Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Books of Blood 4-6, 13 Jan 2006
This second omnibus edition collects volumes 4-6 of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.Volume 4 includes: ‘The Body Politic’ where Barker takes the old horror cliché of possessed murderous hands and transforms it into a bizarre over-the-top fantasy where peoples body parts conspire against them; ‘The Inhuman Condition’ features a tramp with a demonic familiar; ‘Revelations’ is a clever ghost story where a sordid crime of passion at a motel is mirrored years later; ‘Down, Satan!’ is by far the shortest story in the collection, a throwaway piece about an attempt to create hell on earth; and ‘The Age of Desire’ finds an experiment taking human sexuality to horrific extremes. Volume 5 presents: ‘The Forbidden’ - an intelligent examination on urban legends and the curious immortality bestowed upon murder victims (later filmed as ‘Candyman’); ‘The Madonna’ has a bizarre Lovecraftian entity inhabiting a disused swimming pool; ‘Babel’s Children’ is a non-horror piece presenting a conspiracy theory about the real rulers of Earth; and ‘In The Flesh’ mirrors prison life with a more deadly supernatural after-life imprisonment. Finally Volume 6 gives us: ‘The Life Of Death’, a very clever tale about an infectious disease with a nice sting in the tail; ‘How Spoilers Bleed’ is a fairly typical ‘natives revenge against exploitative Westerners’ story; ‘Twilight at the Towers’ mirrors the undercover world of spying with the double life of werewolves; ‘The Last Illusion’ tells of the attempt by a magician to cheat Hell, and introduces the investigator Harry D’Amour who would feature in later Barker novels; while closer ‘On Jerusalem Street’ acts as the second half of the framing device introduced at the beginning of the first novel. As with the first omnibus, this is chock full of great short stories, with a very high hit rate: at the worst a few of the stories here are mediocre, but the vast majority are inspired pieces of horror fiction. Great stuff.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seminal and endocrinal, 6 Mar 2006
In this second half of the highway of the dead, Clive Barker takes us even deeper than we could have ever dreamt into the empire of death. Every story is a miracle and a fascinating marvel. Every story deserves our attention and energy. But some are maybe slightly more conspicuous, at least for me. But these stories seem to be fascinated by various parts of the body, various parts and pieces that have total freedom to do as they like, be they hands that sever their attachment to human beings to live their autonomous life and get rid of the human race ; or the righteous christian soul – a very gullible appendage or appendix indeed – of a preacher who is ready to kill if necessary to impose his vision of the final apocalypse, at least if he has enough time to do it before being executed by his prospective victims ; or the sexual impulse of a man boosted by some prophetic prefiguration of viagra, an impulse that will have to run its course to the end which necessarily means death for the body that is nothing but the tool of that drive ; or the fascination of the eyes, and the camera that is nothing but an extension of these eyes, of this research worker who discovers the deepest pulsating need of mystery, horror and fear in the minds of ordinary simple people who invent the Candyman to inhabit their nights with some thrilling experience ; or the deepest voracious cannibalistic female mother of everything and everyone, a madonna that controls, dominates and generates the whole world that is so willing to be so possessed that no one sees or realises it ; or the killing instinct of one’s grandfather once hanged for his murdering crimes and now able to revisit his grandson in order to make him do again what he himself did in order for this grandson to take his place in the city of the damned and for him to get on the road to eternal life or non-existence since freed of any torturing and waiting ; or the very death we all carry in us and that can be turned into a living deadly organism that is transported and scattered around like a plague, as if death was an organ of ours among many others ; or the greed that gets punished somewhere in Amazonia through a curse from Indian victims of the voracious western ogres who need to eat the flesh and drink the blood of innocent prehistoric survivors of ancient nature-oriented civlizations ; or the real beast that lives in some of us and that is controlled by psychiatric expertise into obedience and service to the secret clandestine forces that stabilizes the obscure balance of the world split in two camps, at the time of the cold war when Clive Barker was writing, and today at teh time of the war on terrorism ; or the satanic magic one can buy from Lucifer against one’s own soul that one can always retain or recapture by mocking the devilish master and using Satan’s magic to block the recuperation of one’s body after death without which the soul is nothing, in fact not even detained. One may be surprised and even shocked by the quantity and diversity of bodily fluids that are shed in those pages, but Clive Barker has a fluid and liquid imagination and his world would have no density without those life-providing even and especially diabolical fluids. We could also wonder why Clive Barker needs so much sex in his stories, and particularly non-kosher sex, that kind of sex that is associated to Sodom and Gomorrha. But once again the potency of Clive Barker’s style is in the sexual dimension of the delirium he calls his imagination. Writing for him is nothing but intercourse with this imagination of his who definitely rapes him over and over again page after page in all possible variations and nuances. And the most hellish form of rape is for him scatological, which means the release of another bodily fluid of sort. Fragile-psyched and delicate-sensitivitied readers are rather heartily advised not to enter these deep lanes and paths down into the pestifirous crypt of human haunting delusions which are nothing but, over and over again, the last illusion that will charm us into either stupidity or complete vegetable stupor. Maybe some will be illuminated, but these lights are nothing but the mesmerizing power of IT, of the longed-for molesting we all hope will one day assault us with delicious ecstacy.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All hail, 14 Feb 2005
Clive Barker has a mysterious way of encapsulating you into his world of twists, gore and terrifyingly realistic monsters. The way his words can create a thousand feelings defies explanation. People compare him to Steven King, but in literary context, Barker is like the god of horror. You will treasure the books of blood and read them again and again.
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