Abarat [Hardcover]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Praise for the illustrated hardback edition:

“ABARAT is more than just a new and major contender. It is (like his earlier book, THE THIEF OF ALWAYS) full of a level of beautiful terror that children are still just able to bear”
Independent

“Always creating and always pushing into the furthest reaches of the human mind, he is an artist in every sense of the word. He is the great imaginer of our time”
Quentin Tarantino

“You’re eager to love this beautiful, heavy, richly coloured slab of a book. And thankfully it’s easy to love…Abarat is a sumptuous and lovely thing. With beautiful pictures of monsters.”
The Guardian

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A dazzling fantasy adventure for all ages, the first of a quartet.

Abarat: an archipelago of amazement and wonder. A land made up of twenty-five islands, each one representing one hour of the day, each one a unique place of adventure and danger (and one mysterious place out of time), all ruled over by the evil Christopher Carrion, Lord of Midnight, and his monstrous grandmother, Mater Motley.

Candy Quackenbush, a 16-year old from Chickentown, Minnesota, crosses by accident from our world into Abarat, and discovers she has been there many, many times before. She has friends there and she has enemies. As Candy makes her journey between all the islands of the archipelago, she will discover a plot by Christopher Carrion to block out the Sun, Moon and stars to achieve a condition of Permanent Midnight. In order to prevent this disaster, Candy must find the courage to confront the Lord of Midnight; and in doing so come to know who she really is: a revelation which will transform her own understanding of her place in the epic events.

The first book of Abarat is a spellbinding adventure for all ages, combining the heartstopping tension of a thriller with the powerful charm of the most enduring fable. And beneath all, it possesses the quicksilver imagination of one of the finest writers at work today. The four books of Abarat have been rightly called Clive Barker’s Narnia, his Wonderland. A sumptuous treat that will capture the imaginations of adults and children alike.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Once upon a world where time is place...
A journey beyond imagination is about to unfold...
Rich, wild and unpredictable - by turns tragic and comical - Barker's Abarat is a story that will capture the imagination of all readers, adult and children alike, offering a limitless landscape to visit and revisit.

Abarat is the first installment of The Four Books of Abarat, a four-book series. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

" I am an imaginer. I think the heart of what I do lies in the shamanistic instict to be a walker between worlds"
Clive Barker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Abarat: an archipelago of amazement and wonder. A land made up of twenty-five islands, each one representing one hour of the day, each one a unique place of adventure and danger (and one mysterious place out of time), all ruled over by the evil Christopher Carrion, Lord of Midnight, and his monstrous grandmother, Mater Motley.

Candy Quackenbush, a 16-year old from Chickentown, Minnesota, crosses by accident from our world into Abarat, and discovers she has been there many, many times before. She has friends there and she has enemies. As Candy makes her journey between all the islands of the archipelago, she will discover a plot by Christopher Carrion to block out the Sun, Moon and stars to achieve a condition of Permanent Midnight. In order to prevent this disaster, Candy must find the courage to confront the Lord of Midnight; and in doing so come to know who she really is: a revelation which will transform her own understanding of her place in the epic events.

The first book of Abarat is a spellbinding adventure for all ages, combining the heartstopping tension of a thriller with the powerful charm of the most enduring fable. And beneath all, it possesses the quicksilver imagination of one of the finest writers at work today. Richly illustrated with dozens of dazzling full-colour paintings by the author, the four books of Abarat have been rightly called Clive Barker’s Narnia, his Wonderland. A visual and literary treat that will capture the imaginations of adults and children alike.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Clive Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952. He is the worldwide bestselling author of the Books of Blood, and numerous novels including Weavenworld, Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, Sacrament and Galilee. In addition to his work as a novelist and short story writer he also illustrates, writes, directs and produces for the stage and screen.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

IN THE GREAT HEAD
CANDY HAD ALWAYS PRIDED herself upon having a vivid imagination . When, for instance, she privately compared her dreams with those her brothers described over the breakfast table, or her friends at school exchanged at break, she always discovered her own night-visions were a lot wilder and weirder than anybody else’s. But there was nothing she could remember dreaming— by day or night—that came close to the sight that greeted her in the Great Head of the Yebba Dim Day.

It was a city, a city built from the litter of the sea. The street beneath her feet was made from timbers that had clearly been in the water for a long time, and the walls were lined with barnacle encrusted stone. There were three columns supporting the roof, made of coral fragments cemented together. They were buzzing hives of life unto themselves; their elaborately constructed walls pierced with dozens of windows, from which light poured. There were three main streets that wound up and around these coral hives, and they were all lined with habitations and thronged with the Yebba Dim Day’s citizens.

As far as Candy could see there were plenty of people who
resembled folks she might have expected to see on the streets of Chickentown , give or take a sartorial detail: a hat , a coat , a wooden snout. But for every one person that looked perfectly human, there were two who looked perfectly other than human. The children of a thousand marriages between humankind and the great bestiary of
the Abarat were abroad on the streets of the city.

Among those who passed her as she ventured up the street were creatures which seemed related to fish, to birds, to cats and dogs and lions and toads. And those were just the species she recognized.
There were many more she did not; forms of face that her dream-life had never come near to showing her.

Though she was cold, she didn’t care. Though she was weary to her marrow, and lost - oh so very lost - she didn’t care. This was a New World rising before her, and it was filled with every kind of diversity.

A beautiful woman walked by wearing a hat like an aquarium. In it was a large fish whose poignant expression bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman on whose head it was balanced. A man half Candy’s size ran by with a second man half the first fellow’s size sit-ting in the hood of his robe, throwing nuts into the air. A creature with red ladders for legs was stalking its way through the crowd farther up the street , its enormous coxcomb bright orange. A cloud of blue smoke blew by, and as it passed a foggy face appeared in the cloud and smiled at Candy before the wind dispersed it.

Everywhere she looked there was something to amaze. Besides
the citizens there were countless animals in the city, wild and domesticated. White-faced monkeys, like troupes of clowns, were on the roofs baring their scarlet bottoms to passersby. Beasts the size of chinchillas but resembling golden lions ran back and forth along the power cables looped between the houses, while a snake, pure white but for its turquoise eyes, wove cunningly between the
feet of the crowd, chattering like an excited parrot. To her left a thing that might have had a lobster for a mother and Picasso for a father was clinging to a wall, drawing a flattering self-portrait on the white plaster with a stick of charcoal. To her right a man with a firebrand was trying to persuade a cow with an infestation of yellow grasshoppers leaping over its body to get out of his house.

The grasshoppers weren’t the only insects in the city. Far from it. The air was filled with buzzing life. High overhead birds dined on clouds of mites that blazed like pinpricks of fire. Butterflies the size of Candy’s hand moved just above the heads of the crowd, and now and then alighted on a favored head, as though it were a flower.
Some were transparent, their veins running with brilliant blue blood. Others were fleshy and fat; these the preferred food of a creature that was as decadently designed as a peacock, its body vestigial, its tail vast, painted with colors for which Candy had no name. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.