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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The perfect introduction to the dark genius of Clive Barker, August 26, 2003
Clive Barker did not want his Books of Blood broken up into individual volumes when they were published, yet that is what happened. Now, the first three volumes are available in one book, serving as the perfect introduction to Barker's unique style of horror. There are some really groundbreaking stories included here, alongside of a dud or two from Volume Two, but each and every story exhibits the genius and originality of its author's dark vision.The initial offering, The Book of Blood, stands out as a unique ghost story, but it also serves as a provocative abstract for everything Barker sought to accomplish with these stories. After this enticing introductory tale, we head below the streets of New York to sneak a ride on The Midnight Meat Train. This story is vintage Clive Barker, full of blood and gore. Barker isn't trying to drown the reader in blood as a means to hide any lack of skill on his part, though, because the skill is undeniably there for all to see. In The Yattering and Jack, a dark comedy farce, a poor demon does everything he can think of to make the unshakeable Jack miserable, driving himself almost mad in the process. I think of The Yattering and Jack as an amusing sort of Barker bedtime story. Pig Blood Blues forces the casual reader to once again don hip hugger boots for a trek into gore and depravity. At a certain school for wayward boys, the other white meat is not pork. Sex, Death and Starshine is a good story, touching upon the needs of the dead to be entertained every once in a while, but it lacks a certain oomph. Dread is a somewhat sadistic tale of one man's obsession with death. His is a hands-on endeavor, as he seeks to look the beast directly in the eye by studying the effects of dread and the realization of imminent death in the eyes of his fellow man. Dread is a psychologically disturbing read, one which succeeds quite well indeed in spite of a rather pat ending. Hell's Event tells the story of a charity race, only this particular contest pits a minion of the underworld against human runners, with the control of the very government hinging upon the outcome. Next up is Jacqueline Ess: Her Last Will and Testament, a disappointing story in which the main character's special abilities to control the things and people around her wind up wasted. The Skins of the Fathers is not a bad story, but it is quite weird. A sometimes almost comical group of inhuman, bizarre creatures comes to a small desert town to reclaim one of their own, born five years earlier to a human mother. A puffed up sheriff and belligerent posse of townsfolk lend comic relief as much as tension to the story's plot of borderline absurdity. I love the unusual premise and the surreal quality of Son of Celluloid. The back wall behind the screen of an old movie theatre has seen so many famous lives projected upon it that the essence of those screen legends has germinated within it. The only thing needed to bring the screen personalities to life is a catalyst, which comes in the form of a dying criminal. The man himself is of no consequence, but he has within him a force possessing a single-minded drive to grow and thrive. Next up is Rawhead Rex, one of Barker's more violent stories. There are creatures that thrived on earth long before man helped force them to the brink of extinction, and things get pretty gruesome when one fellow unknowingly unseals the prison in which such a monster has been sealed for eons. Murder of a more human kind rests at the heart of Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud. This tale doesn't succeed completely in my estimation, and some might even find it oddly laughable, as the main character is an amorphous blob of a dead man's essence who reconstitutes the form of his human body in a death shroud. Scape-Goats is a little island of death story, the most interesting aspect of which is its viewpoint; it is not often that Barker tells a tale from the first-person perspective of a woman. The final story, Human Remains, offers Barker's typically unusual slant on the old doppelganger motif. I have saved the worst and best of the collected stories for special mention. New Murders in the Rue Morgue is by far the worst short story Barker has ever written. We are led to believe Poe's classic story The Murders in the Rue Morgue was based on fact, and now the modern representative of the Dupin blood finds himself mired in an extraordinary, eerily similar, and exceedingly ludicrous case of his own. On the flip side, the most impressive story told in these pages is In the Hills, the Cities. Two male lovers touring the hidden sights of Yugoslavia become the reluctant witnesses to a sight few men could ever even conceive of when a unique traditional battle between the citizens of two adjacent towns takes an unexpected and ever-so-destructive turn. If you want to know what the big deal about Clive Barker is, this is the story you need to read. Books of Blood immediately established Barker as a giant in the genre and should be required reading for all fans of extreme and intellectually challenging horror.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Books Of Blood: The Genius Of Modern Horror, May 26, 2005
