Answering Lovecraft: Clive Barker's embodied fiction. Issue 1 (1st March 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Carbonell, Curtis D.
• Is Part Of: Horror studies. Volume 12:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 97
• Page End: 117
• Publication Date: 2021-03-01
• Subjects: Horror in mass media -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Horror -- Periodicals; 700.4164
• DOI: 10.1386/host_00031_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-3275

Abstract

This article asks how Clive Barker responds to H. P. Lovecraft as a horror writer. It sees in Barker a particular example of how cosmic horror emerges, even as expected Gothic tropes become renewed with interesting variations. In particular, it foregrounds a resistance by Barker to Lovecraft's insistence that the Weird be a place where writers hint at the monsters that cause ultimate dread rather than drawing them. Barker, though, refuses to balk at such a demand, channelling the same instinct that the later Lovecraft himself developed in categorizing with scientific-like granularity the often horrific particulars of the monstrous. This article poses the Cenobites as a fitting example of how Barker combines cosmic and Gothic tropes, both within the frames of the posthuman and draconic, even as they morphed within a shared universe rooted in a Christianized metanarrative. It focuses on The Scarlet Gospels as the most fitting text in which Barker demonstrates his ability to represent the unrepresentable, a dominant concept within fruitful theorizing by thinkers as diverse as Eugene Thacker, Graham Harman and Thomas Ligotti.