King BloodSimon Clark
Hodder & Stoughton, hardback, 534 pages, £16.99
Published February 1997
ISBN 0340660619
Also NEL paperback, 533 pages, £5.99
Published October 1997
ISBN 0340660627
Review by Andrew Darlington (1997)
To say that Simon Clark is the best novelist to emerge in the nineties is self-evident. King Blood, his fourth novel, is labelled ‛horror’, and is being marketed as such. But its scope is epic: nothing short of the onslaught, not of an Ice Age, but a new Heat Age, a Fire Age, and the geothermal convulsions that this brings about.
Simon has simply outgrown genre restrictions. So far the pattern of his novels is to alternate tight small-group hazard plots (Nailed By The Heart and Darker), in which nice loving families are first menaced by the Saf Dar in the Sea Fort, then pursued in their car by the Invisible Hammer; with novels of global apocalypse (Blood Crazy and King Blood) in which the disaster is total. In the latter two cases the supernatural elements are minimal.
Both plot concepts – the genetic evolutionary trigger igniting generational conflict, causing the old to literally devour their children, and the geological heating of the planet’s molten core causing worldwide volcanic disruption with attendant tidal waves and eruptions of toxic gases, are ideas that would fit seamlessly into SF’s ‘School of (un)Cosy Disaster’ cycle. Both are themes that John Wyndham or early JG Ballard (circa The Drowned World or The Wind From Nowhere) would kill for. The horror element is relegated to the lovingly detailed eviscerations and descriptions of rotting corpses.
But even here in King Blood there’s a stunningly macabre sequence set in St Lawrence’s Parish Church graveyard where the ‘build-up of subterranean heat was detonating the gases produced by the putrefying bodies’ so that graves literally begin exploding, showering everything in the immediate vicinity with flame-grilled entrails and parboiled body-parts. It’s a passage as unique and as convincingly nasty as anything in the long history of horror fiction.
But in some ways King Blood’s genre trappings become almost a distraction. Because Simon is determinedly staking out the whole of the 1990s as his exclusive territory. The cultural reference points are KFC, Buzz Lightyear, Jarvis Cocker, Robocop Masks, Chewbacca, nostalgia for McBurgers, and Ren & Stimpy. There’s an impossibly attractive teenage hero who starts out stacking shelves in the local Supermart while dreaming of being a Rock star. Evidence of a wry appraisal, perhaps, of whichever the hell demographic group reads these books anyway? And there’s his charismatic video jock brother from Seattle who’s called – (Stephen) John Kennedy. It’s a perfection even the expletives can’t dent, in fact they even humanise further. There’s uninhibited sex at closely-spaced intervals, first with the Older More Experienced seductress, then with the school sweetheart. Then there’s the necessity of regular gore.
But the action and pace are relentless. His control of narrative tension is now so honed that he has you leaping ahead of yourself in urgency to find out what exactly is the terrible doom that’s counting down for Caroline, whether Rick has really killed his brother, and what the Grey Men are all about. Each separate incident is well-wrought and impeccably worked-out. The escape from the cannibal tribe that is engineered by igniting methane in a ruptured North Sea Gas pipeline. Or the meticulously described sequence trapped in the submerged Rolls Royce at the bottom of the New Venice Lake of flooded London. Even the final secret of the Grey Men (which I shan’t divulge), which in lesser hands could have proved anti-climatic, is used to generate even more horrific levels of menace. Moving inexorably through to the mystical near-visionary climax with its intimations of absolution through sacrifice, couched in prose of near-transcendental power shot through with the kind of symbolism that gets to you on a deep and profoundly primal level.
It’s not often a novel leaves genuine after-images of nightmare. King Blood does. Now, forty-eight hours after I read the final words, I still regurgitate vividly troubling images from its pages that not even the strangely compelling last few chapters can erase. With these first four novels Simon Clark is sending out a signal writ huge, and a challenge not only to the entire horror genre, but to worlds beyond too. Here he’s setting the new benchmark. This is the standard you’ve got to reach to even qualify. And it’s awesome.