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Books of Blood, Vols. 1-3, by Clive Barker
Date of Review: Dec 20, 2002
The Bottom Line: I give it an above average instead of average because the good ones are enough to make up for the bad ones.
Originally meant to be six volumes, when Clive Barker's Books of Blood short story collections came to America, they were published with the first 3 packaged as Books of Blood vols. 1-3, and vols. 4-6 were published as their own short story collections (The Inhuman Condition, In the Flesh, and Cabal), the last two of which produced the movies Candyman, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions.
Reading them, (4-6) I was impressed, completely, floored by his imagination, his writing, his genius with language and visuals.
Now I see that was a level he had to work for, and not a God-given gift as I'd first suspected.
The stories told here in the first three volumes of his range from great ("Midnight Meat Train" and "Dread") to good ("The Yattering and Jack" and "Rawhead Rex") to crap ("Hell's Event" and "New Murders in the Rue Morgue") to the ridiculous ("In the Hills, the Cities" and "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud").
It became increasingly clear as I read through these first three volumes that Barker obviously saved the best of his short stories for the later volumes.
Picture, if you will, a twelve-story tall person, each part of its body made up of people, harnessed and roped together to form the texture of muscles, fingers, tall, thick legs, the best-sighted people in the eye sockets for vision, and a row of bald heads placed in the mouth to give the impression of teeth. That's from "In the Hills, the Cities". Sure it's a cool visual, but my disbelief was, unfortunately not able to be suspended for long.
Or a man, not ready to leave his dead body and give in to eternity. He still has one more person to kill in order to avenge his murder. So his spirit leaves through the bullet hole in his head and takes possession of, of all things, the coroners sheet covering his body. This he molds into the shape of his body and finishes his revenge. From "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud."
These are the lowest of the bunch, too wrong to ever be made right through revision or anything else.
But don't get me wrong, these volumes include some very good work, too. When Barker's good, he's VERY good.
The subway that makes its last stop of the night in Hell, so the dead and damned can feast on the bodies brought to it by a serial killer in Hell's hire. "Midnight Meat Train".
And a 9-foot tall monster buried under the earth for centuries, a being older than civilization, suddenly unearthed to terrorize a small English village before being destroyed by the father of one of its victims ("It ate children," says one of the characters of the legend). That's "Rawhead Rex", also not a bad movie for its budget and when it was made.
So, read them or don't, no skin off my nose. Just don't expect them to get better as you go, or even to keep at an average level of good; they don't.
