Clive Barker's Books of Blood: The Berkley Editions, 1986

June 1986 saw the first American paperback edition of the first volume of Clive Barker's unparalleled short-story collection Books of Blood. Vols. II and III followed later in the year (for those keeping score, August and October respectively). Sure, the covers were adorned with rubbery face-masks but there's no denying the power within, and the sober back-cover copy still delights. These are essential horror reads. As fellow Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell writes in his intro:  

When it comes to the imagination, the only rules should be one's own instincts, 

and Clive Barker's never falters.

Books of Blood, Vol. 6 by Clive Barker (1985): Only the Living Are Lost

Originally published in paperback by Sphere Books in the UK in July 1985, Books of Blood Vol. VI completed Clive Barker's era-defining collection of short stories. Written in the evenings by hand after working days in London's underground theater circuit, these 30 stories in total were '80s horror fiction's watershed and its high-water mark. This final volume can stand with the rest; before turning to his unique brand of epic dark fantasy novels, Barker ended his Books on a high and inspired note of horror, a talent fully matured (these stories weren't published in the United States till 1988, when they appeared in hardcover under the title Cabal, the name of Barker's then-latest work, which they  accompanied).

Barker's own handwritten ms. for the Books of Blood

Readers and publishers loved to compare Barker to King and - gack! - Koontz back in the day, and that has always seemed an ill-fitting comparison to me. While Barker may, at least in these early writings, have lacked the human warmth and bestseller plotting mechanics that gave K&K their huge middle-America audience, Barker is worlds ahead of them when it comes to style and imagination; he is also literary in a way those guys aren't. Barker easily employs irony and wit to his horrors; an erotic and perverse sexuality is threaded throughout; the metaphysics, if you will, of his stories aren't borne out of old monster movies or tawdry thriller novels but from ancient mythology, classic European art and philosophy, and obscure religious history (bet you didn't know a cenobite was a real thing!). Not content to simply scare us, Barker's world is one in which characters confront death, confront monsters, and learn to accept that sometimes banishing "the other" will result only in a world less worth living in, one that's been sanitized and banalized till it's fit for consumption only by toothless children.

The first story is "The Life of Death," and one might think it a trite title but the tale itself lives up to that literalization. It also is a perfect example of how facing fears enables us to see the world afresh... even as we see it for the last time.The world of Elaine Rider, a 34-year-old woman who's just had a hysterectomy and almost died twice during the surgery, has now become wintry and dull; she cries all the time and feels utterly bereft. That is until she happens upon the excavation of a 17th century church, All Saints, and meets near the underground crypts an interesting man, Kavanaugh, who piques her curiosity about whatever lies within those walls. He had legitimised her appetite with his flagrant enthusiasm for things funereal. Now, with the taboo shed, she wanted to go back to All Saints and look Death in its face. But it won't be as simple as all that, of course, not with Barker at the helm.

The jungles of South America, and the greedy foreign interlopers looking to exploits its riches, feature in "How Spoilers Bleed." Confrontation between those deceitful men and a tribal chieftan ends in death; curse is imposed; watch the bodies felled. But it is the precision of the curse, its nightmare delicacy, that unsettles:

 In the antiseptic cocoon of his room Stumpf felt the first blast of unclean air from the outside world. It was no more than a light breeze... but it bore upon its back the debris  of the world. Soot and seeds, flakes of skin itched off a thousand scalps, fluff and sand and twists of hair; the bright dust from a moth's wing... each a tiny, whirling speck quite harmless to most living organisms. But this cloud was lethal to Stumpf; in seconds his body became a field of tiny, seeping wounds. 

Oh, that's not going to end well at all.

One of Barker's strengths, I think, is that he never dipped into that seemingly bottomless well known as the Cthulhu mythos. He wasn't above mixing genres, however, in several of his stories he went to other wells - here, hardboiled crime fiction in "The Last Illusion," and Cold War spy fiction in "Twilight at the Towers." The latter has spies, no strangers to shedding and changing skins, subjugating personalities that, upon discovery, could get them killed. Surely there is power in that half-forgotten personality, power still within reach? Ballard is sent on the trail of potential KGB defector Mironenko, but petty bureaucracy and petty, angry men seem always in the way. Mironenko, Ballard will find, has more in common with him that he thought, and the defector will show that beneath the skin - ever-changing - the two are brothers. Becoming a spy, Ballard lost a part of himself, but the thing he was becoming would not be named; nor boxed; nor buried. Never again.

