A head full of ghosts A novel

THANK GOD FOR EVIL. Without it, horror fiction would be a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick or, perhaps, a ragged, bloody, roughly handled zombie action figure for gullible children. That, of course, is what contemporary horror actually is, most of the time. For some writers, though, the damned soul does sometimes clap its hands and sing. Clive Barker knows the tune, and in his new novel, THE SCARLET GOSPELS (St. Martin's, $26.99), he belts it out as rapturously as an Irish tenor crooning "Danny Boy." Better than half the action of "The Scarlet Gospels" takes place in hell, where Barker is clearly very much at home. His descriptions of the underworld often recall the grotesque tableaus of Hieronymus Bosch, but are at other times weirdly hushed and lyrical: "The sky contained neither sun, nor stars, which was predictable enough, but what it did contain was a stone the size of a small planet. The stone reached high above the immense landscape that spread out below, and it threw off fissures like lightning bolts, through which brightness poured. The effect upon the vast panorama was uncanny." In Barker's work, beauty and evil are an old married couple, living together comfortably, even serenely, with no secrets left from one another. Barker made his name in the genre with a series of unusually fierce and disturbing short stories, collected in the mid-1980s in six volumes called "Books of Blood." Harry D'Amour, the private-eye hero of "The Scarlet Gospels," first appeared in one of those tales, "The Last Illusion"; the villain, a notably sadistic demon known popularly as Pinhead, was introduced in the brilliant 1986 novella "The Hellbound Heart." Both have also popped up in films directed by Barker: Harry D'Amour in his 1995 "Lord of Illusions," Pinhead in the 1987 "Hellraiser," which was based on "The Hellbound Heart." ("Hellraiser" has since spawned eight movie sequels and a series of comic books.) In "The Scarlet Gospels," the demon - who is an adept of a satanic order called the Cenobites and prefers to be referred to as the Hell Priest - drags Harry into the underworld to be a witness to his revolt against the Devil himself, Lucifer, who has, it seems, become as remote and reclusive as Howard Hughes. No one knows for sure if the famous fallen angel is even still alive. It's a fine premise for a horror epic: a kind of blasphemous version of "Paradise Lost," otherworldly history repeating itself as gory farce. Barker tears into it hungrily. The novel doesn't have quite the focused intensity of "The Hellbound Heart" (which has only four human characters, plus assorted demons), but Barker fills this large canvas with an impressive amount of action and infernal spectacle, and recaptures at least some of the rollicking, berserk quality that made his early stories so distinctive. He imagines outré physical torments as vividly as he did in the days of "Books of Blood" and "The Hellbound Heart," and describes them, now as then, in minute detail. This is a handy talent to have when you're writing about hell. "The Scarlet Gospels" is plenty horrifying but, strangely, not all that frightening. The prevailing mood is that of appalled fascination: an unabashed curiosity about the extremes of evil represented by the Hell Priest and especially Lucifer, who is, dead or alive, the most interesting character in Barker's garden of unearthly delights. When Harry first gazes on the interior of the mammoth cathedral the Devil has built in hell, this hardboiled hero finds himself, to his surprise, "both mesmerized and vaguely disappointed." As Barker puts it: "None of this sat comfortably with his expectations. His experience of hell's work on earth had always been physical. The demonic soul - if such existed - knew the nature of physical being: it was libidinous, and gluttonous, and obsessed with the pursuit of sensation. Harry always imagined that if he ever got close to the Devil he would find that philosophy writ large. He'd always assumed that where sat the Devil so too sat all the excesses of the flesh. But this display of vast whispering forms did not suggest a hotbed of debauchery; rather, this was peaceful - even beautiful in its way." In Barker's tempestuous fiction, evil is unpredictable and protean: it creates chaos, pain, madness, conflagration and, at its dizzying depths, a peace that passes understanding. There's no peace in hell for Danny Orchard, the narrator of Andrew Pyper's smart, inventive THE DAMNED (Simon & Schuster, $25), who sojourns there awhile and discovers that it looks a lot like his hometown, Detroit. It's pretty bad, but Danny takes it in stride because for him hell is other people - or, rather, one particular other person, his exceptionally malevolent twin sister, Ashleigh. The aptly nicknamed Ash was, due to some medical/metaphysical mishap, born without a soul and as a consequence is irredeemably evil. The young Ash was, the narrator tells us, a star: beautiful, intelligent, talented. She had, he explains, "the posture of a dancer and a confidence readable in every gesture, as if all her actions were part of a subtle but commanding performance, a summoning to gather round and watch." As is often the case with successful sociopaths and narcissists, her charisma allows her to get away with awful behavior for far too long; she takes special pleasure in manipulating her brother, and Danny, although he knows exactly what she is, seems powerless to resist. Ashleigh Orchard dies in a mysterious fire at 16, by which point she has already done enough damage for an ordinary evildoer's lifetime. But there's nothing ordinary about this girl. She returns, again and again, to settle old scores and to keep her poor brother in her thrall. Whenever he threatens to form an emotional bond with someone, she intervenes, violently. Danny lives in a state of constant interruption, which is for many of us a fair working definition of hell on earth: Ash is always with him, tugging at his sleeve, demanding his undivided attention. And for most of his stunted life, she gets her way, possesses him wholly. This is what demons - living or otherwise, human or not - do best: they mesmerize, they seduce, they stop us in our tracks. Freeing oneself from that stubborn sort of evil can be an arduous process: the hero of "The Damned" has to die and return to life no fewer than four times before he can exorcise his persistent twin. It's toughest when the harrowed victim is, like Danny Orchard, complicit in his own possession or - to put it more charitably - too weak to put up the necessary defenses. In Ania Ahlborn's terrifyingly sad WITHIN THESE WALLS (Gallery Books, paper, $16), there are quite a few people who have just that problem, and fall, all too easily, under the sway of a handsome devil by the name of Jeffrey