Having by now spent ten years publishing blockbuster novels that mix horror and fantasy on an often Biblical scale, Sacrament (first published in 1996) saw Barker taking a step back from the multiple worlds and earth-shaking events of Imajica, The Great and Secret Show and Everville to something less chock-full of entire carnivals of the fantastique. Here, he addresses some issues of concern in the real world around him. And though, this being Barker, there are still moments when it all strays into the metaphysical, fantastic and luridly horrific, it does, at times, even get a little autobiographical.

The protagonist of Sacrament is Will Rabjohns, a world-renowned wildlife photographer known for his images of animals brought up hard against humankind’s impact on their home environments. The novel opens as he’s finishing his latest project, on polar bears hunting through the rubbish tips of Balthazar in northern Canada. But a bear attack puts him into a four-month coma, during which he revisits the events of thirty years ago when, as a thirteen year old, he encountered a strange and beautiful pair of vagabonds, Jacob and Rosa.

Back then, Will’s parents had just moved from Manchester to the Yorkshire village of Burnt Yarley following the death of Will’s older brother, who had always been his parents’ favourite. Still left very much in the shadows of his parents’ affections, when he meets this strange pair, and finds Jacob taking a keen interest him, Will decides to run away with them.

Jacob has a strange avocation as “the Killer of Last Things”: he seeks out the final mating pairs of dying species, documents them thoroughly in his journal, then kills them, thus making what he sees as an irreversible impact on the world. Something passes between Jacob and Will, and the boy experiences some of the older man’s memories, including one of a dead painter, Thomas Simeon, from two centuries ago (Jacob and Rosa are, it seems, immortal, and have a Cenobitish air of ennui’d repletion about them), whose body, left in the wilds, was partially eaten by a fox. (In his coma, Will sees that fox once more and speaks to it—Lord Fox, it calls itself.) In the end, events transpired to prevent Will from joining this dangerous but alluring couple, but he left the town and his parents as soon as he’d grown up: a gay man, he knows his parents—and, indeed, most of society at the time—couldn’t accept what he was. He left England for America, settling in San Francisco.

Recovering from the coma, Will says he’s finished with photography, but has no plans for what he’s going to do instead. He returns to San Francisco, only to find himself in a community ravaged by AIDS. And Lord Fox, stirred into wakefulness inside him, starts visiting, enlivening his senses with a fresh acuity, and driving him to Barkerian excesses in the city’s gay nightclubs. Will realises he has to rid himself of this troublesome animal spirit just as Jacob, elsewhere in the world, decides he needs to rid himself of the connection he still feels to Will. To this end, Jacob and Rosa return to Burnt Yarley and assault Will’s father, putting him into hospital, thus sending the message that they want Will back for a confrontation.

As ever with Barker’s fiction, that confrontation doesn’t go according to anyone’s plan, and turns into a quest that heads further north to the Isle of Tiree, where Jacob and Rosa’s former master—perhaps, even, creator—the magician Rukenau, dwells in the magical structure known as the Domus Mundi, the House of the World.

Barker has said this is a novel infused with autobiographical elements (his biographer Douglas E Winter says “Sacrament is arguably the best of Clive Barker’s novels, and one of the most directly and profoundly autobiographical of his fictions”). It’s broad strokes stuff, though, as this is a novel about a creative gay man who has moved from the north of England to the West Coast of the USA. And Will’s critics say, of his art, what Barker must have heard many times himself: “Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”

The main fantastical element centres on Jacob and Rosa. (Winter writes: “The bloodthirsty scourge known as Jacob Steep is only the most recent of the light-bearing zealots who burn their way through the pages of [Barker’s] fiction,” which is a wonderful description.) Both have some power, most explicitly in Rosa’s case, as she has an animated string of rosary beads that does her bidding (usually murder). Like so many Barker figures, the couple exist in a twilight world, or perhaps an elevated version of this one, their concerns philosophical and aesthetic rather than the mundane ones of daily survival, blessed visionaries and cursed wanderers in one.

