Answering Lovecraft: Clive Barker’s embodied fiction | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 12, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2040-3275
  • E-ISSN: 2040-3283

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 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.

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2021-03-01
2024-05-02
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Barker; cosmic; Gothic; horror; Lovecraft; weird
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