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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : B : Barker, Clive
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"Wake up, sir. We're here". It's a simple enough opening line--although not many would have guessed back in 1991 that this would lead to one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comics of the second half of the century.In Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman weaves the story of a man interested in capturing the physical manifestation of Death but who instead captures the King of Dreams. By Gaiman's own admission there's a lot in this first collection that is awkward and ungainly--which is not to say there are not frequent moments of greatness here. The chapter "24 Hours" is worth the price of the book alone; it stands as one of the most chilling examples of horror in comics. And let's not underestimate Gaiman's achievement of personifying Death as a perky, overly cheery, cute goth girl! All in all, there is a roguish breaking of new ground in this book which is preferable to the often dull precision of the concluding volumes of the Sandman series. --Jim Pascoe
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With Abarat, Clive Barker begins an ambitious sequence of fantastic novels aimed at a young audience as well as his adult fans. There is as much sense of threat to the world here as there was in the horror novels with which he made his name. But the worst almost never happens here--and there is whimsy and charm along with a carefully judged and measured sense of the nightmarish. Young Cindy Quackenbush finds herself transported from the boredom of a Mid-Western chicken-packing town to the 25 islands of the Abarat--islands torn between the evil magician Christopher Carrion and the equally power-hungry rational capitalist Pixler. Each of the islands has a nature determined by an hour of the day--part of the pleasure of the book is seeing how Barker works this conceit out as Cindy travels from peril to peril. The book is literally a book of hours--in the Medieval sense; it's lavishly illustrated with over a hundred of Barker's striking paintings--much of its imagery was conceived of pictorially and then reinvented as story. This is a fine book--it is also a beautiful and charming object. --Roz Kaveney
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In Coldheart Canyon acclaimed horror writer Clive Barker takes us to the dirty secret of ageless sexual power and half-understood contracts with evil that lies at the heart of Hollywood.In the 1920s, magnate Zeffer buys his mistress Katya a room decorated with Boschian mosaics of sex and violence and in the 1990s, Todd Pickett decides he needs a face-lift to save his career; both do not know that they have made a decision which risks their lives and their souls. And somehow, sooner or later, everyone from Tammy, the overweight, obsessive, good president of Todd's fan club, to Micky, a dying former child star with a life full of secrets, ends up in the rich cloying jungle that the gardens of Coldheart Canyon have become, finding out things they never wanted to know about sex, madness, courage and generosity.
Barker has always been brilliant at showing us just how bad things can get--the games of sexual power, the corrupting metamorphoses; here he adds something: a genuine conviction of the possibility of human goodness and kindness that saves people. --Roz Kaveney
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A boy has an encounter with a man who causes extinctions of other species, and as a result grows up to be a man who documents (and thus appeals for a halt to) those extinctions. This dark fantasy tale is unlike most of Clive Barker's work, being more tightly plotted, and more of this world. In a sequence of well-executed stories within stories (comparable to Russian dolls), Barker unfolds a compelling examination of what it means to be human, to be a man and, more specifically, to be a gay man on a planet where ageing, disease and death bring "the passing of things, of days and beasts and men he'd loved." A satisfying long novel packed with vivid images, memorable characters and a melancholy mood that reaches for hope.
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Over many years and through many books Clive Barker has earned a reputation as the thinking person's horror writer. His novels have mixed fantasy, psychology and sheer creepiness in almost equal quantities, and while the gore quotient remains relatively low the tension always runs high. However, in Galilee Barker tones down the ghoulish in favour of the gothic. His novel (or as the author would have it, "romance") tells the tale of two warring families caught up in a disastrous web of corruption, illicit sexuality and star-crossed love, with a soupçon of the supernatural thrown in as well. On one side are the wealthy Gearys--a fictional stand-in for the Kennedys--and on the other are the Barbarossas, a mysterious black clan that has been around--quite literally--since the time of Adam. Galilee chronicles the twisted course of this centuries- old family feud which centres around the magical Barbarossa matriarch Cesaria and her son Galilee. Indeed, it's the latter figure--one part Heathcliff to one part Christ--whose relationship with the Geary women sets a match to the entire powder keg of hostility and resentment. Mixing standard clichés of romance with his own peculiarly deep-fried version of the Southern gothic, Baker has come up with an intelligent and shamelessly amusing potboiler.
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Clive Barker's inventiveness reaches new heights in Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War. What might have been just another portal fantasy in which a girl from our mundane world becomes crucial to the affairs of a fantastic one next door becomes something rich and strange because of the book's strong visual imagery. Barker spent many months painting at random and then used those paintings to create, and illustrate, the world of Abarat, where each island of an archipelago lives in the perpetual light or darkness of a single eternal day.Abarat is a world of the monstrous, the bizarre and the beautiful--this is the book which most totally embodies Barker's strange talent since the short stories of The Books of Blood. There is power and suspense to this book's buildup to a final confrontation between the monstrous, treacherous and pathetic Christopher Carrion and the ingénue Cindy Quackenbush, but in a sense its point is all the decorations along the way; this second volume of Barker's quartet delivers on the promises of the first.--Roz Kaveney
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