Monster Musings: the Lix
Spoilers for Clive Barker's Great and Secret Show
Welcome to Monster Musings! Sometimes I have idle thoughts about fun media monsters: their design in visual works or their potential design in written ones; their thematic or metaphorical elements; extrapolations on what the monster can do or where it can go in the future; and what works vs what doesn’t.
Today I’ve been thinking about the Lix, the loathsome worm-snakes from a few works from Clive Barker, most notably The Great and Secret Show. They are terrifically unsettling; lumpy, fleshy, ungainly meat-worms with enormous strength and a face full of teeth; devouring prey by crawling in through their orifices and eating them from the inside out. There are different elements of uncanniness and aversion at play here, they at once evoke an insect, a disembodied penis, and the uncannily irregular appearance of microscopic germs. There is a fluidity about them almost, even if they themselves are not slimy they seem to manifest and subdivide as though they were slime. I haven’t seen much art depicting them but those that do draw them too cool, too streamlined and natural looking. You’re supposed to feel revulsion even looking at them. I imagined them as little larva with the texture of Jabba the Hutt, a character who as a child I thought to be literally an animated turd. Keep this misapprehension in mind for a second. The Dream Demons from the Nightmare on Elm Street series also gets close, their appearance plays with Freddy Kruegar’s waxy and sinewy flesh like little worms spawned from his burnt corpse. Disgusting.
The Great and Secret Show gives us only glimpses of the Lix, information about them is delivered to you in frantic vignettes as characters try to understand the nightmares pursuing them. We only get their name from a horrible little wizard character halfway through the book:
“The Lix, you mean? The serpent that opened the door? Just a little creation of mine. A doodle. Though I have enjoyed breeding them…” (361)
This repulsive wizard lives naked in his own filth in a shack between dimensions, he behaves exactly like a wizard should behave. He is gross and he’s dedicated his life to gross magic. We learn their name and that they do the wizard’s bidding, but his description of them as “doodles” is such a fun contribution. They’re afterthoughts, nonsense play magic. They aren’t meant for very much more than the most brute force purposes, they just aren’t complex enough.
We later learn that he makes the Lix by masturbating into his own feces. Everything our subconscious suggested about the Lix from their snotty and irregular composition is confirmed: they are literal shit babies. The wizard creates these homunculi in a mockery of childbirth, he spills his seed into a shit and his shit children can only blindly devour and then die.
They fucking rule. I love these monsters.
I’d like to extrapolate on how else the Lix could be used should they make an unwanted appearance in other horror stories. These exercises need to be done carefully; I’ve always disagreed with the tendency to reduce fiction to Dungeons and Dragons, dropping monsters as interchangeable stat blocks as though their existence weren’t part of the story. The Lix should be involved in Lix-like behavior, the circumstances of them appearing again should be sweaty and uncomfortable. You should feel unclean after an encounter with the Lix, like you were just attacked by a sentient shit. To that end here are a couple of ideas:
1. Poisoning. It feels only natural that the blind, idiot Lix could carry a magical disease perhaps brewed from the wizard’s cauldron. Imagine a Lix body covered in pustules in the water supply.
2. Messages. The Lix have teeth, why not a tongue? But no, it would be against character for these monsters to be able to communicate—even as a parrot does—even rote imitation has too much dignity for them. The only way it could work is if the effort strained them to the very last of their being, that it took everything they had to retain and deliver the smallest message. To crawl up to someone’s ear and spit out only a profound secret before shuddering and collapsing, disintegrating back to its base components of shit and cum. The wizard probably would only use this to intimidate, to deliver a dramatic warning.
3. The idea of using the Lix for surveillance has occurred to me, that they could posses a single rheumy eye which gazes dully in the dark. The wizard could wipe mucus from its lid and coo at it the way some do for their horrible little dogs. But that would extend the Lix into spheres of surveillance, this is a task that again is too dignified. Monsters that watch you while you sleep need to be patient and moderately subtle, sometimes even intelligent. It’s totally out of character for the Lix to wait; they are only birthed, snarling, and then released. However there are delightful possibilities for an evil Wizard to pluck out his own eyeball and use that as some kind of spying monster, no reason not to recycle this idea for another monster.
4. Could the wizard feed a Lix from his breast? Not milk, his is a perversion of motherhood, but rather blood like the apocryphal pelican in her piety (like the one that appears on the Louisiana state flag, of all places).