The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker

There are days I feel exactly like Jack Polo, the protagonist of this piece. We’ve all had those days where nothing goes right: the key doesn’t work, the blinds won’t close properly, the cat explodes all over the living room. After reading Clive Barker’s short story, I can now imagine the worse every time I lock myself out of a hotel room.  But is it really the worse, or did he give me the ability to see things are sometimes just out of my control?

The story is about a minor demon called Yattering who is sent to harass the mild-mannered son of a woman who reneged on a contract with Beelzebub. That contract, for whatever reason, was to result in the woman’s soul being turned over to Hell. Instead, she confessed her sins at death and ascended to Heaven. Jack is to be payment for this broken contract. To get his soul, the minor demon must cause him to go crazy.

I’m now convinced my ex-wife is a Yattering.

But Jack is privy to the plan and never allows himself to lose his temper or allow his thoughts to settle too long on the fact he’s being pursued. In fact, he has a plan to win the day.

Barker is known for his dark works of fiction, including The Hellbound Heart mentioned in an earlier blog post, as well as Imajica and The Great and Secret Show. But The Yattering and Jack is one of his rare jaunts into lighter, more comedic fare.

Where the book stumbles the most is the almost blasé way in which Barker reveals that Jack is in on the secret. The first third of the story is told from the POV of the demon, and so much times passes that I stop suspecting I might get it from Polo’s point of view. Then suddenly I get insight into Polo in an abrupt, head-hopping transitional paragraph. I say abrupt because Barker’s style is so fluid that anything can happen at any moment, and the reader needs to be prepared. Reading Barker is an act of conscientious reading, in which the text should be studied. He is not a lazy Saturday evening read.

There’s nothing spectacular about this story, though it was featured as an episode of Tales from the Darkside. Because we spend so much time with the Yattering at the beginning, it’s hard to see any kind of character arc from our protagonist. We have to assume that he’s been playing the game a long time, and he finally gets a chance at a final showdown. The biggest arc is for the antagonist, who, in a fit of rage, goes a little mad and makes a couple of clumsy mistakes the way he’d hoped Jack would.

The ending was only mildly satisfying, and leaves open the possibility that perhaps Jack didn’t win. Looking back, the reader may wonder if all the events had been foreseen by the Yattering’s masters and they got exactly what they wanted. It’s a classic case of short-story comeuppance that can be satisfying and infuriating in equal measure.

Clive Barker was a force in the 80s, and has given us plenty of classics. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is just an adaptation of some folktale or fairy tale he’d heard as a kid.

Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King

Got your nose!

Stephen King likes to write. That’s about as obvious a statement one can make when referring to a man who has written more than 50 novels since the 1970s.

But that’s not what I’m really talking about. I mean, Stephen King likes to write. This is why he’s given us massive books like The Stand, It, and Under the Dome. When Stephen King begins a book, it has to feel like climbing Everest to him. Most writers are satisfied cresting the 300-page limit, but King consistently produces novels more than 500 pages long. He likes to write stories, page count be damned. But between all those novels, there are dozens of novellas and countless short stories.

Cycle of the Werewolf is a strange amalgam of both novel-writing stamina and his short story acumen. On the surface, it looks almost like a slick children’s book: big print, glossy pages… lots of pictures. But it’s the content that proves it’s pure King. He weaves a single story across several (12) short stories to bring the reader to a classic conclusion to a classic monster story.

Basically, the book is a “year in the life of” tale of a small town werewolf, as told from the point of view of its victims. We don’t learn who the werewolf is until late in the book, but it’s really less about who the wolf is and more about a small town coping with a monster in their midst. Of course, the town is divided into two camps on what to believe. There’s your average folks who believe it’s an animal or some crazy person, and then there are the town’s fringe citizens who know from the start what they’re dealing with.

It’s a classic werewolf story with classic characters and a classic end. There are even silver bullets. If you haven’t read this book, you may have seen the movie based on it, Silver Bullet. The movie starred ’80s favorite Cory Haim as the book’s protagonist, Marty Coslaw.

