Customer Reviews

Mister B. Gone

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

Having been an avid fan of Clive Barker's fiction for the past twenty or more years, starting with "Books of Blood", I have come to expect so much more from this author. I was very disappointed with Mr. B. Gone. I found myself tiring quickly of the pleading to stop reading, the begging for the fire, etc. And I agree with the reviewer who indicated that the book has been "dreadfully proofread". I agree.....so many typographical errors, extra words, missing words....and again, since the book is ABOUT words and their power, I found myself pulled out of the story several times a chapter.

I found it to be not scary, not suspenseful, and rather slapdash. It pains me to write this review, in a way, since I count myself an ardent fan of Mr. Barker's work, but this one....well.....I think I should have given it a miss. I must say though, for the record, that this is the first book of Mr. Barker's for which I have had a less-than-stellar review. Usually, I find his books to completely capture me. This one, I found rather boring.

To those of you who liked it, I wish I felt the same way. But, alas, I did not.

There was actually a pretty good book hidden in here trying to get out. Unfortunately, it failed.

First, the good things:

This was a really inventive premise. A demon escapes from Dante's Inferno, and finds himself in the real world. How does he react? How does the World react to him? He has escapades. Cool idea.

Barker's demon Jakobok, and indeed the other angels and demons in this book, in no way fit the common stereotype. Also cool.

Now the bad things:

The conceit of the book that it actually contains Jakobok's spirit, and he wants you, The Reader, to burn the book. While inventive at first, about what seems like the thousandth time you go through it this device becomes more than grating, it is irritating beyond words. I ended up skipping pages and pages at a time to get beyond it and back to the story. In what is already a short book, if this stuff were edited out, you'd have a magazine article remaining. Barker's editor deserves a swift kick in the [...].

In a book in which Gutenberg's printing press play such a pivotal role, it is beyond ironic that this book is so chock full of typographical and printing errors. Also REALLY annoying.

Because the actual story itself is so slight, most of the characterizations are, too. Almost cartoon characters.

So.... one and a half stars, which I'll round up to two because I've enjoyed Barker's past work so much. Pretty generous of me, frankly.

Don't forget to burn this review when you're done reading it.

It is hard to be impartial when it comes to Barker, for I have been a fan of his work since I was in my mid to late teens. But, I will not recommend this to first time readers of Clive's work. You won't care for Barker if you take this as an introduction. This was obviously written for longtime Barkerophiles, and I have to be thankful for it. It is filled with satirical whimsy and tongue-in-cheek blasphemy Clive fans will enjoy and, trust me, you won't be able to stop yourself from chuckling out loud at some sections.

Jakabok is oddly endearing or, rather, becomes so over the course of the novel. Some stunning imagery and words, as always (particularly near the end), from Barker.

Again, not a book for newcomers to Barker, but if you have read "Imagica", "Books of Bloods", "Cabal," et al., this is a read I think you will enjoy, just enter with the caveat it is not a horror novel, it is a dark satire. A comical look at a lower demon's life, and his travels with a beloved fellow demon friend, after the lower demon is accidentally dragged from the lower levels of hell and into the human world.

(Hardcover version)

When you read this review can you hear my voice in your head? How does it sound like? Is it someone you know? Well that is what I thought. You know you shouldn't read this review, but there you go doing it anyway, don't tell me I didn't warn you.

This unique book is both a story about a demon and a conversation with that demon all at once. My first paragraph is my feeble attempt at imitating what goes on in the book. In the book there are several requests to stop reading the book and burn it instead, and some of these requests are threats of torture and threats of eternal damnation if you don't burn the book. This gets a little tired after a while, but I found the concept of a demon both telling his gruesome life story and talking to you and threatening you all at the same time quite innovative and creepy.

The name of the demon is Jakabok Botch. He escaped the ninth circle of Hell in the 14th century. He has been with us ever since and if you buy this book he will be living with you too. He is ugly, severely burned, has two tails, he is hateful, and he likes to take warm baths in the fresh blood of infants.

