Name: The Damnation Game
Rating: 3.9 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9780425188934

Clive Barker

A reclusive millionaire makes a deal with the devil. Just another horror tale? Don't bet on it. It's from Clive Barker.

The Damnation Game

Tim Pendry

Clive Barker's first full novel (1985) is imaginative and very different from most novels of damnation where the devil or demons and a defined external hell are central themes while a Faust-like character trades his soul for something that proves insubstantial in the long run. A dark fantasy set in a world of addiction, sleaze and failure, it has flawed humans and half-alive corpses in a chess game played against a wealthy sociopath, Whitehead, by Mamoulian whose own petulant negativity gives him no heroic aspect unlike say Rice's 'Memnoch'. The book cannot be called subtle even though it is creative in the telling. There are few deep meanings but Barker does manage to hint at the evil being closer to the Christian good than many might like. In this, he is as subversive as Philip Pullman was to be in children's literature. Part of the cleverness of the story (because it allows the plot to progress through the will of the living dead) lies in not having the reanimated entirely lose all will and reason independent of the reanimator even if their faculties seem to have rotted down to instinctive base urges. However, while the author subverts our expectations throughout much of the novel, he also has a tendency not to take a theme or idea and bring it to a satisfying conclusion. One suspects that Barker was still thinking in segmented short story terms at this time. For example, the first half of the book develops a strong theme of gambling, games-playing and chance. While this is returned to (although almost in passing in favour of other themes) at the end, the imbalance between its importance in one place yet not another is noticeable. The book is certainly entertaining (assuming you have a taste for evil, decay and putrefaction) but it seems to lack an almost indefinable 'thing' to hold it together as a fully cohesive work. Yet this is a quibble. It is still a book that marks a very original and effective writer in the genre. As to the evil at the centre, it is powerful and dangerous but also limited. Barker solves a common problem in the horror genre of how evil monsters seem to be so powerful and often fail at the same time by creating a credible monster operating between the human and the supernatural. Mamoulian is no demon but simply a very lucky (or is it unlucky) man with a void at his centre whose experience has placed him in a position - never fully defined or explained - of power between our world and the world on the other side of death. He is an unnatural bridge bringing life (as the animating soul) to death and death to life and creating mental terror and illusion by transferring the other world into the perceptions of those who live in this world. This enables subtle play with ideas of soul transmigration. His extreme transgressive self-animation brings no wisdom. He starts off as a limited low life (rather like Marty, the 'hero', and the billionaire Whitehead) and transforms least over time, in his case, a very long time. He is cunning but his dark arts replace intelligence. He is negation. The conflict between Mamoulian and Whitehead is the conflict between a sociopath who is limited but has 'powers' and one who does not have such powers but is intelligent. Marty has no powers and is not very bright but is certainly not a sociopath. If the villain is a nasty bit of work as we would expect, the 'hero' is a not-too-bright petty criminal drawn into a world that becomes truly visceral, one of death and putrefaction in life. He ends up a hero but only because he is a bit dim. Barker's supernatural is finely honed to become a credible collapse in boundaries rather than a wilful intervention from outside. His hellish other world is something that we slip into with death and should never return from. Mamoulian changes that iron rule of existence and non-existence. However, Mamoulian cannot change the laws of nature (Barker is quite old-fashioned in seeing a world of souls separate from matter) so what he restores to life freezes or slows down but does not reverse aging or decay. He is not God or a god, nor Devil nor demon. There is a spoiler problem here because the precise history of the tempter, the complex qualities of a hell that travels alongside us without necessity for God and the insubstantiality of the bargains being made are revealed only slowly. As a result, not much can be said that provides more detail. The romantic aspect is conventional, matching the horror with some realistic sex, even if the relationship between the dim and the damaged tends to confirm a rather gnostic view of love struggling against materiality. The material world, of course, contains its own future rot within it. Grand guignol takes over by the end and what starts as a dark thriller with a mystery at its centre transforms by the end into some seriously schlocky horror with no holds barred. This is not cosmic horror but a tale of decay and grubbiness between worlds that reflects on our own. Overall, Barker writes well. There are few places where one is tempted to speed-read to leap the bounds of convention. The bulk of the book has one fully engaged but it is not a story for those with a sensitive stomach.

The Damnation Game

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