Living for the Screen: The Bastard "Art" of Horror Movie Novelizations

You won't find me collecting too many horror movie novelizations. While horror movie fans might find them exciting, I think novelizations are a strange and thankless art for the reader. I suppose they're not even art, they're simply commercial artifacts designed to sneak more money out of a film fan's pocket. Initially as disposable as a movie-theater popcorn bag, they have, like so much other pop culture detritus, turned into kinda cool collectibles. I read many as a kid before moving on to, well, actual books. I certainly don't think I'm alone in that, and I remember devouring the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien and Superman novelizations of the late '70s/early '80s.

Most novelizations probably aren't worth much, but some have turned into decent collectibles thanks to, of course, covers that either reproduce the awesome poster art - as in Nosferatu (1979) - or features more characterization - as in The Wicker Man (1978). And I must say, I was pretty jazzed to snag that copy of Night of the Living Dead (1981), even though the guy peeking out from - well, whatever it is he's peeking out from - looks nothing like a zombie.

Novelizations are different from movie tie-in editions, which are when novels written first are then repackaged later with the movie adaptation poster on the cover. A good example is Stephen King's 1982 collection of four short novels, Different Seasons. This baby got re-released half a dozen times as a total of three of the novellas were adapted into popular movies. It's not just double-tripping; it's quadruple dipping, and more, in some cases. Check them all out here.

The literary merits of the novelization are next to nil, probably even closer, but often they are based on early or discarded drafts of screenplays and can therefore offer different or more in-depth details not in the finished film (see Jaws 2 for a great example). Often the books have pseudonyms or ghost-writers, and in the case of Nosferatu, have authors who became rather well-known in the literary world. Paychecks were pretty much guaranteed for this type of work, so many burgeoning young authors put aside notions of artistic purity and cranked 'em out on the side.

Even the estimable Ramsey Campbell, under the incredible and incomparable pen name of Carl Dreadstone, had a payday with 1970s novelizations of 1930s Universal monster classics, which actually go for a fair penny on eBay and such. I have so far been unable to track these down for a price I'm willing to pay. Which is like a buck.

Others who turned to novelizations include Dennis Etchison - actually, a major editor/short-story writer of the 1980s who I've not yet written about on this blog - who, as Jack Martin, penned Videodrome, David Cronenberg's bizarre cult masterpiece from 1983. Etchison worked from an early screenplay of the director's and therefore some of the alien quality of the movie is alleviated. John Skipp and Craig Spector, just before the height of their popularity, wrote one for Fright Night, the charming 1985 homage to horror movie hosts of the 1970s.

While I have here and there picked up some of the above novelizations, they're not really my collecting focus; I won't be filling my shelves with all the Friday the 13th novelizations, for example (an exception would be made for the novelizations of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Martin). But for anyone really interested in this aspect of horror fiction, I mean really and sincerely, you have to go here; this guy has an astonishing thread going, albeit from four or five years ago. The covers are mostly amazing. Imagine that!

Conjure Wife (1943) and Our Lady of Darkness (1977) by Fritz Leiber: Under Her Black Wings

Two good novels from classic fantasy writer Fritz Leiber: Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness. The former is a tale of witchcraft set at a New England college university, while the latter explores the occult theory of Thibaud de Castries known as "megapolisomancy" (invented solely by Leiber himself in a Lovecraft-inspired bit of mythmaking) and posits the city of San Francisco itself as a haunted - and haunting - entity. It also weaves authors like Jack London and Clark Ashton Smith into its storyline, as well as the pulp fiction background of Leiber himself, and won the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Both novels feature modern men, thoughtful and literate, modern men of skepticism and rationality, who find that the dark superstitions of the past have a horrifying way of wending their way into the light of the contemporary world. Count me in!

