When AIDS becomes literature, novels become contagious

Clive Barker is a cult author, famous for having created a mythology that is now part of the horror imagination. His stories, covered in blood and guts, take us to the most hidden, to what lives in our unconscious and that only surfaces in critical moments. In one of those stories, included in his blood books (Valdemar), the author from Liverpool tells us how a woman browses through an underground cemetery that has just been discovered under an old church.

It turns out that the corpses were piled up centuries ago, during the Black Death epidemic that devastated Europe between the 14th and 18th centuries. It all started in 1340, when the Tatars came into conflict with the Genoese who protected themselves from the attack in Caffa (Feodosia), the city that would usher in the pandemic. With this, the Genoese spread the infection throughout all the ports; Ships became floating coffins and Europe experienced a bacterial infection that decimated its population. We have talked about this somewhere else.

But what interests us here – based on Barker’s story – is another disease, in this case sexually transmitted, whose contagion continues to threaten in every carnal contact. We are referring to HIV that weakens the immune system and attacks white blood cells, so the risk of contracting diseases and tumors is high. Today we have the map of this fearsome disease, but, at the beginning, there was no information, and it led to what became a newly arrived pandemic, that is, speculation, speculation and false diagnoses that are nothing more than different ways of express panic in the face of the unknown.

For all this, Clive Barker captures the heartbeat of those times in the story titled life from death where he tells us a terrifying story that happens around an epidemic that spreads from the past. We already said that it is an eighties story that captures the pulse of the times, when AIDS was a virus that devastated every encounter and having a date with someone was the closest thing to dating death.

In another record, the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis, in his novel American Psycho, offers a reading of those times when AIDS was a threat. And he describes it from the first pages, when one of the characters exclaims that if you get AIDS you can get anything, even dyslexia.

However, according to the posh people in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, AIDS is very difficult to catch, a zero point zero, point zero one chance of catching it, they say, making the matter less serious. In this way, Easton Ellis turns the novel into a story of risk and promiscuity where blood splashes on every page. Between Barker and Easton Ellis there is a secret bond. Because, although on the surface they may seem like different writers, deep down they are united by a taste for the macabre and having their blood poisoned by a literature whose patriarch is Stephen King.

The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.

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