Andrew David Barker’s short novel Dead Leaves (published by Boo Books) takes us back to the 1980s and the height of the video nasty scare. Scott, just out of school and facing a life of bleak, working-class drudgery in the Midlands, is interested in two things: girls, and horror films. He’s hopeless with the former but considers himself a connoisseur of the latter, which he rents from the seedy Ray’s Video Emporium or buys from the local video pirate to watch with his mates, Paul and Mark. But there is one film they can’t get hold of, a film they desire more than any other, a film thought to be so violent and gory that they have to see it, whatever the cost: Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead.
So-called video nasties were a huge source of panic in ’80s Britain: for the first time in history kids were free to watch whatever they wanted, unsupervised at home, and with that freedom came the fear that violent films would corrupt and deprave. Video shops were raided, people arrested and even imprisoned, all over films that wouldn’t make us blink twice now. 30 years on we have torture porn taking box-office millions, blood-soaked horror all over TV, and of course, the Vomit Gore Trilogy.
Dead Leaves is not a horror novel, but it is a novel about horror, about how our passions can become obsessions and how our obsessions come to define us. It’s also a novel about growing up different, alienated from your peers and your surroundings, nursing dreams so fragile that you dare not share them lest they turn to dust. Barker’s teenage characters have a touching fragility to them, a sense that in spite of their bluff and bluster they might at any minute crack and break from the stresses and traumas of adolescence.
Scott is particularly well drawn, and I could really sympathise with how his desire to become a filmmaker causes him to clash with his working-class parents, to whom food on the table is far more important than creative fulfillment. I couldn’t help but warm to a teenage narrator who comes out with lines like, “I sat on one of the swings and contemplated my existence. Surmising that it was shit.” Sometimes the characters are so self-involved, maudlin, and downright teenage that you want to reach into the book and shake some sense into them, but I considered that a strength of Barker’s characterisation, not a weakness.
Barker obviously loves horror, and he steals from the genre a strong feeling of impending doom–the films the characters love are being taken away, their hangouts are closing, their friendships are becoming strained and their childhood is ending, forcing them to take up industrial jobs they don’t want. Add to that the historical understanding that those same jobs will soon be gone, destroyed by globalisation in less than a decade, and Dead Leaves feels far more bleak than most coming-of-age novels.
Like a good video nasty, Dead Leaves is a short, sharp shock, clocking in at under 150 pages. The chapters average less than two pages each, giving the novel a cinematic feel as if it is being told via a series of jump cuts–there is one great section where Barker uses just six words over two chapters, and the effect is like being punched in the ribs. There is violence, too, and one particularly tense scene in a deserted shopping centre that could have been ripped from a gore-soaked ’80s film. There are, ironically, no “Dead Leaves” in this novel, which is taut and tight as the skin on Leatherface’s lamps.
Dead Leaves is a great read for anyone who once was (or still is) obsessed with horror films or the taboo. In fact, it is a great read for anyone whose youthful obsessions made them different, or whose dreams of a creative life were not warmly encouraged by those around them. It is a well-drawn portrait of growing up different and a grimy, blood-soaked love letter to the cathartic, transformative qualities of the horror film.