I don't think either of these covers captures the feel of the books themselves: Conjure Wife is another example of an older book republished during the height of the Gothic romance fad (this edition is from '68, art by Jeff Jones). Its current edition has a pretty foxy Goth chick on its cover, reminiscent of the loverly Eva Green. Berkley's Our Lady of Darkness has an odd psychedelic tinge to it, dated even by 1977 standards; fortunately Amazon has it listed as being back in print this fall.

...sometimes it wasn't clear whether it was a real woman, or a goddess, or some sort of metaphorical entity that de Castries was talking about. "She is all merciless night animal," he would say... "She knows the cities' secrets and their secret weaknesses, their ponderous rhythms and dark songs. And she herself is secret as their shadows. She is my Queen of Night, Our Lady of Darkness."

The Weird Tales of Clark Ashton Smith: Nightmares Forever Calling Me

Unless you are diehard fan of horror or dark fantasy stories of the early 20th century, the name Clark Ashton Smith probably means little or nothing to you. But for those of us who are such fans, his name conjures up worlds of exotic darkness, of the purplest prose describing the strangest entities of eons past. Along with Lovecraft and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, Smith ruled those long-ago days of the 1930s and Weird Tales magazine. But unlike the other two, whose works have long been readily available, Smith sank, along with most of their Weird Tales brethren, into obscurity. Despite vocal champions like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Lovecraft himself, Smith is a household name only to those folks, like myself, whose homes suffer under a surfeit of paperback horror fiction. And not even always then.

Fortunately in recent years much of his work has come back into print thanks to, you guessed it, the rise of the internet. A Google search turns up plenty on him. But, as always here at Too Much Horror Fiction, what is the fun of simply ordering a $20 book off Amazon? The real collecting fun is had scouring bookstores and library sales and even eBay to find these gloriously-covered and colored paperbacks which smell of dust and bear the worn creases of hours of much-loved reading. I've luckily found all of these paperback editions over the years; they're treasured parts of my collection, you can be sure. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy editions from the early 1970s are particularly awesome.

For me, Smith conjures up memories of hours lost in musty crooked bookstores, trying to find any of his elusive paperbacks published throughout the 1970s by Ballantine. In the 1930s and '40s much of his output was published in small hardcover editions by Arkham House and these are now collectors' items. For those not so inclined at collecting there is The Eldritch Dark site, devoted to everything Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft dubbed him). You'll miss out on some distinctive cover art, replete with demonic sorcerers, underground caverns, and bizarre nightlife, however.

A poet and a sculptor in addition to being an author, Smith published dozens of stories throughout the 1930s with delightfully odd and evocative titles like "The Charnel God," "The Dark Eidolon," "The Beast of Averoigne," "The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan," "The Desolation of Soom" and "The Isle of the Torturers." I mean, awesome! Smith invented prehistoric, arctic lands like Hyperborea, or Averoigne, or Zothique, peopled with primitives and shamans and wizards and priests and all manner of horrific creatures. With a prose style charmingly antiquated, a vocabulary that would put any logophile to shame, and an imagination that knew the darkness of a hundred ancient worlds, Smith's stories embrace myth, magic, and horror with equal fervor. Any true horror fan should avail themselves of his malevolent and decadent visions at once.

Original Arkham House hardcovers, 1942 and 1944; latter features CAS's sculptures

As all men know, the advent of the Beast was coeval with the coming of that red comet which rose behind the Dragon in the early summer of 1369. Like Satan's rutilant hair, trailing on the wind of Gehenna as he hastens worldward, the comet streamed nightly above Avergoigne, bringing the fear of bale and pestilence in its train. And soon the rumor of a strange evil, a foulness unheard of in any legend, passed among the people...

The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker (1989): Waiting for the End of the World

A British edition of the 1990 paperback of The Great and Secret Show, the first novel in Clive Barker's long-planned magnum opus trilogy called "The Art." It concerns, as Barker was fond of saying at the time, his three obsessions: "sex, Hollywood, and the end of the world," and features one of the more astonishing creations in his fiction: the vast "dream-sea" of Quiddity, which is pretty much a literalized Jungian collective unconscious. Heady stuff for a horror novel.