Yes, even though it’s twelve short stories, there’s still a protagonist. Here’s where I’ll give King credit: Even though it’s a classic story, the hero is not a classical one. Marty Coslaw is only ten years old and wheelchair-bound. After more than 40 years in the business, many of King’s books have a child or disabled person (or, in this case and a few others), a disabled child as the story’s protagonist. This isn’t King exploiting special needs, it’s King honoring them and treating them like everybody else.

Look, Cycle of the Werewolf is an old story with old characters, but it’s still engaging. How does he do that? It’s an amazing talent, and I would love to challenge him to write a book about paint drying, because I know he could do it and it would be horrifying.

The story, for reeking of so much sameness as other takes on the tale, was well done. Even with its non-traditional format, there was a cohesive narrative that worked and a satisfying character arc for our protagonist. King admits the lunar cycle was jimmied to fit the narrative, and he doesn’t apologize for it. It’s a minor thing, and really doesn’t detract from the story.

So what’s the deeper meaning behind this book? What is King trying to saaaay? I dunno. Seems like he just had some fun writing a neat little homage to the classics. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

From the terrifying mind behind The Hellbound Heart (you might know it by its movie title, Hellraiser) comes one of his short story masterpieces…Rawhide Rex.

But is it a masterpiece?

For two pages I read, enthralled by Barker’s easy-to-read, yet substantially artistic prose. I felt I was reading one of the best short stories I’ve ever laid eyes upon. It was amazing, and for a brief ten minutes I felt as if the short story rapture was upon me. Oh, glorious day!

Then Rawhide Rex himself appeared.

I’ll break this blog post into two parts: the good and the bad. In lesser hands, there would be ugly, but Barker is a master of the macabre on par with the greats. Hell, he is one of the greats. He can get away with breaking the rules because he knows what the rules are and doesn’t give a fuck.

The good: This short is full of fantastic, easy to follow prose. There’s nary a place where I stumbled over the text, even though he writes in a literary style. It’s a watered-down literary style that invites the common reader in and rewards them with popular fiction story-telling with smarty-guy words and phrasing. He doesn’t make the reader feel silly about reading about a monster eating a child.

His messages and meanings float to the surface easily enough, and at the hands of an inferior writer would almost be spoon feeding. Religion, parenthood, greed, hubris… they all play prominent roles in this story. But, oddly enough, so does false idolization, loneliness, selflessness and modesty. I was in awe of the way Barker juggled all these themes while telling the story of a centuries-old child-eating beast. Without giving a blow-by-blow synopsis of the story, imagine the Lorax as nine-foot tall, immortal, murderous animal with a hatred toward man but a love of sweet, sweet baby meat… who’s into watersports (not jet ski watersports, the other kind).

The bad: So. Much. Head hopping. As students of popular fiction, we’re told this is bad. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but generally it’s believed it’s difficult for the reader to follow who’s thinking what. Barker takes us from the terror of being chased to the thrill of the hunt in a single sentence. If I had read this without being enrolled in a writing popular fiction program, I may not have even noticed. But I am and I did.

There were also a lot of typos. This isn’t really against the writer in general, but it is about the book. Or books, to be more precise. Several books that were 1.) compiled into six short anthologies… at minimum that is two editing/publishing cycles, and 2.) were further compiled into two anthologies… at a minimum that’s three editing/publishing cycles. The typos should’ve been caught and dealt with far earlier. I can deal with them on a first edition, but c’mon now…

So, the bad was less about content and more about style. Let’s get to some general observances.

Rawhide Rex as a monster is fantastic. He’s properly scary but human-like. Think of a blood-thirsty sasquatch if my earlier description of him seems hard to digest. A blood-thirsty, warrior, immortal sasquatch with little knowledge of the modern world. He’s got an agenda that isn’t so much evil as it is evolutionarily sadistic. He’s just a monster that likes baby meat. He hates people like a wolf hates people: encroaching trespassers who have no right to play in the same arena as he.

I’m not saying he’s relatable. No. I found his methods stomach-turning and a little uncomfortable to read. I’m saying he isn’t a mindless monster like something from The Blob or The Mist. He’s just a thing trying to eat and rule over his land.

