First Things First…
This is the first story in Volume Two of Barker’s Books of Blood. All the stories from Volume One that I reviewed for Geeksbury over the past year were re-reads. I can’t wait to finally read something of his for the first time again. I don’t know anything about this story, but hey, dread is one of the hallmarks of great horror, so I bet I’m gonna like it!
3 Things I Like
3. The Universality of Dread
“With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.”
Narrator
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes.”
This story makes a compelling case that we should add dread to the list.
We all fear something. We all dread.
Even those who claim they don’t, like Cheryl. She responds to Quaid’s query of “No fears? No nightmares?” with…
“No way. I’ve got a good family; I don’t have any skeletons in my closet. I don’t even eat meat, so I don’t feel bad when I drive past a slaughterhouse. I don’t have any shit to put on show.”
Well, Quaid proves she’s full of shit. He brings out her dread.
Why?
We’ll get there—that’s the best part of the story…
2. Malice
“The man had a look, in certain moods, of malice. Nothing more or less. He looked like a man with malice deep, deep in him.”
Narrator
Unlike dread, not everyone experiences malice within themselves. Anger, sure. Maybe even hatred every now and then. (Certainly far more for some than others.)
But malice?
That’s a special type of cruelty. It’s a fascination with hurting others that, thankfully, is much less common.
But Quaid has it. He has it in spades.
Unfortunately, Cheryl doesn’t recognize it. But Steve does. He sees right through Quaid and Cheryl’s new relationship. He doesn’t quite know what Quaid is up to, but he knows there’s malice behind it…
“There was another feeling; a curious sense he had that Quaid was courting Cheryl for his own strange reasons. Sex was not Quaid’s motive, he felt sure. Nor was it respect for Cheryl’s intelligence that made him so attentive. No, he was cornering her somehow; that was Steve’s instinct. Cheryl Fromm was being rounded up for the kill.”
Months later, when Quaid reveals to Steve the “experiment” he conducted on Cheryl, we follow along with Steve in a brilliant but hard-to-read section where he flips through secret photographs of Cheryl, seeing the incremental degradation of her psyche and her humanity over the course of six excruciating days , when she was locked up like an animal with nothing to eat but a hunk of meat. Meat that was repulsive to her, as a vegetarian, even in the beginning, at its most succulent, but that paradoxically doubles as both her physical salvation AND the cause of her mental cracking when she finally gorges on it to ease her hunger—after it’s days old, rancid, and littered with fly eggs and larvae.
Quaid defends himself by simply saying, “I didn’t intend to reduce her to an animal.” Yet nothing but deep-seated malice could cause someone to do this to another person—just to prove she does, indeed, experience dread.
It’s revolting.
But this—along with the psychological torture he then inflicts on Steve—give Steve the major insight into Quaid’s motives…
1. The Most Scared of All
As Steve is trapped by Quaid’s sick experiment, thinking about Quaid trying to learn something about the nature of dread by eliciting dread in others, and wondering if Quaid would go so far as to kill him to extract answers, he realizes…
“… Quaid, the impartial experimenter, the would-be educator, was obsessed with terrors because his own dread ran deepest.”
It’s a wonderful insight by Steve.
Quaid is actually disappointed Steve begins to crack so quickly, because Quaid hasn’t learned anything from him yet about the experience, anything that will help him.
And it’s only after Steve fully cracks, and Quaid releases him, that we get our first glimpse of Quaid on his own and see the nature of his inner life…
“Quaid sat in darkness. The terror was on him again, worse than ever. His body was rigid with fear; so much so that he couldn’t even get out of bed and snap on the light. Besides, what if this time, this time of all times, the terror was true?”
Quaid’s dread is practically debilitating.
Often, though you’d never suspect it, the worst monsters are the most afraid.
1 Thing I’m Mixed On
1. Worse Than Dread?
After telling a lengthy story about the terrors of dread, I feel like the point is undone just a bit by saying there’s actually something worse.
In Quaid’s case, his dread comes alive. His biggest fear—the thing he dreads in the night, no matter how unlikely or unreasonable—is a killer clown with an axe.
He’s such a vile character that it seems fitting for him to be stuck with that dread forever, incapable of anything more than temporary relief in the daylight.
Instead, whether it’s karma or happenstance, the mentally cracked Steve transforms into the manifestation of Quaid’s dread, and he comes for Quaid. The pain Quaid is about to suffer as the story ends is fitting in its own way. But as terrible as being tortured and hacked to pieces by an axe-wielding maniac would undoubtedly be, it does relieve him of his dread. And I’m not convinced that’s the best ending.
Here’s what I like about this, though: it’s a Greek tragedy.
Just like many ancient Greek myths involve a character whose fate is realized only through the steps they take to avoid it, it’s Quaid’s own actions that he hopes will relieve him of his dread that breathe life into the clown and guide him up the stairs and into his bedroom.
1 Thing I Don’t Like
1. From Fascination to Fear Too Fast
Steve is fascinated by Quaid early on. He doesn’t know exactly why, but he’s fixated. And he’s jealous of Cheryl taking up so much of Quaid’s time after they start dating. The story never defines Steve’s sexuality, but I got the sense he might be looking at Quaid as a potential lover.
But no sooner does Steve admit his jealousy, he then expresses a foreboding sense that Quaid has bad intentions for Cheryl. And it’s on the very next page, after Steve confronts him about this bad feeling, that…
“The jealousy had left Steve altogether. He wouldn’t have been paid to be so near to Quaid, so intimate with him.”
It’s jarring for his feelings to sway from one extreme to the other so suddenly—although not without good reason. I just thought Steve’s fascination with Quaid, and with what he’s trying to prove, would last longer. Maybe that he’d even be a part of it before winding up on the wrong side of an experiment.
Tim Matassa