Presidents, messiahs, shamans, popes, saints and lunatics had attempted - over the passage of a millennium - to buy, murder, drug and flagellate themselves into Quiddity. Almost to a one, they'd failed. The dream-sea had been more or less preserved, its existence an exquisite rumor...

1990 HarperCollins paperback

Only two volumes have been published; the (excellent) sequel, Everville, was released in 1994. Barker unfailingly has insisted in the 15 years since that he's still planning on the final piece, but who knows? Barker has always insisted the project he was asked about was right around the corner, nearly finished. Hell, I remember him in 1991 talking about how he was directing the remake of The Mummy. The Mummy!

1999 Harper reprint

What I love about this UK cover is that each element is actually in the book. This is not always the case with cover art, as I'm sure everyone knows. I love the tiny embroidered details, in the same design as the UK edition of Weaveworld. Again, it's obvious the artist (unknown) read the entire book, from beginning to end, and didn't simply come up with one lame image to identify it. Compare it with the US cover, both paperback and hardcover: a mailbox. Because the first few pages take place in a post office. There you go. Guess that's as far as the artist read!

This hardcover UK first edition is actually my favorite horror fiction cover art ever; when I first saw it I thought it was some kind of fancy illustrated limited-edition version. It's not. It's the first edition UK hardcover, that's all. It's beautiful all the way round. I love its sickly yet elegant greenish hue. Guess I could live without the Groucho Marx there, though. Still.

2009 UK reprint

Now I haven't read Great and Secret Show since its original publication but I recall it fondly, and I loved Everville as well. Once I started reading scholarly mythologists Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade a little while later, I loved the books even more and could easily see from where Barker drew inspiration. Rich in transformative moments and transcendent visions, in themes eternal and ephemera most profound, the first two volumes of The Art have set a very high standard for that long-proposed third. We await the dream-sea, Mr. Barker!

Here's an impossibly young-looking Barker taking his trade to the housewives of the land on Good Morning America in 1990.

Night Shift by Stephen King (1978): Take My Hand As the Sun Descends

I don't know if there's a collection of horror stories that I recall as fondly as Stephen King's Night Shift, which brought together many of his early '70s works originally published in men's magazines like Cavalier, Penthouse, and Gallery. How many school nights did I stay up late as a teenager, engrossed and amazed by these perfectly composed tales? How many times did I attempt my own versions, getting maybe six paragraphs in before realizing I might be a better fiction reader than fiction writer?

I have no idea what happened to the paperback copy that I had back then; I just found this one (at top), the same printing, same cover, and realized I wanted to write on such an influential book. After a laudatory welcome by crime writer John D. MacDonald, King's introductory essay set the stage for his later Danse Macabre, an informal look at horror literature, what it is, what it does, why it works and why we love it in a world that holds enough real-life horrors on its own.

I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night.

And oh dear God, I think so too.

Those are the final lines of "Strawberry Spring," lines I only recently reread, and rereading them caused the hair on my arms to stand up: I realized they'd been rattling around in my head and haunting me for over two decades; in their cadence and finality, in their sad and terrifying irony, the revelation and bitter acceptance of madness and murder. Horror writers work hard to get that last line just right, to get that tone, to save up through the whole story so they can sucker-punch you at the end. But it's not really a sucker-punch, though, is it? We know it's coming, we want it, we're reading the story - if not the entire genre - for that.

Writers like Charles Beaumont, Frederic Brown, and Gerald Kersh, though largely forgotten today, specialized in these kinds of short stories; crafted brief gems of suspense, weirdness, and outright horror. They're good models to have and King has often sang their praises. "Jerusalem's Lot" is a terrific riff on Lovecraft's "Rats in the Walls," set in the 1850s and told in epistolary form. "I Am the Doorway" is science-fiction horror with another one of those precise and chilling final lines, and provides the paperback's striking cover image (none of the many reprints of Night Shift through the '80s, '90s, and today can match it). "One for the Road" - now there's a phrase you don't hear anymore - takes place in 'Salem's Lot, the doomed town of King's second novel.