Like all short stories, the best parts come at the end. This ending featured an unlikely—and arguably, unlikeable—hero that the reader won’t see coming.

If I gave scores, I’d rate this short story some amount of stars out of an equal or greater amount stars (but closer to equal).

Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Everybody groaned. I could hear them, spread about the continental United States like Cold War sleeper agents. But instead of spies, they were students. Students of popular fiction. Of writing popular fiction. Of looking at what makes a book marketable and engaging (the two aren’t necessarily intertwined, as one would hope). The assignments had been handed out. The dice were cast.

One such die landed on Sarah Pinborough’s Breeding Ground. A book about giant spiders. The premise alone was enough to draw out moans boredom and squeals of self-righteous indignation. I read the one-line quips on Facebook: “The shittiest book ever,” “It’s hard to find because it’s so awful,” “It was a hard one for me to get through.”

I added my own voice to the chorus after only a few pages, even so much as to decry why such a folly had been wrought against us by our class professor. I even debated throwing the book into a campfire just to take pictures and post about how awful it was and how awesome I was.

In the end, I abandoned my Fahrenheit 451 daydreams. And then it happened. I set aside my self-pity and engaged myself in the book. I surrendered to it.

It wasn’t terrible.

In the beginning, I hated the way Pinborough writes. But you know what? The “mistakes” I saw in her were mistakes I myself have been corrected on. Participial phrases, semicolons, poor characterization. I began to see myself in Pinborough, and draw parallels to my own writing. She’s a woman writing about a man. I’m a man writing a woman. She writes men horribly. I write women… subpar.

There’s nothing fantastic in this book. There are no earth-shattering insights or amazing characters. In fact, I’d argue the characters end the book as two-dimensional as they begin. None of them are extremely likeable, especially the protagonist. We’re introduced to this man who loves loves loves his wife. She’s the center of his universe, the light of his life, the apple in his eyes.

Within a week after his wife turns into a giant spider, he’s sleeping with a random woman who survived the arachnid apocalypse. And by the end, he’s running off with another rare woman.

No, I am not a fan of Matthew Edge.

I’m not really a fan of any of the characters in the book. They’re whiny or mean or paper thin. They are not characters that I, as a writer, would ever want to create. They were just there, created to provide eyes though which to tell a story. Near the end of the book, when there’s talk of other pockets of survivors, I so desperately wished the book had been written from any of their points of view.

Pinborough’s apocalypse unwinds too quickly. Not the spiders themselves, but the characters. They abandon hope too quickly and ride away from their nice, safe house the first day. They put themselves in danger for no solid reason except to move the story forward. It wasn’t natural, and it felt forced. As a reader, I don’t want to be forced to believe or feel something, I just want to experience it and let those emotions come naturally. As a writer, I want to do the same thing.

So why did I end up enjoying it?

It wasn’t pretentious. I didn’t have a grand message (except maybe don’t mess GMOs, but I think even that was a false belief held by the sole scientist in the story). I didn’t feel like what I was reading took any effort. It was, in short, a summer read. It took me nearly a month to read. In the meantime, I wrote a lot, read some other things, and just went about my life. But each time I picked it up, it was where I left off. I didn’t need to go back, or put myself in a “mood” to read it. It was simple.

The book’s cover has the following inscription: “Fans of Bentley Little, Richard Laymon and Dean Koontz will be pleased.”

The joke? That’s for an entirely different book! I’m a huge fan of Little and Laymon (my bookshelf will corroborate that), and I enjoy a little Koontz as much as the next person, but I saw no similarities to them in Breeding Ground. There was none of Koontz’s amazing characterization. None of Laymon’s animalistic over-sexualization (okay, there was one passage…) and I turned the book upside down and sideways and couldn’t find any of Little’s hyper-reality.

No, friends, Breeding Ground is not a great book. It’s barely a mediocre one. But, it’s a quick, unassuming read with a fun monster (the ones at the end are even worse!), that taught me a thing or two about myself and my writing.

There’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll pick it up. I’d hate to lose any more respect for somebody who has been lauded of late for her brilliant writing.