1992 French paperback

Harry D'Amour is one of Barker's few characters that spans stories and novels and movies, and he appears in "The Last Illusion," a New York City detective in the classic world-weary Bogart tradition. But D'Amour is otherworldly-weary, dealing as he does - for a price, of course - with real magic and real demons. The Castrato is one of those:  

It did not carry the light with it as it came: it was the light. or rather, some holocaust blazed in its bowels, the glare of which escaped through the creature's body by whatever route it could. It had once been human; a mountain of a man with the belly and the breasts of a neolithic Venus. But the fire in its body had twisted it out of true, breaking out through its palms and its navel, burning its mouth and nostrils into one ragged hole. It had, as its name implied, been unsexed; from that hole too, light spilled.

Sept 1989 Pocket Books paperback - probably the worst of Barker's book covers

A short-short tale ends Volume VI, one that didn't appear in Cabal; it is "The Book of Blood (a postscript): On Jerusalem Street," and it brings the entire story arc back to the beginning, the very first tale told in Volume I, quite nicely. I hadn't read this volume in well over 20 years; in fact, I'd never finished "The Last Illusion," and the only one I recalled anything about was "How Spoilers Bleed," and that because of its perfectly abrupt ending. Again, Barker in no way let me down as I found these final pieces a fitting end to perhaps '80s horror fiction's greatest artistic achievement. Volume VI might not be my favorite - to be fair my favorite tales are spread across all the Books - but it is, as virtually all of Barker's '80s output, essential horror reading.

The dead have highways.

Only the living are lost.

Happy Birthday Clive Barker!

Too Much Horror Fiction favorite Clive Barker turns 59 today. Above you'll see him with a few other familiar horror folks - yes, that's Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, and Charlie Grant, circa 1986, in London on the set of Hellraiser. One of the Barker books I've not gotten around to rereading yet is Cabal, aka Books of Blood Vol. 6 (kind of; see comments). So here's a preview of some of those paperback covers. I simply love that tagline: At last, the night has a hero... Indeed, Mr. Barker. Indeed.

Books of Blood, Vol. 5 by Clive Barker (1985): In the Flesh

But then monsters were seldom very terrible once hauled into the plain light of day...

Four more stories of challenging, thoughtful horror in which our bodies and our world are transformed in ever more complex and illuminating ways. This penultimate volume of the Books of Blood, his famous series of short horror fiction, finds Clive Barker diving deep into the subconscious myth-pool and coming up with more utterly fantastic tales: of crime and punishment in "In the Flesh," of gender fluidity in "The Madonna," of the insane vagaries of international politics in "Babel's Children," and perhaps most famously, of the fearsome legends we pass on to one another in "The Forbidden" (the basis for the 1992 horror movie Candyman). Sound good? Of course it does.

Poseidon Press hardcover, 1986

Like its companion The Inhuman Condition, which was originally simply titled Books of Blood Volume IV in the UK, Volume V was retitled after one of its stories when published in the US in hardcover in 1986 and a Pocket Books paperback in 1988; it became In the Flesh (with cover art by Jim Warren). As the volumes went on, Barker’s strengths as a writer grew; the long stories here - the longest of any volume in Blood, each over 50 pages - allow some of his strongest, most evocative prose to shine and features some of his most thematically potent imaginings. This is metaphor made flesh at its finest, most realized, most satisfying. My review could be double its length, such is my admiration for Barker and these tales! Invention, boldness, terror, eroticism, and yes, self-knowledge await...

The title story is an ironic rumination on sin - or, if you prefer, "sin" - within the walls and bars of a prison. Young Tait might look like fresh fish to his new fellow inmates, but his forebears are of stronger stuff: his grandfather, known as Saint Tait, hanged for murdering his family; all of them, except his daughter, who would grow up to birth Tait the younger. Sharing a cell with petty experienced thief Cleve, Tait slowly reveals the shadows of his truest self and a dream-city which, despite its appearance of vacancy, houses the worst of humanity. Cleve wants to know (as do all of Barker's heroes): Why? Why does Tait call upon the rotting shade of his grandfather and allow himself to be transformed painfully? Tait's answer is chilling in its simplicity: "To be not myself; to be smoke and shadow. To be something terrible."
"The Forbidden" is like the best Ramsey Campbell story you’ll ever read. One of urban destitution and a dilettante intruder who seeks to intellectualize the vulgar graffiti of a rundown, crime-ridden housing estate, it evokes Barker's fellow Liverpudlian but is still distinctly his own. It is also, quietly, unobtrusively, about the “pleasures” of horror itself: of the stories we tell solely to chill the blood but ultimately to familiarize ourselves with our final ends. We are drawn to it, no matter who disdains us. Myths and legends live, literally live, Barker shows, and when they step from shadow, we must be ready to meet them. Filled with passages and ideas I must refrain from quoting at length, this is surely one of Barker's best works. Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?

