect I came to this a lot later than to any of the other items in this series of posts – my junior year in high school, I believe. This was right around the time that Bro. Stephen, my English teacher, began encouraging me to think about writing when I grew up, but I had no intention of doing so, and wouldn’t for another six or seven years. But in this story I still recognized something I’d never seen before, if that makes sense. Something dark and terrible and true. If I were ever to write, this would be why.
Barker was young and hungry when he wrote the Books of Blood, living a doubly closeted life not just as a gay man (which he revealed with some fanfare in 1996) but also as an escort (which he revealed with obvious lingering shame on his Facebook account just a few months ago). In that light the central relationship in the story, a gay couple whose relationship is on the rocks as they tour the Balkans on vacation, is all the more fascinating; certainly the explicit sex scene between them that starts the story was something of a declaration of intent not to hew to the genre’s paradoxical conservatism. As a young man unaware of any of this it just felt bracing and fresh when I came across it – and so zesty and uplifting for the characters that it only heightened the horror to come.
Heh, “heightened the horror”: That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? “In the Hills, the Cities” is Barker’s skewed body-horror take on the giant monster. The stunning image above tips the story’s hand, I suppose, but I still think it takes nothing away from the relentless slow burn of Barker’s prose, the way he slowly cuts from the protagonists to a pair of remote nearby villages, adding detail to detail, hint to hint, foreshadowing to foreshadowing, strapping them on top of one another until the oncoming horror towers into the sky, unique and inevitable.
I think this passage best encapsulates what Barker’s doing here. Note his ability to be allusive and evocative and sledge-hammer blunt depending on the needs of the moment, often within a single sentence – a perfect mimicry of the mind’s ability to take in a certain amount of horror, then shut down to prevent overload, then open back up to take more.
Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was recovering from its first convulsions. It stared, with a thousand eyes, at the ruins of its ritual enemy, now spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the impacted ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from the sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded the stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept its balance, even as a common insanity, woken by the horror at its feet, surged through its sinews and curdled its brain. The order went out: the body thrashed and twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo, and fled into the hills.
As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed between the car and the sun, throwing its cold shadow over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his tears, and Judd, his eyes narrowed against the sight he feared seeing around the next bend, only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute. A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.
Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance out towards the north-east, he would have seen Popolac’s head, the vast, swarming head of a maddened city, disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched into the hills. He would have known that this territory was beyond his comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this corner of Hell. But he didn’t see the city, and he and Mick’s last turning-point had passed. From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin, they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.
If you’re going to write, I think when I read and re-read and re-re-re-re-read this, this is how, this is why. Write to show people something they can neither bear to look at nor bear to look away from. Write to build something astonishing and send it crashing back down. Write to change the reader the way this story changed me.