Customer Reviews

Revelations

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I am So glad that I just got this book from the library and didn't spend any money on it.If this is what horror has come to then I guess that I will have to read older stuff.
This is definitely not in line with The Dark Descent which is my favorite anthology of all time.
These stories just kind of sicken me.They are mostly about mans cruelty to other man(or women).I don't like stories like these at all.I find them very depressing and upsetting.If I want to read about things like the above I would read more nonfiction.This is not my idea of entertainment.It made me want to take a shower after reading just a couple of the stories.There is also very little supernatural elements in the stories which I think makes stories fun.All around a very unpleasant anthology.

Doug Winter has outdone himself. This assemblage of writers and stories is guaranteed to thrill and chill you. The Joe Lansdale story is worth the purchase price alone. It will (allegorically and literally) blow you away. Clive Barker's "bookend" pieces are also fantastic. There are no weak links in the century long chain in this book. This is what an anthology should be like

Douglas E. Winter waited a long while to return with an anthology to match his excellent Prime Evil; so rather than retread old ground he creates a celebration of the coming Millenium. We are left with Revelations: a volume which brings together some of the best contemporary horror talent in a non-genre experiment to build an anthology novel covering the final century of our current Millenium. Its scope reaches even beyond this, with Clive Barker's tale of openings and closures which wraps about the tales of our century, taking up to the stirrings of the Millenia we currently inhabit.

As an anthology it is surpassed by few, and as a novel it is a work which renews important events of the previous century ready for the onset of the future Millenium. So it prises open a few graves; airs the woes of some of the centuries ghosts; takes us into the depths of many of our recent history's defining moments. Natural disasters and far more human ones, the full range of human emotion. Each author makes a decade live in the present for a while, and history phases past with the turning of each page. What can the future hold? Where better to look and draw inspiration from but the past.

Do the authors matter? In a work like this they should, but the individual voices merely combine to create a greater whole. Once Barker's unique vision of the past has receeded we move into the twentieth century, and a pair of devestating natural disasters wrought fresh by Joe Lansdale and David Morrell; storm and pestilance. Next F. Paul Wilson brings us face to face with one of the centuries greatest evil, and a man that can possibly avert it; or can he? Then to the Chinese Opera, and a secular world from which two young lovers escape - a collaboration between Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust. Charles L. Grant brings a unique vision of the man in black and Whitley Strieber takes us on a nuclear trip. Richard Christian Matheson takes the seventies and the charts by storm, with a band who downward spiral carries them to devestation. David J. Schow and Craig Spector bring down the Berlin wall, while the shades of old conflicts look on. It takes Ramsey Campbell's charting of this, our current decade, to bring an obscure author into the limelight with the greatest book ever written; barr none. So it's over. Yet it is merely the beginning, so Clive Barker again takes us on his encapsulating vision.

At the end of this enrapturing journey you have been shown where we have been and where we are going, that the darkest of literary visions is still conscious of the light. A forfilling meal you'll shelve for perusal again, and again - a book which will outlast the Millenia that spawned it.

I just wanted to say i think this is such a great showcase for horror writers both new and older. Although i haven't finished all the stories i must say my favorites so far, the excellent Joe R. Lansdale and Pobby Z. Brite and Christa Faust. I would also say Douglas E. Winter should be commended for his choice selections and vision.

This book is one of the most poorly written and shoddily compiled collections I've ever read. Additionally, it is a sad commentary on the field of horror today. Barker is fast becoming a parody of himself: his bookending "stories" in Revelations, if you can call these underplotted and overpretentious works "stories," are foolish and dumb, as is every story here with the exception of Richard Christian Matheson's story, which stands out like a jewel in a pile of garbage. In general, these stories are unconnected except in vague ways, are poorly written (even Joe Lansdale's story is pretty crappy, which quite surprised me), and are self-important to the point of hilarity. For true horror, read Thomas Ligotti or Kim Newman. For contemporary dreck that almost makes Ann Rice look decent (quite an achievement, believe me), try this weighty book of self-important nonsense.

Apocalypse: 1. a. Apocalypse. Bible, The Book of Revelation. b. Any of various anonymous Jewish or Christian texts from around the second century BC containing prophetic or symbolic visions, especially of the imminent destruction of the world. 2. Great or total devastation. 3. A prophetic disclosure; a revelation.