As so often in Barker’s fiction these are figures on a quest for deeper, or higher, knowledge. Like The Great and Secret Show’s Jaff or Weaveworld’s Shadwell the Salesman, their power derives from an awareness of another world, but one they are not the masters of. Jacob and Rosa, in fact, do not really understand what they are. They know they’re immortal; they’re haunted by certain memories (an ice palace they visited many years ago reminded them of something, though they can’t recall what). Jacob in particular is troubled and inconsistent. Despite his extinction-killings, he seeks forgiveness somehow, and a clear view of God—who is drowned out, in this world, he believes, by the “smothering, deafening fecundity” of its animal life, hence his need to kill it off—but, at the same time, he’s contemptuous of the deity, saying “God’s a coward and a show-off, Will… He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are…” Zealot he may be, but his faith blows hot and cold.

Jacob and Rosa know they owe their existence to the magician Rukenau, who dwells in the Domus Mundi—which they, somehow, helped build—and it’s when they, and Will, start to learn more about both Rukenau and the painter Simeon (who was, for a while, Rukenau’s partner in magical endeavours) that the novel really starts engaging with its ideas, and became much more fulfilling, for me.

Simeon’s is the clearer, more positive, vision, as he (in one of the memories Will has experienced) holds up a flower petal to Jacob and provides the novel with its title: this petal is “the true sacrament”, “the Holy of Holies… the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself”, as is all of the natural world. He has something of Algernon Blackwood’s panpsychism about him as he says: “God knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service…”

But Simeon died centuries ago, and we only get to meet Rukenau here, living a squalid existence in the out-of-this-world structure known as the Domus Mundi. Whatever it is or was meant to be, this structure (I don’t recall it getting a full explanation) is a shining thing that seems to contain the essence of the world’s animal and plant life, a light full of “hints of living things”—or would do, but because Rukenau is unable to face its constant light, he has covered the interior walls in “mud and excrement”—the main image that lingered from my first reading of the book, making me wonder at the time just what Barker was saying. (I’m still not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s more by way of a complaint, that we live in such a wondrous world, but insist on polluting it in every way we can?)

One notable shift in Barker’s fiction that comes through in this novel is its attitude to death. In his previous fiction, death has only ever been a transformation, a change of state rather than an ending, and one it’s possible to return from (however painfully—think of all those half-made Uncle Frank-like “walking anatomy lessons” throughout the novels). In Imajica, a man who died from AIDS became a voice that spoke from the afterlife, an “angel” to one of that novel’s characters; here, when a man dies from AIDS, it’s the end. Resurrection has been a key theme of Barker’s fiction from the start, but “This is not a world of resurrections.” Rather, it’s a world of “early and unexpected goodbyes”, where “Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.”

Jacob and Rosa, though, belong “to a race or condition which was in some unfathomable fashion beyond the frailties of disease, or even death.” In the end, though, they are revealed to be not human at all. They form part of another theme in Barker’s novels, of created beings, like the homunculus of his play The Magician, or the magical doppelgängers of Zacharias and Judith in Imajica.

What humanity they have, in particular their characters as a man and a woman, was acquired by “learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them”. Jacob, then, is death (“It was one of this appetites as a man; to love the hunt, the blood-letting and the kill”); Rosa is a combination of lust and a constantly-frustrated desire to have babies.

Overlapping with this Barker theme of the created being is another that’s closely allied to it, the relationship between fathers and sons. Here, it’s dealt with in entirely non-fantastic terms in Will’s relationship with his monstrously unemotional father, a philosopher whose response when his son says they should try to talk his mother out of her mournful depression, is to go on about the inadequacy of words to express any sort of meaning. “Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels,” Hugh tells the boy, which is basically his excuse for doing nothing. His mockery of the idea of human emotion reaches its nadir when, pushing the question to its absurd extreme, he asks Will to imagine “a portion of excrement which may be dubbed loving”, and thinks that this disproves love, when it in fact only invalidates his methods of enquiry. Will finds a far better father-figure in the murderous Jacob, who at least, for a while, is interested in the lad (even if he later wants to kill him).

Sacrament received some friction at the time for centring on a gay character, both from critics and its first (soon-replaced) editor (who apparently asked Barker if he couldn’t swap Will’s boyfriend for a girlfriend, scared it would hurt sales). Surprisingly, for a book that depicts the gay community as Barker knew it, and so which presumably could have provided it with a de-stigmatising voice at the time, the sequences in San Francisco are a little bleak, and not just because of the presence of AIDS. (Douglas E Winter writes: “its take on gay lifestyles is by no means a gentle or encouraging one”.)