In Barker's own illustration for the cover of the UK paperback of Vol. V, you'll see"The Madonna." This story is ripe to bursting with Jungian imagery of feminine fecundity, pools of water, sucking vortices and suckling babes (part squid, part shorn lamb), and prefigures part of the climax for his magnum opus Imajica (1991). Two business-criminal men lost in a labyrinth of an abandoned health spa, and the wet, shimmering female wonders at its center. Barker's talent is to subvert notions of normalcy and reveal unseen truths: There were miracles in the world! Forces that could turn flesh inside out without drawing blood; that could topple the tyranny of the real and make play in its rubble.

1996 Audiobook

And last, "Babel's Children" is unclassifiable; like his earlier "In the Hills, the Cities," it's an example of his ability to meld the sublime and the ridiculous slyly, ironically. Vacation-adventurer Veronica, lost in the scrub of a Greek isle, comes upon a sort of monastery for the mad, and finds the entire world owes all to it. And if - as her dizzied mind had concluded - these were creatures as sane as herself, then what of the tale that Mr. Gomm had told? Was that true too? Was it possible that Armageddon had been kept at bay by these few giggling geriatrics?

The Pocket Books edition at the top has a surreal cover painted by Jim Warren; look again after reading and you'll see those grotesqueries spring from the pages themselves. Don't wanna spoil any for you but one: the eyeball impaled by a knife, a piece of graffiti art from "The Forbidden" that would please a Dali or Cocteau or Breton: Close by was an image of intercourse so brutally reduced that at first Helen took it to illustrate a knife plunging into a sightless eye.

2001 Pocket Books trade paperback

Having not read In the Flesh for some many years (it's another book I clearly remember reading in high school classes instead of doing schoolwork), I was thrilled upon returning to find them as fresh and effective as ever; the years have not dulled their ability to chill, to amaze, to repulse, to provoke. Barker was certainly in a class by himself; as I’ve been reading and rereading all this horror fiction from that era I can easily see why everyone was so taken with him: the high caliber and unexpected elegance of his writing and his boundless imagination that left nothing to the imagination are simply greater than almost anyone writing at that time. His towering conceptual powers have few equals. He still ranks as one of my all-time favorite writers, horror or not. Whichever way you refer to it, In the Flesh or Books of Blood Vol. V, Clive Barker has provided us with yet another collection of essential horror fiction.

Barker in Highgate Cemetery, London, c. 1986

Books of Blood, Vol. 4 by Clive Barker (1985): The Inhuman Condition

When the final three volumes of Clive Barker's Books of Blood were published in the United States, they were each retitled for a (seemingly random) story in the collection, and so Vol. IV became The Inhuman Condition. I assume it was because a different publisher, Poseidon Press, had the rights to those books and wanted to put them out in fancy little hardcover editions; no more of those déclassé paperbacks that cluttered up spinning metal racks at the local drugstore (although I'm sure that's still exactly where the above 1987 Pocket Books - art by Jim Warren - edition ended up).

No, it was high time for Barker to step up to the bestseller world of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub, get him into the all-important literary and fantasy book clubs of the day. This was how he became not just another acclaimed paperback horror writer with a King-size blurb, but a brand-name author with huge publisher promotions behind him and TV and radio appearances - which Barker, not unaware of the origin of his name, took to like a natural.

Poseidon Press hardcover, 1986

I well recall the excitement I felt when I saw Barker's latest was in hardcover; the intent to build prestige for him worked on me and I started to really see him as a serious writer - or more importantly, that other people saw him as a serious writer. And the stories themselves are a solid, inventive, original bunch that more than justified the hardcover and the wider-spread readership that would bring. Right after this would come his major bestselling novels The Damnation Game (1986) and Weaveworld (1987).

