The Adventures of Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus by Clive Barker, David Niall Wilson, Richard A. Kirk Page A
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Circus with a familiar ache. I’ve felt that same ache in the past, at the end of works like The Lord of the Rings , or Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, or when Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere ended with so much promise of something more. I felt this same ache at the end of the last two or three novels by Mr. Barker that I had the pleasure to read, and I felt it in this book. I want the story to continue. I want to know more, to experience more performances and to meet new characters. I want that other world I visited to remain intact with its own continuing time stream so I can go back to visit. I feel like new rooms have opened up in my mind, and I don’t want them to grow old or faded or covered in dust.
In the pages of this book, the seeds of something truly remarkable were sown. Pinhead and his cube, the Books of Blood, novel after novel and world after world have unfolded to entertain us, amaze us, and draw us from our tired, drab existence into places that are something more.
In a recent interview, I read something that Clive Barker said, and it stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing—I hope he won’t mind. Horror fiction has been growing more and more into an extension of the sensational, graphic depictions of our world that people seem to find so fascinating in the news. When fiction begins to emulate those types of horrors, and writers spend their time dwelling on things that are happening down the street, embellishing them with bits and pieces of magic to make them shiny and attractive, it’s dangerous.
Horror fiction needs a jolt of the supernatural. There needs to be some clear rift between the imagined world, and the horrors we deal with from day to day. Bilbo Baggins wrote There and Back Again , and though he was talking about his quest, it applies to fiction – in particular fantastic fiction – as well. If we are to escape, we should go somewhere that offers us something in return, and then we should come back. Violence, torture, graphic dismemberment and endless strings of horrifying events fall short of the goal, particularly when they bear no message, moral, point, or purpose but to shock. They expend creative energy—the magic—and leave that energy with no positive outlet.
We need the supernatural to symbolize what we can’t overcome, presented in a way that changes things just enough that we can overcome them. We need a measure of hope in the face of evil. In the movie Hellraiser , Frank Cotton is flayed alive by hooked chains. This happens when he encounters the Cenobites on the other side of the Lament Configuration puzzle. We can suffer with him, and then, we can return to our world. If you wrote that same scene with some drug dealers in a Manhattan warehouse, it would no longer be escapism in the same sense. It’s too close to home, and there’s no safe way back from the shadows. They are all around us. Journalists are fantasists too, remember, and for drug dealers with chainsaws, we have them. For the magic, we need the Clive Barkers of the world, young and old.
If there was ever a question whether the best and brightest of artists are made, or born, works like this one come very close to answering it. Here’s to Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and his entourage. I hope that we have not seen the last of them, but if we have we can be content in the knowledge that other worlds, and other magic will follow. We only have to turn to the next page.
David Niall Wilson
About the Author
Clive Barker wishes he had a circus.
In the pages of this book, the seeds of something truly remarkable were sown. Pinhead and his cube, the Books of Blood, novel after novel and world after world have unfolded to entertain us, amaze us, and draw us from our tired, drab existence into places that are something more.
In a recent interview, I read something that Clive Barker said, and it stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing—I hope he won’t mind. Horror fiction has been growing more and more into an extension of the sensational, graphic depictions of our world that people seem to find so fascinating in the news. When fiction begins to emulate those types of horrors, and writers spend their time dwelling on things that are happening down the street, embellishing them with bits and pieces of magic to make them shiny and attractive, it’s dangerous.
Horror fiction needs a jolt of the supernatural. There needs to be some clear rift between the imagined world, and the horrors we deal with from day to day. Bilbo Baggins wrote There and Back Again , and though he was talking about his quest, it applies to fiction – in particular fantastic fiction – as well. If we are to escape, we should go somewhere that offers us something in return, and then we should come back. Violence, torture, graphic dismemberment and endless strings of horrifying events fall short of the goal, particularly when they bear no message, moral, point, or purpose but to shock. They expend creative energy—the magic—and leave that energy with no positive outlet.
We need the supernatural to symbolize what we can’t overcome, presented in a way that changes things just enough that we can overcome them. We need a measure of hope in the face of evil. In the movie Hellraiser , Frank Cotton is flayed alive by hooked chains. This happens when he encounters the Cenobites on the other side of the Lament Configuration puzzle. We can suffer with him, and then, we can return to our world. If you wrote that same scene with some drug dealers in a Manhattan warehouse, it would no longer be escapism in the same sense. It’s too close to home, and there’s no safe way back from the shadows. They are all around us. Journalists are fantasists too, remember, and for drug dealers with chainsaws, we have them. For the magic, we need the Clive Barkers of the world, young and old.
If there was ever a question whether the best and brightest of artists are made, or born, works like this one come very close to answering it. Here’s to Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and his entourage. I hope that we have not seen the last of them, but if we have we can be content in the knowledge that other worlds, and other magic will follow. We only have to turn to the next page.
David Niall Wilson
About the Author
Clive Barker wishes he had a circus.
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