Halcomb. A kind of latter-day Charles Manson, Halcomb barely appears in the novel, but nevertheless manages to dominate the narrative and the consciousness of every character in it. When the story begins, he's been in prison for 30 years; he has never given an interview. Lucas Graham, a true-crime writer down on his luck, one day receives a summons from the notorious inmate, and with his 12-year-old baby-goth daughter, Virginia, in tow drives all the way across the country, from New York to the Pacific Northwest, chasing a story he thinks will revive his flagging career. He's so desperate he even accepts the peculiar condition that he move into a specific house for the duration. The house is, unsurprisingly, haunted by the spirits of Halcomb's dead followers. ALTHOUGH THE PREMISE is no more than serviceable, and Ahlborn isn't, sentence by sentence, much of a writer, "Within These Walls" creeps under your skin, and stays there. It's insidious, like the elusive Halcomb's fatal charm. The book's atmosphere is distinctly damp, clammy, overcast, and it isn't all the Washington weather: its characters' souls are gray, dimmed by failure. Ahlborn is awfully good on the insecurities that plague both aging writers like Graham and oversensitive young girls like Virginia, which leave them vulnerable to those who, like Halcomb, know how to get into their heads. Exactly what sort of creature Jeffrey Halcomb is remains ambiguous to the end, but the taxonomy doesn't really matter. We've all met users like this, and whatever they are - human, demon or something else - they deserve a special place in hell. "Within These Walls" is so grim that even a novel about, say, a vicious, possibly supernatural, serial killer called the Sickle Man might seem, by contrast, rather sprightly and lighthearted. Sophie Jaff's debut novel, LOVE IS RED (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99), is that thing precisely, the story of a New York City predator and the women who love him. The Sickle Man, so dubbed by the reliably imaginative New York press, is an unidentified malign entity who combines elements of Ted Bundy (good looks, charm), Son of Sam (the production of Gotham-paralyzing terror) and Jack the Ripper (ingenious work with sharp instruments). What he most closely resembles, though, is the "man of wealth and taste" who speaks so eloquently for himself in the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." Jaff's monster narrates longish stretches of this story in a cooing, calmly grandiloquent second-person voice: "You lean in, and farther in, and you whisper a little secret into her creamy and curved and vulnerable ear. Exposed like a soft little mouse." Moments later, closer to the kill, his internal monologue becomes still more sinister: "She thinks she knows what kind of man you are. But she's in for a surprise. She has no idea. No one does. So you are content to suck and lick her round, creamy breasts." And so on. (Creaminess looms large in this monster's erotic imagination.) The florid romance-novel prose of the killer's running account of his activities is part of what gives "Love Is Red" its unique nutty-creepy tone. The fantastically elaborate plot contributes to that too, as does the interpolation of passages from a folk tale entitled "The Maiden of Morwyn Castle," whose connection to the grisly present-day events in New York is not, even by the end of the book, entirely clear. This novel is the first installment of a projected trilogy, so there's time for a fuller explanation. Clarification, when and if it comes, may not be a good idea in this case because the villain of "Love Is Red" represents a pop-fiction conception of evil that doesn't generally require, or benefit from, close scrutiny. The kick of this ridiculously entertaining book is the haze of delirium it creates in the reader's brain, which is buffeted throughout by wild plot twists, abrupt shifts of mood and verbal style, sudden narrative somersaults, all flashing by at vertigo-inducing speed. Pause to reflect, and the whole thing would crumble to dust like Clive Barker's hell. In its current, unresolved form, Jaff's woozy supernatural saga is effectively scary and great fun to read: It's screwball horror. Paul Tremblay's terrific A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS (Morrow/Harper-Collins, $25.99) generates a haze of an altogether more serious kind: the pleasurable fog of calculated, perfectly balanced ambiguity. One of the book's epigraphs is from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic 1892 tale of terror and madness "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the principal narrator is a troubled young woman named Meredith Barrett who, when the events she recounts took place, was an 8-year-old who liked to be called Merry the cat. Readers of Shirley Jackson will recognize the allusion to the peerlessly disturbing "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." Tremblay's story involves a case of what may or may not be demonic possession, complete with not only an exorcist but also a camera crew documenting the spooky goings-on for reality TV. The putatively possessed is Merry's 14-year-old sister, Marjorie, who inexplicably becomes, for a time, as alarming a teenage specimen as the soul-challenged Ashleigh of "The Damned." Marjorie's apparent, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't demon displays all the classic bad behavior familiar to readers and viewers of "The Exorcist" and its many descendants: the foul language, the lewd acts, the quick, explosive bursts of blasphemy. The manifestations are so familiar, actually, that they're a bit suspect. Alongside Merry's recollections of the dire happenings in the Barrett household is the running commentary of a blogger who identifies herself as "The Last Final Girl" and deconstructs the reality-show version of Marjorie's possession with a keenly skeptical eye. Last Final Girl writes pages and pages like this: "The inner demon getting its groove on for the benefit of the men (always men) of reason and science in the white antiseptic hospital room just might be the second most stereotypical scene in a possession movie (with the actual clergy-performed exorcism as number one). 'The Exorcist,' 'The Rite,' 'The Possession' (the 2012 movie by Sam Raimi, featuring a sneaky little dybbuk hidden in a Jewish wine cabinet box bought at a yard sale ... SOLD!), season two of the gory and horny TV series 'American Horror Story,' and ... you get the idea." She's snarky, but she's good company, and her perspective is crucial to the head-spinning effect of Tremblay's novel. By the end of "A Head Full of Ghosts," you may not be able to say with certainty whether Marjorie's demon exists, but you know in your bones that evil does. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.