With hints of Hellraiser, Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show (1990), the title story is an enigma ultimately about, of all things, evolution. A puzzling cord of knots stolen from a vagrant mesmerizes a young criminal; their unloosening begets raw-fleshed monsters. Classic Barkerian moment: when the first of the monsters hides in shadowed trees, the criminal says to it, "Show yourself... I'm not afraid. I want to know what you are." The playful and absurd "The Body Politic" is referenced on the dust-jacket for both editions of Condition: human hands take up arms against their oppressors and cleave themselves to freedom, scuttling in the darkness like errant crabs, eager to be away with their leader. Neat imagery - the fires escape [was] solid with hands, like aphids clustered on the stalk of a flower - and a cool twist ending; a good example of the author's more lighthearted weirdness.

Barker's own painting is featured on the paperback from his UK publisher Sphere; this happy fellow is obviously from "The Age of Desire," in which an experimental aphrodisiac maddens and arouses at once; no nook or cranny or cop is safe from this man's advances. This was one of Barker's tales that I read with glee in high school, passing it along to a couple other friends who bothered to read at all. Barker's repertoire has always included an unflinching and perverse sexuality but his approach is more Georges Bataille than the juvenile or mainstream t-n'-a that one usually finds in horror fiction.

It was a new kind of life he was living, and the thought, though frightening, exulted him. Not once did it occur to his spinning, eroticized brain that this new kind of life would, in time, demand a new kind of death.

Rather an odd one in the entire Books of Blood, "Down, Satan!" is a story only a few pages long, no dialogue, no characterization really. This one is more like a fable, a fable of Gregorius, a sickeningly wealthy man who has lost his faith and is determined to meet the Dark Prince face-to-face, and has built a suitable palace of horrors for just such a happening. Surely the Devil could not resist such a roost to call his own, hopes Gregorius. For God was rotting in Paradise, and Satan in the Abyss, and who was to stop him?

Set in the hinterlands of Texas, "Revelations" reveals the prosaic banality of the afterlife: no cosmic justice, just the shades of a murderess and her husband the victim who, on the anniversary of death, return to the scene of her crime. But that motel room is now occupied by an evangelist obsessed with (the comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with) St. John the Divine, and his suffering wife. In Clive Barker's imaginings, arousal extends into eternity...

2001 Pocket Books trade paperback

Barker's writing here shows much growth from earlier volumes of Blood; there is a more assured quality overall, his sentences are elegant, crackling with dry humor, and his tone is ironic, poetic, knowing. Characters witness strange and beautiful horrors that no metaphor can contain, or they are horrified to learn that a trite sentiment such as Give me your heart can become literal in a deadly flash. Barker upends horror tropes and brings new ones to the genre and demands readers keep up with his ideas. I say happily that The Inhuman Condition is an integral part of what made Clive Barker one of the premier horror writers of the '80s and '90s.

You never can tell what Barker's been smoking.

Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker (1984): "Fictions are Fuckable"

More glorious short-story mayhem from the best. Clive Barker continued his revolutionizing of the horror genre with Books of Blood, Vol. 3, which was the first thing I ever read by him way, way back in January 1987. I bought it based on the Berkley 1986 edition cover alone, and can still recall sitting in a mall courtyard reading the first story, "Son of Celluloid," and being a tad put off because Barker's measured, careful prose was so very British. His style was unique and took a bit of warming up to. There was little of the neighborly chumminess of Stephen King's work, or the weighty obliquity of Ramsey Campbell's. Nothing of Lovecraft or Matheson, either, I daresay. Barker was sui generis.

Instead, there is a polite informality, a deft and dry wit in his writing, as if to make the horrors more palatable, the deformities less alien, the grotesqueries a welcome respite from reality. A large part of Barker's horror philosophy, if we can call it that, was that horror should subvert our (often wrong) notions of normality and beauty. From "Scapegoats," which evokes the zombie-island nightmares of Italian exploitation film but is laced with an unexpectedly poetic tone:

And I, losing my life with every second, succumbing to the sea absolutely, couldn't take pleasure in the intimacy I'd longed for. Too late for love; the sunlight was already a memory. Was it that the world was going out - darkening toward the edges as I died - or that we were now so deep the sun couldn't penetrate so far? Panic and terror had left me - my heart seemed not to beat at all. A kind of peace was on me.