Kirkus Reviews, though, gave the book a mostly-thumbs up critique:

“By turns suspenseful, intellectually exciting, wildly melodramatic, turgid, and bombastic, Barker’s novel is charged—in its complex development and surprising resolution—with very real, very human emotion. A weirdly absorbing and entertaining tale that offers more disturbing delights from one of our most inventive and risk-taking writers.”

I certainly enjoyed it, perhaps more than the first time around, as I can maybe appreciate its maturity and depth a bit more. The first half felt a little unsatisfying, perhaps because of the lack of Barker’s usual profusion of fantastic images and ideas suddenly leaving his characters with nothing to be beguiled by, but as the themes kicked in, in the second half of the novel, it certainly grew on me.

Some questions seemed unanswered, particularly about Rukenau (just what was he up to when he had the Domus Mundi built?), but ultimately it’s a book that retains Barker’s usual visionary concerns, just versed in slightly less fantastic terms. Inclusionist that he is, Barker sees the wonders of creation at all levels of existence, in all aspects of being human, and in the natural world:

“The creators of the world had not retreated to the heights. They were everywhere. They were stones, they were trees, they were shafts of light and burgeoning seeds. They were broken things, they were dying things, and they were all that sprang up from things dying and broken. And where they were, [Will] was too. Fox and God and the creature between.”

In a 1931 letter to Frank Belknap Long, H P Lovecraft summed up what he was trying to do in his fiction as striving for “a form of non-supernatural cosmic art”, one that adhered to the new and increasingly strange ideas about reality that twentieth century physics was coming up with, yet still managed to convey the weird thrill and “sense of outsideness” of cosmic horror.

I couldn’t help but think of this when reading Benjamín Labatut’s collection When We Cease To Understand The World, in particular its third story, “The Heart of the Heart”. In When We Cease To Understand The World (a title with evident Lovecraftian resonances) and his subsequent novel The Maniac, Labatut focuses on the lives of the real-life mathematicians and scientists who formed the theories (relativity and quantum physics) that brought their own particular style of cosmic weirdness to the twentieth century. Mostly, Labatut deals with early-twentieth century figures, but “The Heart of the Heart” opens with a modern mathematician who is actually still living (Shinichi Mochizuki), and mainly focuses on another, from the second half of the twentieth century, Alexander Grothendieck. It begins with Mochizuki quietly publishing an enormous proof of “one of the most important conjectures in number theory”, known as the “abc conjecture”. It’s a proof so complicated that even when the world’s leading mathematicians pore over it, they can’t be sure it has achieved its aim. Sometime later, Mochizuki withdraws it. He has, Labatut writes, succumbed to “Grothendieck’s curse”, and goes on to outline the career of the man who (according to Wikipedia) is “considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century”. Grothendieck seems to have been a wellspring of new, complex theories of mathematics, finding immense depths and interconnections in even the simplest of notions. Behind it all, Grothendieck believed lay “the heart of the heart”: “a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object”, but which was also “an entity… at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him”. Something about this “entity” causes Grothendieck to retreat from mathematics—indeed, from the world at large, as he moves to a remote village and attempts to live on nothing but dandelion soup—and to demand certain of his works be removed from library shelves. He has, Labatut implies, glimpsed an idea so disturbing that it should remain hidden, “for the good of all of us”. The implication is that Mochizuki, a former disciple of Grothendieck, has glimpsed the same thing.

The imagery and language Labatut uses is rife with Lovecraftian resonances. That disquieting “entity… at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him”, sounds something like Lovecraft’s idiot god Azathoth, “which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity”. More Lovecraftian still, Grothendieck, after his retreat, “came to believe dreams were not proper to human beings, but missives from an external entity he called Le Rêveur”—which also recalls, for me, Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, with its inhuman source of all dreams.