In the United Kingdom, Revelations has an alternate title: Millennium. This 1997 anthology does indeed consider the (then) impending Millennium, in Clive Barker's exquisite fictional discourse on storytelling, "The Chiliad--A Meditation." Composed of two interlocking stories set one thousand years apart, this framing device puts forth the notion that the future influences the past, that the river of time "flows both ways." The true focus of this collection, however, is the twentieth century, perhaps the most turbulent in all of human history. Over the course of ten stories, each dealing with a specific decade, twelve writers focus on the human element involved in cataclysmic events.

The first story, "The Big Blow," by Joe R. Lansdale, is set in 1900. Two hurricanes hit Galveston, Texas, one a natural phenomenon, the other taking the form of big John McBride, a vile, profane man hired by racist members of the Galveston Sporting Club to wrest the club's boxing title from its present owner, a black man named 'Lil' Arthur (Jack) Johnson. Their intense battle is matched only by the ferocity of the hurricane that strikes during the match, leveling the city.

The next story takes place in 1918. "If I Should Die Before I Wake," by David Morrell, tells the story of Dr. Jonas Bingaman, whose heroic efforts do little to assuage the devastating effect of the Spanish Influenza on Elmsdale, the small town where he practices. Morrell reveals a sobering fact at the end of this touching story: while World War I caused the deaths of 8.5 million, the estimated number of those killed by the Spanish Influenza was 40 million.

F. Paul Wilson's entry, "Aryans and Absinthe," takes us to Germany, circa 1923. Here, Karl Stehr, a Jewish bookseller, is befriended by the mysterious Ernst Drexler, who counsels him on avoiding the debilitating effects of Germany's runaway inflation. Drexler also introduces him to absinthe, which causes the bookseller to hallucinate during an impassioned speech by rising political figure Adolph Hitler. During this episode, Stehr has a vision of the Holocaust, and, believing it to be true, decides to kill its architect. This is a "If you could stop Hitler before he came to power story" with a delicious twist.

"Triads," by Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust, is the story of two young boys, Ji Fung and Lin Bai, lovers caught up in the corrupt and exotic world of 1937 Hong Kong and Shanghai. Sold to a performing troupe by their families as children, the pair escape their brutal master only to become involved with Chinese gangs. This stylish tale, set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese War , ends tragically, but on a note of optimism.

We next visit the forties and fifties, courtesy of Charles Grant and Whitley Streiber. In "Riding the Black," Grant takes a prototypical Western plot and stands it on its head. Here, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse perceives the end of the world not in the creation of the atomic bomb, but in the advent of the television age. Streiber's story "The Open Doors," is a stream of consciousness reflection on the atomic bomb and (surprise!) alien visitation which demands rereading.

The sixties are handled by Elizabeth Massie. I felt sure that "Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo," Massie's story on hippie cults and culture, would end up dealing with the Manson family, but I was dead wrong. Her twist ending reminded me of a bumper sticker I saw recently, which read "I know I'm Paranoid, but am I Paranoid ENOUGH?"

The seventies are covered by Richard Christian Matheson's epistolary "Whatever," the eighties by "Dismantling Fortress Architecture," a collaboration between David Schow and Craig Spector. Matheson's knowing story follows the rise and fall of seventies supergroup Whatever through a series of magazine articles, press releases and interviews (I especially liked the name of the band's debut album, Know Means Know). Schow and Spector use the fall of the Iron Curtain as a backdrop in their piece, an eclectic summation of over sixty years of German history. This piece is unique to the anthology in that it refers to events in another story in the collection, Wilson's "Aryans and Absinthe."

Ramsey Campbell brings readers into the nineties with "The Word," which chronicles the career of writer Jess Kray, as seen through the eyes of Jeremy Bates, a curmudgeonly reviewer/critic. Kray, a sub mid-list author, writes a bestseller called The Word, which literally means all things to all people. Bates, skeptical of Kray, hopes to expose him as a fraud, but unwittingly bestows Messianic status on him during a live television broadcast.

Winter should be commended on the uniform quality of these stories--after all, the nature of the anthology did not permit him the luxury of arranging the stories to maximum advantage. The book is indeed a revelation, a thought provoking reflection on the century just ended. Rather than dealing with thousand year cataclysms, the stories focus on individual apocalypses, reminding readers that horror takes many forms--prejudice, natural disasters, disease, runaway inflation, technology, social upheaval and ignorance are just a few of its aspects. This emphasis gives Revelations an intimacy and power it might not otherwise have had.

Winter points out in his afterword that the end of a century is "a global anniversary, and inevitably a time of summing up and looking ahead." Revelations does just that: it tells us where we've been, while raising a number of disturbing questions about where we are going.

Words fail me, which is not usual at all. All I can say is if they decide to do another one of these things for God's sake pick an editor that knows what he's doing!