True, in a story like the infamous "Rawhead Rex" - made into a dismal film in 1986 that Barker disowned at once - there is a ravenous creature that has an enormous head like a skinned penis and a mouth like a vagina dentata. No holding back from the terrors of viscera and humiliation here. In "Son of Celluloid," another well-known story, a criminal's cancer, his literal cancer tumor, infests a fleabag second-run movie theater and brings to horrible life the ghosts on the screen that fascinate us so, but which need our eyes to exist. This incredible cover for the UK paperback edition from Sphere (below), with Barker's own art, presents one of that story's more memorable moments: our Norma Jean (the fuckable fiction, her hapless victim notes), teasing us with the fur divide that had been the dream of millions.

"Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud" is a revenge tale of mobsters and meek accountants that would have not been out of place in the old EC horror comics that the generation prior to Barker grew up on; it contains one of his most inventive deaths, which my friends and I in junior high used to marvel over. A man takes possession of the linen placed over him in wrongful death; a wraith, an actual ghost that appears to be a person wearing a sheet as a Halloween costume, he seeks out the men who framed, tortured, and killed him.

His flesh and blood body was utterly deserted now; an icy bulk fit for nothing but the flames. Ronnie Glass existed in a new world: a white linen world like no state he had lived or dreamed before. Ronnie Glass was his shroud.

Why, that makes think of Barker's wonderful second novel, Weaveworld, in which an entire world is taken up inside an intricately woven carpet. Nicely done, sir. "Human Remains" ends this volume, a fine and sensitive work about Gavin, a gay hustler, and his doppelganger, come to steal his face, the only possession Gavin has worth anything. They meet when it rescues Gavin from sure death at the hands of a pimp:

"I am a thing without a proper name," it pronounced. "I am a wound in the flank of the world. But I am also that perfect stranger you always prayed for as a child, to come and take you, call you beauty, lift you naked out of the street and through Heaven's window. Aren't I? Aren't I?" 

How did it know the dreams of his childhood?

..."Because I am yourself, made perfectable."

Gavin gestured towards the corpses. "You can't be me. I'd never have done this."

"Wouldn't you?" said the other.

"Human Remains" showcases Barker's penchant for marginalized characters that lurk in darkness and giving them a voice. A story that rather puzzled me when I was a teenager but rewarded a rereading as an adult, it's a highlight of the entire six-volume series, I believe.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily recommend Volume 3 as the best place to start if one has not read Books of Blood - one really should start at the beginning, go through to the end, and then stop, and begin again - but I am still thankful that it was the place I started with Barker and his brand new world of horror for the future. And I haven't stopped yet.

Barker c. 1987. Future's so bright, etc.

Books of Blood, Vol. 2 by Clive Barker (1984): The Delights of Dread

There is no delight the equal of dread.

So begins the aptly titled "Dread," the lead story in the second volume of Clive Barker's essential six-volume collection, Books of Blood. In a way, it's a mantra for his early novels and tales, a neatly-done epigram that sums up not just his work but the entire horror genre itself. Filled to bursting with woundings and madness, monstrous absurdities of flesh and bone, and the nonsenses of fear, despair, and revulsion, Volume 2 is one of my favorites in Barker's series and contains two of his very greatest stories.

College students and their mad messiah: "Dread" takes a philosophical approach to terror, as strange Quaid posits that fear underlies everything humans are. Nation, family, Church, law. All ash. All useless. All cheats, and chains and suffocation. There was only dread. Don't you know that Quaid, who forces others to face their fears, will have his never-ending moments of dread himself? This is often considered one of Barker's finest moments and has turned up in several best-of horror anthologies. I wholeheartedly concur with this sentiment.

Hell hot on runners' heels, the infernal nether regions come to race, literally so, in the streets of London. In "Hell's Event," Barker imagines, Without the human urge to compete, and to bargain, and to bet, Pandemonium might well have fallen for want of citizens. Don't look behind to see who's gaining on you, runners; remember Lot's wife. Clever boy, Clive Barker.