There are physicists and mathematicians throughout When We Cease To Understand The World dealing with strange and disturbing new insights into the cosmic order, many of whom find themselves driven to the edge of sanity, if not beyond. (Labatut’s fiction is full of madness, fevers and suicides.) His novel The Maniac (2023) opens with the tale of Paul Ehrenfest, known to such colleagues as Einstein and Bohr as “the Conscience of Physics”, but who suffers from bouts of extreme depression, and ends up shooting not only himself, but his mentally and physically disabled son. The main subject of the novel, the mathematician John von Neumann, is, however, a complete contrast. If Grothendieck is perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, von Neumann is surely the most influential, certainly in terms of our daily lives. The list of areas he either pioneered or took a key part in includes the development of the atom bomb (von Neumann was the one who said it should explode before it hit the ground, so as to cause the maximum damage), the Cold War (after the bombing of Japan, von Neumann urged the US to immediately bomb Russia before they could develop a similar weapon, this being, in his mind, “the only fully logical decision to make”; afterwards, he advocated the idea that came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction—the development of such an overwhelming stock of nuclear weapons that it could destroy the world several times over, thus, in a way, “ensuring global peace by taking us to the brink of Armageddon”), the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb (five hundred times more powerful than the atom bomb, and described in the novel as “a true horror, something that could not be justified in any sense, an evil by any measure”), but also computing (“The DNA of the entire digital universe”—the von Neumann architecture—is still the basic structure of all modern computers), game theory (an apparently abstract mathematical idea that nevertheless informs all modern warfare), AI (a late obsession with self-replicating digital entities and the workings of the brain) and, to name one positive, weather-forecasting.

Unlike the subjects of so much of Labatut’s fiction, von Neumann is free of mental instability—at first, anyway. His “intelligence was playful, not tortured”; he was “Brilliant but childish, insightful yet incredibly shallow”. At first pursuing the logical basis for all mathematics (something that also forms the subject of one of my favourite graphic novels, Logicomics)—until Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem proved one would never be found—von Neumann then becomes “more practical and effective than before, but also [more] dangerous”, freely engaging in “so many top-secret projects that his suit pockets were overflowing with security cards”. Where Ehrenfest, though burdened with depression, was “the Conscience of Physics”, von Neumann, free of all doubt, seemingly has no conscience at all.

(He does, though, have his own ultimate date with mortality, when it’s discovered he has terminal cancer, in all likelihood caused by his exposure to radiation during the development of the atom bomb. Previously so sure of his own special status, this proves to be the one thing the genius von Neumann cannot comprehend: “He suffered,” one of Labatut’s narrators records, “from the loss of his mind more than I have seen any human being suffer, in any other circumstance.”)

And I can’t help but reach for Lovecraftian parallels again as, aided by an elite possessing abstruse and occult knowledge, something insanely destructive and utterly without conscience rises in a remote Pacific island: Cthulhu from his sleeping depths, the first hydrogen bomb explosion from the Enewetak Atoll.

Labatut writes with a feverish, propulsive style, a headlong rush of ideas, anxieties and desperation in his subjects’ lives. (Full of long sentences, and page-spanning paragraphs, it’s a nightmare to find your place again if your concentration wavers.) But, as the sort of scientific and mathematical concepts he writes about (very lightly—you won’t come away understanding Quantum Mechanics, let alone Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory), are usually covered much more soberly in non-fiction, there’s something fresh about Labatut’s addressing them in such an emotionally inflated, even melodramatic style.

I found both the collection When We Cease To Understand The World and the novel The Maniac very readable, but I’m a bit torn about them. They use real-life figures (The Maniac has chapters narrated by Richard Feynman, among others) to tell real-life stories, but how reliable are they? This is a heightened, compressed version of events, foregrounding insanity, desperation and genius. It is fiction, and so not necessarily true—but, at the same time, I sort of want this, Labatut’s version, to be the truth. It fits so neatly into wonderfully Lovecraftian ideas about the cosmic dangers of forbidden knowledge. But the one case where he deals with a still-living figure—Mochizuki’s withdrawal of his massive proof—has since been undermined by real-life events: Mochizuki published his proof in 2021, a year after When We Cease To Understand The World came out. (But even if it does contain Azathoth in the form of a mathematical theory, who would understand it but the insane?)

Labatut’s stories appeal to something other than knowledge about the world, though. These are modern myths about the nature of knowledge and its consequences—myths that Lovecraft, too, addressed in his fiction, which was itself written under the influence of the shockwaves of those early-twentieth century notions such as relativity and quantum physics. Perhaps Labatut’s use of real people and events could be understood by another of Lovecraft’s ideals for weird fiction: “My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” The ultimate hoax, then, is to use so much of the truth that the weird comes through merely in the embellishments: the facts are true, but the way they’re spun brings in the darkness and weirdness.

