In volume one of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series, the 1984 story “In the Hills, the Cities” describes how the citizenry of competing villages lash themselves together to form giant human figures as tall as skyscrapers, which wage bloody war upon each other in remote valleys. In Georg Heym’s 1913 story, “The Dissection,” a dead body in an autopsy room “quivers with happiness,” revealing a form of hidden life.