On the UK paperback seen here, illustrated with Barker's own art, we have the title character of "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament." Easily one of my favorites of all Barker's fictions, as it is a perfect example of his mastery of economic characterization, copiously inventive bloodletting and bodily injury, and the twining tight of Eros and Thanatos (he said, consulting his thesaurus). Too long beleaguered by the ennui of modern life and the condescension of men who think they know better, Ms. Ess discover she has the power to bend them to her will. And not figuratively. Behold her belittling psychiatrist:

She thought: Be a woman. Simply, as she thought that preposterous idea, it began to take shape. Not a fairy-tale transformation, unfortunately his flesh resisted such magic. She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin split and his sternum flew apart. His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its center; unbalanced, he toppled over onto his desk, his face yellow with shock.

In the baking Arizona desert, "The Skins of the Fathers." A lone, stranded motorist sees the full riot of what Clive Barker can describe as a procession of monsters cavorts in the shimmering distance, like something out of Bergman's Seventh Seal, one whose head is a cone of exposed teeth, another is three-winged, and two more are married in a union of monstrosities the result of which was more disgusting than its parts. It can only get worse from there, can't it? And finally, an update of Poe in "New Murders in the Rue Morgue." It had come to this; offered a human woman by this naked ape... From love to murder back to love again. The love of an ape for a man. A man, an ape, and a woman. And a happy ending for two of those three.

So remember, upon reading Books of Blood, Volume 2 - or indeed any tome of horror - that there is no delight the equal of dread... as long as it's someone else's.

Books of Blood, Vol. 1 by Clive Barker (1984): Wherever We're Opened, We're Red

The first volume in Clive Barker's genre-redefining short story collection Books of Blood was published in Great Britain in November 1984 by Sphere Books. By the time the series reached the States, published by Berkley Books in 1986, the paperback covers were emblazoned with the famous Stephen King quote (by way of what someone famously said of Bruce Springsteen): "I have seen the future of horror, and its name is Clive Barker." King, enthusiastic master of the glad-handing blurb, was here absolutely correct. And while the back-lit rubber Halloween mask barely distinguished it from heaps of other horror fiction paperback originals then on the shelves, it was the King quote and the confident, prominent possessive of Barker's name on the cover that prompted me to pick the books up in January 1987 (I've been dating my books for a long time).

UK Sphere paperback, 1984, art by Barker

Books of Blood are Barker's gruesome twist on Ray Bradbury's fantasy classic The Illustrated Man, in which that book's stories are tattooed on an itinerant man's body. Here, the title story is of a young man, a psychic phony who accompanies a parapsychologist on an investigation, accosted at a "crossroads of the dead" by the ghosts of those who have died - and killed - violently. The dead then carve their stories directly into his skin: Even through the blood she could discern the meticulous way that the words had harrowed into him....

She saw plainly that the highways that crossed at Tollington Place were not common thoroughfares. She was not staring at the happy, idling traffic of the ordinary dead. No, that house opened onto a route walked only by the victims and the perpetrators of violence. The men, the women, the children who had died enduring all the pains nerves had wit to muster, with their minds branded by the circumstances of their deaths. Eloquent beyond words, their eyes spoke their agonies, their ghost bodies still bearing the wounds that had killed them. She could also see, mingling freely with the innocents, their slaughterers and tormentors. These monsters, frenzied, mush-minded bloodletters, peeked through into the world: nonesuch creatures, unspoken, forbidden miracles of our species, chattering and howling their Jabberwocky.

It's lovely stuff, is it not? Before he was famous for being a horror writer, Barker was a playwright, and his mind's eye was well-trained for sights both unseen and unimagined. The other short stories in this first volume include the deathly erotic "Sex, Death, and Starshine," in which a theater troupe carries on even after the final curtain; "The Midnight Meat Train," an unapologetically outright blood-and-guts splatterpunker of a butcher and those he serves; the drily witty "The Yattering and Jack" is the comic anomaly of the entire series, as a seemingly oblivious man and a minor demon face off; and "In the Hills, the Cities," perhaps Clive Barker's most enigmatic, visionary, and original short story, one of men and women and the cities that they make. Each is essential for the horror fiction fan, new or old, glittering with the author's wit and irony and fearlessness.

Numerous editions of this now-classic collection have been published over the past quarter-century. Isn't it obvious that Barker's own illustration for the cover, second illustration down, is the most exciting, intriguing, and indeed accurate one? I can only assume it was considered "too much" for American audiences. And look closely, for one of the damned presents to the potential book buyer a charming black-and-white photograph of the all-too-youthful-looking author; might we guess that somewhere on that highway of the dead, a demon possessed a certain soul?

He has such sights to show you!