I admit I did not think the book was very scary, but for me it was still a page turner. I found the book to be interesting and creative. I found the comparisons between the heartless barbarism of people in less enlightened times (as well as today) and that of demons in Hell enlightening. Earth looks a lot like just another circle of Hell in which we are our own demons. However, in this circle of Hell, there is a choice, a choice that the eternally damned demons do not have. Demons and Humans are so similar and yet so different.

An episode in the book that I found to be quite intriguing was the war and then the negotiation between the angels of heaven and the demons of hell over the written word at the time and place of Gutenberg's invention. This event determined our future and this book had a very peculiar place in this history.

With regards to Clive Barker I am a first time reader and contrary to what Publishers Weekly told me I still liked it. I should say that I have seen the Hellraiser movies and I've bought a pinhead mask for Halloween so I am not totally unfamiliar with Clive Barker, but I have never read a book of his before. If this book was among Clive Barker's worst then I cannot wait to check out the other books (I'll go for Hellbound Heart next). I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read something different and odd, but not as a good horror book.

It seems that there are a lot of mixed reviews of this book, and I imagine what a lot of people are missing is that this isn't a horror or suspense book - it's a black comedy.

The narrator is completely unreliable, and at turns lovable and pathetic. He tries so hard to be bad, but we have to come to the conclusion that he's nothing but sad and lonely. The depictions of horrors and tortures are intentionally graphic, but in the silly way that a child might imagine an overly deadly scene in order to attempt to shock an adult.

If one reads the book as a serious tale of an arch demon, it would be disappointing, but read as a character study of a deeply flawed narrator who so badly wants to be evil but simply cannot manage to overcome his desire for love and belonging, it's both sad and amusing.

Barker tantalizes you with details and emotions, he doesn't bash you over the head with them. Read with an eye for the humorous and absurd, this is a fantastic black comedy with both soul and laughter amid the refuse and pain.

I have been reading a lot of bad reviews of this book and I honestly feel they are unfounded. Mister B Gone has been called Barker's return to the horror story. I do disagree with this statement (I really don't feel that this is horror, but that's subjective), though I don't feel it affects the bottom line. That this is a fun little book that I had a lot of trouble putting down and, yes, was sad to see it come to an end so quickly.
I enjoyed the little asides with Jakabok begging to burn the book and him with it. I thought that was an ingenious way for Barker to tell his tale in a way other than every other book you've ever read. Maybe a couple of them were a bit long winded, but the asides as a whole were, for the most part, clever.
Barker has a power in his writing that provides a vivid picture of the world in which you are reading like no other author that I have read. This is not his best story, but it is what it is. I nice little novella to help our wait for The Scarlet Gospels seem less...well...painful.

I did take away one star from my rating because, yes, the editing was horrible. Misspelled words, unclosed quotation marks, etc. Most books have a few errors here and there, but it got to the point of distraction in Mister B. Gone.

I am glad to see that I am not the only one who thought the pleas to burn the book were so tedious that they ended up skipping over them too. Reading the jacket, I thought this was an exciting idea. I was very disappointed and wondered if there would be anything illegal about me writing a book with the same premise of a demon speaking to you from the book, but in the way I had hoped it would be. Not having the best knowledge of grammar, I was not sure if it was me - but I did think there was quite a bit of editing that seemed to be missed. And, I thought to myself while reading it, "I hope I don't have to read the words din or throng or tattoo in this book again".......but eventually they would appear. Fairly disappointed.

This book gets very old, very fast. It lacks imagination and it seems as though Mr. Barker got bored writing so he repeated himself over and over to fill up a few pages and produce a small novel to cash a check. Don't waste the money. If you want to read it get it from the library.

It grieves me to write a one-star review for Barker's new one, but his novels have been such hit-and-miss affairs for over a decade now, and THIS one was simply unreadable. It's the first time I've literally thrown a book at the wall (being halfway through the story) in disgust in ages.