Back in the days of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, aliens, with their “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” could be seen as a warning against one of the great threats of the looming 20th century: letting pure intellect dominate, and lead us into our own technologically-flavoured destruction. Midway through the century, an alien of a different type (Klaatu by name) turned up to issue a more direct warning against blowing ourselves up, as though to say, “You just don’t get it, do you?” Later still, in the post-Morning of the Magicians/Chariots of the Gods? 70s and 80s, when aliens came not to invade us, they were still often remote (2001), weird (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or at least impressed by our capacity to feel emotions (Starman).

But here we are in the 21st century, and it’s a sorry state of affairs when aliens come along to remind us how to be human.

I went to see Disclosure Day the day after the current president of the United States hosted an Ultimate Fighting Championship night in the White House, so the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s latest dip into alien lore—a wrestling match in which one contestant breaks a chair on his opponent’s head while the crowd eggs him on to further showy violence—couldn’t help but feel like a political statement. Is this, Spielberg seems to be asking, America today: a baying crowd driven to distraction by a trumped-up fight while the world teeters on the brink of environmental instability and World War III, and meanwhile a shady organisation that somehow blurs the distinction between a tech company and a government agency is responsible for incarcerating and mistreating immigrants (of the interstellar variety, but immigrants all the same)…?

If it needs to be made any more explicit, we’re told at one point (slight spoiler) that Disclosure Day’s aliens regard empathy as an important evolutionary advance—a direct riposte, I assume, to a certain [update: ex-]trillionaire’s assertion that the same quality is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation”. (Elsewhere, footage of dead or injured Close Encounters-style aliens, with their emaciated bodies and overlarge heads, surrounded by various flavours of the uniformed military, can’t help recall images of the victims of Nazi concentration camps…)

It’s a pity, then, that Disclosure Day is such a mess. The story (though not the script) is by Spielberg himself, and I can’t help feeling the “story” in question was more a wish-list of scenes and ideas, which had to be knocked up into some sort of a narrative. Can we have crop circles, please? Just the one. It doesn’t have to mean anything in the narrative, but just be there for a brief attempt at a sense of wonder (though it comes off more as a tired joke)…? It is, in this way, the film of a true believer, who feels he has to include everything, rather than pick only what serves a well-honed story.

On the way, Spielberg gets to fake some archival UFO/alien footage, which I’m sure is already, in some sectors of the internet, being claimed to be actual alien footage, snuck into a Hollywood film against the government’s wishes (the government, of course, never watching Hollywood films) while also being a government-sanctioned plot to prepare us for the real disclosure day (the government, of course, being in secret control of Hollywood films) which will happen any day now. (No, now. No… now. Alright, but soon.)

Ever since Klaatu assumed the name of Carpenter in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the line between aliens and angels/saviours/gods (or, as von Däniken would have it, Gods?) has been somewhat blurred, but here the blurring is more slapdash than subtle. On the one hand, Spielberg spends a rather contrived scene assuring his viewers that a belief in aliens isn’t incompatible with traditional faiths, then he undermines it by having people treat our touched-by-the-aliens protagonists with religious awe. (Why should technologically more advanced beings be thought of as spiritually superior? If my neighbour has a better iPhone than me, is he holier? Does being guided by AI make a war any more spiritual? Or make the Buddah, not having a digital watch, any less?) There’s too much demand on the aliens in this film to be everything Spielberg wants them to be.

But I don’t think it’s the point of Disclosure Day to make sense. Its point it to thrust a lot of stuff at us—Steven Spielberg sense-of-wonder stuff (though it’s nowhere near as sense-of-wonder-ish as Close Encounters)—while making a broad point about empathy at a time when the world could really do with a reminder that such a thing exists.

There’s a push to see Disclosure Day at the cinema, but I have to say, it doesn’t really do much in the big-screen wow-ing visuals department. Worth watching on your home TV (if for no other reason than you can pause it to take a loo break, because it’s over two hours long), but not, I’d say, if you’re up for a wholly satisfying story—more if you’re happy with a dip into the realms of conspiracy culture (or are a believer, in which case it’s probably a delight), plus an occasionally moving reminder of what it means for people to perhaps, maybe, sometimes, be nice to each other, have hope in the future, and get together to turn things around generally.