[To read the previous countdown post, click here.]

15. “Hell’s Event” (from Vol. 2)

The damnation game’s afoot in this fast-moving piece in which an ostensible London charity event to raise money for Cancer Research actually serves as a high-stakes race between humanity and the denizens of Hell (which is hoping to claim as its winner’s purse “enough souls to keep it busy with perdition another age”). The grim fates suffered by the various human runners as they are tracked down one by one by Hell’s representative give the narrative the feel of an 80’s slasher film, but Barker is also interested in making social commentary here. The black character Joel Jones, who has caught wise mid-race to the infernal shenanigans transpiring, thinks: “And he was not afraid of darkness; he was painted in it. Wasn’t that what made him less than human as far as so many people were concerned? Or more, more than human; bloodier, sweatier, fleshier. More arm, more leg, more head. More strength, more appetite. What could Hell do? Eat him? He’d taste foul on the palate. Freeze him? He was too hot-blooded, too fast, too living.” But the real horror, and the real joy, of the story comes from Barker’s depictions of devilish creatures (with features like “a fan of knives” or an animate wound–“oily bone locking and unlocking like the face of a crab”) and the icy Ninth-Circle hellmouth (in the bowels of London building) from which they spring.

14. “The Age of Desire” (from Vol. 4, The Inhuman Condition)

This sexually-charged recreation of the Frankenstein myth forms one of the most realistic (i.e. non-supernatural) and frightfully plausible narratives in the Books of Blood canon. What begins as your basic police procedural (the investigation of a murder scene at a laboratory) steadily unfolds into something darker and more disturbing.  Jerome, a nondescript everyman, transforms into a human monster and goes on a rampage of indiscriminate rape after volunteering as a research subject for a potent aphrodisiac drug (one that “operates directly on the sexual imagination, on the libido”). Following his escape from the lab, Jerome commits a slew of sexual violence, against others as well upon himself (in a scene guaranteed to make any male reader cringe, Jerome rakes his own member bloody while humping away at a niche in a brick wall). But like Mary Shelley before him, Barker elicits sympathy for his murderous monster, the tragic victim of a mad doctor. Some of the most moving sections of the story are those that delve into Jerome’s “spinning, eroticized brain” and present his viewpoint, his ecstatic yet catastrophic state as he is immolated from within by his uncontrollable, artificially-stoked lust.

13. “Pig Blood Blues” (from Vol. 1)

Barker’s poetics and politics are clearly revealed in this early Books of Blood entry. The setting of Tetherdowne is called “a Remand Center for Adolescent Offenders but it was near as dammit a prison.” This bastion of “Law and Order” doesn’t appeal to the protagonist, the new employee Redman, who–in a passage that serves as a perfect gloss for Barker’s colorful and uninhibited artistry–thinks: “Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and numbered in order of influence, one marked ‘Cunning,’ the next ‘Impressionable.’ They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.” A place of entrapment and an unsettlingly repressive institution, Tetherdowne grows even more Gothic as a site of violent death, ghostly return, and the monstrous presence of a possessed, man-eating sow (beautiful and grotesque, “a seductress on trotters,” the beast is both feared and worshiped by the cult-like boys remanded to the prison-farm). “Pig Blood Blues” reads throughout like a mix of “Children of the Corn” and Lord of the Flies, but in its gruesome conclusion reaches the level of true, Wicker Man horrific-ness.