As usual, Barker takes an absolutely tantalizing concept, starts pretty decently, and then completely loses all focus, cohesion, and discipline.

Yes, I've been reading his work since 'Books of Blood' so I know the guy's "quirks." The problem is that "The Quirk Won't Work if the Work You Shirk."

Barker's wonderful creative foundation becomes disjointed and incoherent yet AGAIN. There's no stars to be had for simply throwing random bursts of "disconnected imagination" at the empty page and hoping the stray bits will all somehow amount to a story.

The tantalizing concept in 'Mister B. Gone' is similar to Barker's pet theme of worlds or 'beings' existing and/or trapped "within worlds." The premise is great here: a demon trapped in the pages of an actual book, a memoir. That demon speaks directly to the reader with words of admonition and warning--words that are intended to evoke horror in the reader (or at least give us $22.95 worth of unsettling feelings).

No such luck. The premise is the only good thing about this short novel. From Barker's half-baked description of Hell and its denizens, to the lazy writing and patchwork plotting, this is a big disappointment. Again, Barker seems to have been phoning-in his novels for awhile, and this one must have required a VERY long-distance call indeed.

A big problem rests (gee) with the main character, the demon "Jakobok Botch" (Yes, demons have silly first-names and idiotic surnames in Hell and live in houses w/ plugged-up toilets and lots of pointless things happen "below." And there's piles of garbage down in hell, too. Yeah, that's right). Jakobok Botch whines and whimpers with no voice of mystery, intrigue, or remarkability, much less terror. The rest of the "characters" only get worse because they are strangled by a plot-line that doesn't meander so much as it seems to step idly into one bland, literary gopher-hole after another. The "Quitoon" character is pointless. Boring. Aimless. Irrelevant.

If Barker were being extra-experimental or just "extra-quirky," certain things could be forgiven (or understood), but even in fantasy/horror, one can't spit-shine pure drivel, no matter how hard one tries. And Barker didn't appear to try very hard, here. And this IS drivel. The dust-jacket copy touting Barker's exploration of the "very nature of good and evil" in this book has got to be the saddest overstatement I've seen in a long time. The book explores nothing remotely substantial along these lines, reaches no interesting conclusion, and is no more penetrating than something written by L. Ron Hubbard about the origins of...well, ANYTHING.

Again, Barker seems still quite able to summon fine initial concepts, but his execution has become hapless and random. His prose is still decent, but he needs to remember how to write an actual story that makes sense--even in his marvelously imaginative "worlds." Without question, the need for basic tight writing and narrative coherence is all the more crucial when Barker is off in some "other" dimension. His creations deserve better; his characters do. To say nothing of his fans.

I'm not best pleased to write this review, but the book was far more displeasing. Hopefully, Barker will resurrect his interest in the completion of the 'Abarat' books and their excellent, source-relevant display of fantasy-writing and imagery. Barker's heart seemed to be in the right place in those unique books.

It's MIA in this one. I tremble to say it about the great Clive, but: this is out-and-out hackery.

I have been a Clive Barker fan for almost 15 years. I absolutely love his writing, characters, imagery, everything. But I was genuinely disappointed in his latest novel. I kept expecting a clever twist, a creative story line or rich characters, but was very disappointed. There doesn't seem to be so much of a story as much as ramblings that aren't even that interesting.

At first I liked the idea of a demon being pulled from hell. How would you interact with humans? How would you survive? But Barker barely seems to touch on these ideas. He barely seems to touch on much of anything about the main character. Just brief snippets that don't seem to add up to a lot.

The ending wasn't a surprise, pretty well guessed it about 1/3 way into the book. Which is very uncharacteristic for his novels. Usually I get pulled into Barker's rich worlds, colorful characters and imaginative stories. But this one, lacked the qualities that made me a die hard Clive Barker fan in the first place.