Horror: A study on Cliver Barker part 13, Son of Celluloid

Summary: The son of Celluloid starts off with a man named Barberio running from the police after killing one of them. Barberio alludes police and hides in a theater room between the projection screen and the back wall. There he dies from Cancer. (Now this is where the story gets a little hard to follow), the emotional energy left behind by thousands of viewers over the years gives the cancerous tumor sentience, turning it into a shape-shifting monster. The monster has the ability to not only change itself into movie characters but has the power to change the environment as well. The monster ends up slaughtering a group of teenagers one night at the movie theater and almost escapes justice as it hides inside one of the victims. The only other survivor hunts down the creature, shoots its host, and pours acid on it to kill it.

Note: This is one of my least favorite stories from Books of Blood, and I debated on skipping it due to my displeasure with it. I did, however, want to comment on the voice of one of the characters, Barberio. The Barberio part is very difficult to read, and this is because Barberio is very uneducated and Clive Barker wrote sentences to match this.

"Thing was, he'd got that belly-ache, the deep, gnawing pain he got more and more these days." (Page 329)

The above sentence is grammatically correct but is very unpleasant to read (just like how Barberio is). It is obvious that Clive Barker has studied poetics, as he uses a lot of them in his writing, and the device he is using is called a sentence effect. A sentence effect is where the composure of the sentence has a psychological effect on the reader that is intended. This is created through the four big factors Diction (word choice), Tone, Voice, and sound of the words chosen. I might do a blog series on Sentence effects in the future, but I just wanted to make note the effect the words you choose, and how you compose sentences has on the reader.

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The next story will be Rawhead Rex. It is a great monster story to study for anyone interested in writing them and I will be going into what makes a great monster and why.

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