Clive Barker's Books of Blood 1-3

Originally published as 3 separate bus stop paperbacks, the Books of Blood are at long last together in one compendium...Actually I am lying as there is also books 4 through 6... So this is half a compendium, but it is nothing short of 100 percent sheer horror and madness. There are about 15 stories in this book, most of which made me want to re-read them right after I was done. Standouts include the famous Rawhead Rex - Where a monster was buried under a large rock in a farmer's field hundreds of years ago, but mankind has since forgotten why the monolith was erected in the first place. They decide to remove the stone, resulting in unholy consequences.
The Yattering and Jack is a great story about a demon trying to torment Jack, but he is oblivious and immune to the tricks of the demon. And finally a standout story "Dread" should be mentioned as it is a predecessor of the "Saw" movies, where a lunatic locks a vegetarian girl in a room with nothing to eat but a piece of rotting meat. As time goes by, her hunger grows, but so do the maggots in the animal flesh.
Anyhow, Barker delivers with this collection, and you should remember when reading it, that everybody is a book of blood - when we are opened up, we are red.

Relic113

It's too bad that Barker pretty much abandoned Horror fiction very quickly. I haven't really read hardly any of his non-horror stuff, but even if that's excellent I can't help but suspect he had more than a few first-rate horror stories left in him. Still, this is very good stuff. It's got a few too many weaker stories for me to give the full 5 to it, but it's pretty amazing at it's best. Barker is also a beautiful, poetic writer, which jibes surprisingly well with his gruesome subject matter.(And, he doesn't overdo it here, as he's does sometimes.) I'll break it down book by book

I- The titular story is the shortest thing here. There's not too much to it, but Barker's excellent prose carries the day. 'Sex, Death and Starshine' is one of the weakest story in this whole collection. It ain't bad, but it's not that hot and definitely not substantiative enough to justify it's length. 'The Yattering and Jack' is another weaker one. Fairly amusing, but not truly memorable, as is generally true of the less serious material. There's some great stuff here, however, particularly 'In the Hills, The Cities'. This isn't really a horror story, but is just a remarkable, original tale. I don't dare say anything specific. It's best just to read it. 'The Midnight Meat Train' is a gruesome, nasty piece combining gruesome serial murder with Lovecraftian themes. 'Pig Blood Blues' is another fine one, gruesome and oppressive, and with a nicely developed, likable main character. (A rarity in short fiction)

2- 'Dread' is a great psychological horror tale with some interesting concepts and a cruel, inhuman and yet believable antagonist. 'Hell's Event' is another semi-comic one. Fairly entertaining, but not on the level of his straight work. 'Jacqueline Ess...' is the weakest story in the collection. It has some interesting ideas but it doesn't really take them anywhere and is rather redundant. 'The Skins of the Fathers' is awesome, however. Another Lovecraftian tale, but moved to the desolate American southwest. 'New Murders in the Rue Morgue' is a Poe homage, obviously. Again, a relatively weak story, but different enough from everything else in this collection to be worthwhile anyway.

3- 'Son of Celluloid' is very, very strange. It takes a whacky premise and plays it straight enough that we buy into it. 'Rawhead Rex' is probably my favorite story here. It's a fairly conventional monster story, but brutal and compelling with a first-rate monstrosity. 'Confessions of a (Pornographers) Shround' is another very weird tale, this time of revenge from beyond the grave via, yes, a possessed sheet. Again, not fantastic, but interesting. 'Scape-Goats' is another excellent one, one of the subtlest, moodiest works here and with a really creepy ending. 'Human Remains' is another relatively character driven work, and surprisingly sad and touching, in its way.

I notice that I said that such and such a story was relatively weak surprisingly often. Remember, this is more a reflection on just how good the very best stories here are. Overall this a just an interesting, original collection with a number of truly great stories.

The horrific images are burned forever into my psyche... perhaps because of the young age in which I came upon them, or perhaps of their breadth of imagination, lyrical flourish, lucidity and clarity of detail, not to mention the overall symbolic and metaphorical representation of humanity's faults. Barker captures in beautiful prose a series of nightmares that, once read, will haunt for many years to come.

Though as an author, Barker has departed the horror genre for further reaching aims in the Fantastic, my soul senses that The Books Of Blood vI-III will be remembered (if only by an ever-dwindling underground following) as some of the most intelligently disturbing horror stories of the Twentieth Century.

In my Opinion, the best stories from these first three volumes include:

Scape Goats: for the sense of isolation and doom, plus an unexpected chilling WWII reference

Tale of a (Pornographer's) Shroud: simply put, a tragic account of a man's soul seeking revenge for his undignified death at the hands of filth-peddlers

Pig Blood Blues: The horrid reincarnation of a youth's malevolent spirit

Rawhead Rex: a demigod's blasphemous destruction wrought upon an unsuspecting English village

The Skins of the Fathers: Demons from beneath the sands return to claim their half-human offspring.

In The Hills the Cities: once one overlooks the unnecessary interpersonal aspects of the two main characters, the scale and immensity of death will astound you.

Jaqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament: depicts the power of love and it's inevitable death


Take Care, fellow horror-enthusiasts.

It is impossible de cover all these long short stories. They are all absolutely mesmerizing. Barker goes beyond the logic of life but by pushing this very logic one iota beyond sanity. This is done without any gross language or images. Barker wants to terrorize his audience, not make them retch. Among all these stories I will retain one as going a lot further than the others in the vision of reality, society, life, our life. It is « Son of Celluloid ». The cinema is an art and this art reproduces life (with twenty five dead stills per second) or a fictitious vision of life. Nothing to say about that. People love this entertainment and it is better to see human sacrifice on the screen, as an illusion, than in reality in the form of televised death penalty or televised war or televised real human sacrifice, always covered up as thr result of a decision of justice. But the story takes people who are fans of the cinema, who live in the cinema, who work in a cinema and one night they get haunted by the cinema. This is complete alienation to a fictitious world. And of course John Wayne and western films appear, and of course many other films appear, the film each subject considers as the best. The cinema becomes a house of ranting and raving panicky people. This is a perfect illustration of the danger of what some call post-modern civilization where simulacra becomes more vivid and alive than the real thing. We live in a dream that covers up reality and helps us bear the ugliness of reality in which decay and death is necessarily the ultimate objective. We are a living species that feeds on illusion and at times illusion feeds itself on us. Clive Barker is one of the greatest authors in the genre that can shift from reality to horror without us even knowing it because horror is just the natural looking extension of real reality. In other words for him illusion is reality, even if only virtual, which means even more real than real reality, because virtual reality lives in our minds and our minds control our visions of the world.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne

Barker's stories already seem dated. Rather than containing the universal appeal of great tales, these seem like an author pushing the collective fear button as it existed in the early 1980's. His interchangable, immediately forgettable characters move blindly through Barker-by-the-numbers stories about leftist horror themes and alienate rather than welcome a reader. These read a lot like campy horror comics minus the illustrations. Yes, I know he's hailed as the most revolutionary genius in horror in fifty years, but I think his stories lack anything beyond momentary shock value. Try this: read Barker and then after a month try to remember the details of his stories. When you can't do that, then try to name five of his characters. It's hard, isn't it? The characters get lost in the stories and the stories get spat out of the mind almost upon completion. The works in "Blood" are not lasting gems, they are more like novelty candy: gone in a few minutes.