“Some were yoked on their neighbours’ shoulders, straddling them like boys playing at horseback riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together with threads or rope in a wall of muscle and bone. Yet others were trussed in a ball, with their heads tucked between their knees. All were in some way connected up with their fellows, tied together as though in some insane collective bondage game,”

This is a horror story which, like so many others, uses the genre’s ability to play with our own anxieties and discomforts and to transcend the low reputation of the cheap scare. Barker’s Books of Blood are the place to go to find such stories. He changed the game of British horror, replacing the largely sexless stories of action heroes saving the day in books like James Herbert’s The Rats to depict humanity, and particularly the body, in its visceral glory.

Like so many Twilight Zone episodes, this story begins with two people driving empty, unfamiliar roads, in this case the Yugoslavian countryside. The two men are lovers who have grown tired of each other, and their mutual developing dislike simmers under the surface of the first part of the story. Meanwhile, in the hills, two cities are binding their citizens together to create monstrous giants to fight each other.

So far, so ridiculous, but when the men find the mutilated survivors of the losing city, the story takes on a frightening and dark tone which persists to the end so that the final scenes of one of the protagonists hitching a ride on the monstrous leg of a giant made of intertwined people seems a great deal less laughable than it might do otherwise. Making the ludicrous plausible and frightening has always been one of Clive Barker’s particular skills and he does this to great effect here.

It’s a story which doesn’t reward much analysis, but that’s okay. Sometimes things are just disturbing and that’s all they need to be.

First published in Books of Blood, Volume 1, Sphere Books, 1984