Years ago, around '86 or '87 a friend of mine in High School turned me on to a then unknown Englishman by the name of Clive Barker. I was a complete Stephen King junkie at the time and this friend of mine said, dude, you gotta read this guy's stuff...he's un-f*cking-real! I kinda wrinkled my nose and shook my head. Read some no-name's book...pleeze. But I trusted this friend with his opinions and while browsing around one day at a local B. Dalton bookstore I came across a hardcover copy of In The Flesh by Mr. Barker on the under $5.00 table. What the heck. It bought it and read it and....Jeezus! The Forbidden still haunts me to this day. But that small dose of Barker was only the beginning. A few months later I had the luck of finding (on the same under $5.00 table in the same bookstore) a harcover copy of The Books Of Blood. Now, in England, The Books Of Blood were arranged in volumes I through VI by a little outfit called Sphere Ltd, but Stateside, they were broken up into Volumes I through III, The Inhuman Condition, In The Flesh and finally at the end of the novel Cabal. Anyway, I took the book home and started to read the short stories represented there one by one. Astonishing. Nothing I had ever read before would prepare me for what Clive Barker was up to. Never before had I witnessed such abominations, such cruelties, such acts of horrifying and engrossing carnal abberations. He scared me more than a little. Great God, where had this guy come from? Stephen King was praising him on the jacket of every book he printed and rightly so. This guy was the new messiah of the modern horror story. Nowhere had I read such raw, brutal and fresh ideas. Nothing cliche here. The stories encompassing all of the orginal Books Of Blood are awesome from "Midnight Meat Train" all the way to "How Spolers Bleed" at the end of Cabal. These stories are definitely a work of genius. All these years later and I haven't missed a Barker publication yet. Still, though, once in a while, I go back (as I do with Stephen King's earlier novels) and reread them. Books Of Blood is not for the squeamish and neither is Clive Barker. He wasn't afraid to eviscirate someone back then or to report pornographic couplings and he isn't afraid to do so now. Visionary. Imaginative. Original. The Books Of Blood rock on all levels!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid body of work and a stellar showcase of Barker's craft!, August 24, 2004
When originally released as three seperate works during the 1980's, these short stories were widely considered to be the beginning of something revolutionary in horror fiction. Barker was a fresh and promising look at what the genre could become when placed in the hands of thoughtful, intelligent, and (above all) imaginative writers. Stephen King would even make a very vocal statement supporting Barker, calling him the "future of horror." Clive Barker's Books of Blood trilogy were spellbinding, inspiring, and terrifying entries into the stale and used up world of occult horror. He was a breath of much needed fresh air.
Now looking back on these works about twenty years later, and surveying the massive and impressive body of work that Clive has sustained for himself, it's a very different "future" than the one Stephen King had imagined. Clive Barker has written some of the best and most daring fantasy works of the twentieth century; grand in scope, epic in length, philosophical in depth, and hopeful at heart. Weaveworld, the Great and Secret Show, Sacrament, Galilee... all of these books are great tales written by a master craftsman, and none of them carry the baggage of having to fit into the horror genre. In fact, besides perhaps the Damnation Game, I'd say that the Books of Blood (volumes 1-6) are the only works that Barker actually made that fall into the horror category. All works that follow are in a league all their own entirely.
Barker's work never made the splash in horror fiction that Stephen King was predicting. Sure, Barker has been a massively successful author, and has been able to create a wonderful tapestry of fiction by adhering to his own set of rules ( a very admirable quality in an author), but to claim that he writes horror fiction is to inaccurately label his beautiful style and prose. It seems now the name Barker has all but faded from the minds of casual horror readers. It's far more likely that you will find a room full of people who've read a Stephen King novel, than you will find a room full of people who've even heard of Clive Barker.
But for the devoted ones who have latched onto Barker's books, this is all very trivial and unimportant. The talent of an author is not meausred by the ammount of books sold (and he has sold millions), nor is it gauged by the familiarity of his name. For the fans, like myself, Barker's work is liberating. Reading his books set the imagination free and give you the uninhibited feeling of life. The feeling that all things are possible, if not probable. It's almost spiritual. No author has given me as much as Clive barker has. His ability to tap into the things that disturb yet fascinate us as well as the things that drive us and confound us in uncanny.
Clive Barker has said that the Clive Barker that wrote these Books of Blood is not the Clive Barker writing today. He is no longer as interested in shocking or disturbing his readers as he once was. He's matured as an author, and life has taken him in a different direction. So, reading these short stories of terror now, it's interesting to see the Barker of twenty years ago creating a world of repulsion and beauty, digging under your skin and finding the things that shake you to your core. "The Midnight Meat Train", is an exercise in graphic violence and lurking evil, "Dread" is the human mind breaking in two as it is forced to confront that which terrifies it beyond repair, "Skins of the Fathers" is an interesting precursor to the ideas explored in Cabal. The young Barker strikes some very vital chords here, and he made a brief, but very potent impact on horror fiction.
If you've never read Barker before, and you enjoy this sort of genre, this is a fabulous place to begin. If you enjoy these stories, pick up another Barker book, approach it with an open mind, and he'll take you places you never thought you would go.
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