Animal Life
Ralph snapped on the light.
"Too bright." said Duffy, squinting. He was sitting up at the table with a tub of peach ice-cream in front of him. There was a spoon and a bowl beside it, but he'd apparently decided they weren't worth the bother, and plunged his snout into the tub. "Boy," he said, "You look like hell ." Ralph put his hands to his throbbing head. His concussion was plainly worse than he thought.
"I know, I shouldn't be eating ice-cream," Duffy was saying. "Our digestive systems weren't designed for sugar. But I thought, What the hell? Why not celebrate? It's not every day that a dog gets to talk with its master."
"When we enter the world of fantasy - and I'm talking now about horror fiction and invented world fiction and science fiction too - are we maybe attempting a return, at least imaginatively, to a time when we could look at our pet dog and almost imagine ourselves inside the dog's head? I speak about dogs particularly because I always had dogs when I was a kid, and I still dream of dogs all the time, always with this terrible sense of loss attached, because in your dream state you understand a secret language of some kind, which is lost when you wake. ..It's like the dream state which is made reference to time and again in fairy stories, of being in the enchanted wood and finally understanding what the birds are saying."
On Animal Life...
Every Fear is a Desire
In London, September 1988 by Lisa Tuttle, Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden
Stephen Jones & David Sutton: "Animal Life was inspired by the January 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles (where Barker now lives) and deals with one of the author's favourite themes, the intersection of the real and the mystical. 'There are two ways to read this story,' he suggests."...other comments
Dark Terrors 2 By Stephen Jones & David Sutton, Dark Terrors 2, 1996
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