The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker

In the beginning of this story, I don’t know who I was rooting for, Jack, hapless inheritor of a dark pact from his mother, or Yattering, the one sent to collect the soul. I started out siding with Jack, after all, it wasn’t his fault that Hell wanted him, but by the end I was firmly on the side of the demon.
It’s all Barker’s fault. He makes the reader feel for Yattering by showing you how rough he has it and how frustrated he is that Jack will not fall for his tricks. I mean, a creature from Hell should have a gleeful time torturing his subject, not be more trapped than the victim is. It’s not as if Yattering is some sort of demon slacker, he genuinely wants to complete the task given him. He tries quite hard to make Jack’s life as miserable as possible.
The Yattering may not come from the same Hell as Pinhead and the Cenobites, but it follows the same model: order over chaos. (This idea is the basis of the graphic novel Jihad ‘Cenobites vs Nightbreed’, which has no connection the Yattering but is quite awesome if you can find it.) Yattering’s got a job to do and the Lord of the Flies isn’t going to let him out of it just because he’s not having any success. It’s a lovely example of corporate mentality. I know I’ve been there, given the impossible job and told “just do it” with no extra resources or help. So once we start seeing the demon’s side of things, then we can decide whether we’ll side with or against him. While I wasn’t sure Jack deserved to be consigned to Hell
What turned the tide in favor of the demon for me is finding out that Jack, humble gherkin importer, knows the entire time what’s going on. I think Barker overplays his hand here and lets the reader find out too early that Jack knows. But I’m wondering, if without knowing that, would I still feel sympathy for the little demon? Jack seems like a stand-up kind of guy before we know what he’s up to; afterwards, he seems just as diabolical as the Yattering.
If you look at some of the things Jack does in light of this fact, he actually comes out crueler. He keeps bringing in cats, knowing that they’ll probably get killed, he lets his daughters be terrorized on a holiday. Some would say, yeah, he’s got a good reason to do all this, but it kind of makes him monstrous as well.
The end of the story makes me wonder if perhaps Yattering won’t end up claiming jack’s soul after all. It was Faust’s familiar who drove him to lower and lower depths by egging him on and increasing his depravity. If Jack acts like that to make the demon blow his top, what kinds of things might he do now that he’s got one in his control? There probably are rules for that too, though we don’t really get any hint of that in the story.
There’s a Tales from the Darkside episode made of this story. Yattering is played by Phil Fondacaro (a little person who’s been in a ton of movies and tv shows.) The cheesy red makeup and bad devil horns make Yattering look that much more comic, rather than imposing. I also found a piece of the script for the episode on Barker’s website: http://www.clivebarker.info/yatteringtv.html
Epic produced a comic too, and John Bolton’s version of Yattering looks a bit like the imp from World of Warcraft (though it was out loooong before. Besides, both are a fairly classic lower demon type creature) It looks better than the Tales from the Darkside one: http://www.johnbolton.com/bolton/comics/yattering/yattering01.html
I’m thinking that once someone points this guy’s magazine out to Clive Barker’s lawyer, their totally getting sued: http://www.heofthehouse.com/yattering&jack.html

Here’s a link to some Clive Barker comics: http://www.clivebarker.com/html/visions/bib/comics/index.html

In honor of the Yattering, this post is 666 words long.