Have You Read This? Review of Clive Barker's Books of Blood

This is one of the nice covers!

Some readers like their horror subdued, the ice crawling down one’s spine and the wind (or fingertips) on one’s next. There is also horror that goes to shock, to truly horrify, their content more blood-soaked and visceral than any emergency room. If Clive Barker should be known for one thing, it is how he achieved a balance of these two extremes. Barker offers blood and guts by the bucketful but he doesn’t skimp on developing three-dimensional characters and the fantastical worlds they inhabit. No more does he demonstrate this gift than in his first, and biggest, horror collection, The Books of Blood.

Read one story from this collection and you can see that Barker’s style is truly unique, his artful use of words and his descriptive power as distinctive as a fingerprint. Not content with giving readers only whispers in the dark and fluttering candles, Barker has people literally turned inside out and torn to pieces, all while describing these horrific scenes in the most beautiful, florid language; think of him as an artist who paints with viscera or sculpts with flesh (“Jacqueline Ess” is a story that’s a great example of this). In these tales, Barker demonstrates that he not only deserves to be mentioned with 80’s horror heavyweights like King and Koontz but also master storytellers like Matheson and Bradbury. Just in Volumes 1 and 2, Barker shows how well he walks the tightrope between high art and gutbucket horror in the “Midnight Meat Train,” he delves deep into psychological horror in “Dread,” and he details a fantastic ritual that has to be read about to be believed in “In the Hills, In the Cities.”  In Volume 3, if you’re a cinephile who’s wiled away many an afternoon in a darkened theater, read “Son of Celluloid,” part haunted house story, part Barker’s love letter to Hollywood.

The stories in this collection show a horror author’s imagination at its most fevered and fertile, but good luck tracking down all the volumes for your library. Volumes 1-3 are collected in this book, and this book is relatively easy to find. Volumes 4-6, on the other hand, might be tougher to track down. For those looking to go beyond Volumes 1-3, the can get The Inhuman Condition, Volume 4, and Volume 5, In the Flesh. Why get them? Volumes four and five contain gems like “The Body Politic,” about hands across the world seeking to overthrow their tyrannical bodies, and “The Forbidden,” the basis of the Candyman movies.

Even if you, or your library, just get the easier to get Volumes 1-3 Omnibus, neither you nor your fellow horror patrons will be disappointed. Clive Barker may not have the current output of a King or Koontz but his place in the evolution of horror should be respected and he will always be, to many, a fascinating and disturbing discovery.