Sasha Selavie reviews Barbie Wilde’s latest collection of twisted short stories
Why does gay art – in every form – completely eclipse its timid, heterosexual rival? Because – quite simply – it’s fuelled by overwhelming lust! From the lush, teeming criminality of Caravaggio’s canvases, to the pouting proportions and Apollonian aphrodisiac that is Michaelangelo’s David, gay aesthetics scream artistic arousal!
Wherever you look – from breathless, pre-coital close-ups of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, to Francis Bacon’s trembling treatment of lover George Dyer – need utterly transfigures banality. So, it should come as no surprise that recent LGBT practitioners of horror fiction – such as transgender writers Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlyn R. Kiernan – work a similar, witchy magic.
‘We have such sights to show you’, says Pinhead, the lead, S&M demon in gay film director Clive Barker’s Hellraiser movie, and he’s not kidding. Ah, but if your jaded tastes have moved beyond razor-wire fishhooks dissecting your penis, then welcome queercore horror author Barbie Wilde. An actress, writer and dancer, her portrayal of Sister Cilice, the paranormal, nightmarish harpy from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, is an enduring icon of inverted, abattoir ecstasy.
It gets better yet. Perhaps willfully self-possessed by her former, fictional self, Wilde’s just unleashed Voices Of the Damned, a feast of delirious sexual mayhem. More instantly, compulsively addictive than chemsex cocktails of crystal meth and crack cocaine, Wilde’s prose hooks like a frighteningly non-stop, body-horror wet dream. Have you ever seen, and God forbid, thoroughly enjoyed the Saw torture-porn franchise on repeat, slo-mo viewings?
Was that a yes? Tut-tut. Well, that hardly makes you a monster. The point, as Wilde’s namesake Oscar so perfectly knew, is that art and aesthetics beautifully hover beyond good and evil. So, just like Wilde’s ferociously non-PC tales of bodily excess, her artistic values – her unflinching willingness to confront insanity – are defiantly, gorgeously unfettered.
It’s tempting, here, to draw fitting comparisons with the devastating, anti-straight shock thresholds raised by gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Defiantly re-imagining a bullwhip thrust in an eager anus as an icon of overwhelming, spunk-fuelled desire, Mapplethorpe brilliantly and comprehensively expanded the acceptable limits of artistic human love.
And that’s just what Wilde’s divinely twisted stories do – massacre any form of prior, or even conceivable, restraint. Not that she condones atrocity, just magnificently insists on her right to explore – and, more crucially, imagine – beyond any artificial limits of taste.
Better yet, the bloodshed’s as show stopping as a homicidal ballerina, and refreshingly, wholly free from spineless hate speech and trigger warnings. Why even read horror if you don’t genuinely relish the wet crotch arousal of vicarious, baroque sadism?
So, should we lap up Wilde’s stunningly executed literary savagery? Oh yes. ‘Zulu Zombies’, for instance, is a sickly comic, splatter-punk assault on the legacy of imperial English racism, while ‘American Mutant’ skins US religious hucksterism limb from sly con-man limb. Elsewhere, ‘Polyp’ explores a malign, excreted living cancer cell that grows huge and wreaks mayhem and ‘squats on a toilet like a disaffected teenager’, while ‘The Alpdrücke’ viciously sucks the nipples of paralysed sleepers. Even more sensuously intriguing, there’s ‘Valeska’, detailing a war between supernatural, female harvesters of semen(!) – the Seminals – and orthodox vampires, while ‘Gaia’ savagely updates Ancient Greek mythic notions of limitless female vengeance. But Wilde never writes one-dimensional expressways to excess, so both ‘Botophobia’ – a fabulously literal take on a 50s trash movie, and ‘Writer’s Block’ – featuring a sullen, disaffected Goth fatally fucked to posthumous fame – become shockingly hilarious black comedies as luscious as laughing gas.
Frankly, if Wilde’s ravishing, deviant muse is this accomplished now, speculation fails at imagining what succulent depravities she’s yet to unleash. Best, then, to savour her artistry in precise, bearably perverse portions; after all, half the joy in enforced depravity is being savagely denied further excess. So, finally, let’s raise a toast to the debauched, virtuoso seductions that form Wilde’s Voices Of The Damned, undoubtedly the sharpest, most bewitchingly queer voice in modern horror!
Voices of The Damned by Barbie Wilde is available now, published by Short Scary Tales Publications.