Then you've got your vengeful "Quitters, Inc." and "Sometimes They Come Back," morality tales that bring back memories of Twilight Zone but are a bit uglier. Suspense-filled ones like "The Ledge" and "Battleground" could have been on the old Hitchcock show, while "The Mangler," "Gray Matter," "The Boogeyman," and "Graveyard Shift" are straight horror, pulpy and ridiculous but with that sense of the quotidian that King excels in which grounds them; the Wicker Man-esque "Children of the Corn" was the basis for the inexplicably popular horror movies, while "Trucks" served for the best-forgotten Maximum Overdrive. "Strawberry Spring," probably my favorite, takes place on a Northeastern university campus that is terrorized by the murders of several of its co-eds (ah, the '70s!). Not supernatural in the least, it still manages to unnerve the reader in its depictions of regular people trying to live regular lives while a monster is in their midst - prime King, of course; prime, and untouchable.

The Drive In (1988) and The Drive In 2 (1989) by Joe R. Lansdale: At the Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

"I would rather die as part of a movie than live as part of the normal world."

A genre unto his ownself, Texas-born-and-bred Joe R. Lansdale is the author of crime novels that up the ante for violence and cruelty, horror novels and stories that mine the blackest vein of humor and perversity, Westerns turned inside out as well as award-winning mainstream fiction. And The Drive In and The Drive In 2 are a bewilderingly weird combination of all of the above. I think if Joe Bob Briggs wrote novels this is how they would turn out: gory, grim, gleefully outrageous, and obsessed with bad movies, written in a down-home, vulgar, smart-alecky drawl: Had I been Jesus Christ, I'd have come back from the dead, made myself big as the universe, gotten the world between two bricks, and whammo, shit jelly.

I was lucky enough to discover them in 1991 after reading Lansdale's debut novel, The Nightrunners. The two books are sadly out-of-print in their wonderfully colorful Bantam Spectra "science fiction" editions (which I found in mint condition in a comic book store ages ago), but are back in print in a new collection that also includes a third volume, which is brand-new and I have not read.

A meteor unlike any ever seen (The comet smiled. Split down the middle to show us a mouthful of jagged saw-blade teeth) swoops down and then disappears over The Orbit, an enormous six-screen drive-in move theater specializing in horror and exploitation movies on Friday nights in a small East Texas town. In its wake it leaves The Orbit seemingly hanging in outer space, an island adrift in an utter blackness that fries anyone who tries to touch it into a vomitous goop. What follows is an outrageous horrorshow in which the movies that play over and over (Texas Chainsaw, Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, etc.) on the enormous screens cannot hold a candle to the horror the characters are now trapped in. It's a bit like Stephen King's "The Mist" except not quite as dreary but still as existentially, well, fucked. People start to get a little crazy - which, in a Lansdale novel, means a lot crazy.

Horrible cover from Carroll & Graf, 1997, but at least they brought it back in print awhile

Lansdale scores some easy points with his narrator's attempts to find meaning in a universe that would let something like this happen ("Give me something to blame this on. A random universe with no god, evil or otherwise, is just too much for me"), but hey, Jack is only 18 and two of his buddies have been struck by strange lightning and fused into the Popcorn King, an insane demi-god that promises salvation to those who'll worship him. But once Jack decides it's tentacled aliens shooting their own movie, his much more level-headed friend Bob tells him, "Always got to have something to believe in, don't you, Jack? Astrology, Christianity, now B-movie gods." Bob and Jack figure out a way to escape The Orbit, but end up crucified for their pains.

Picking up right at the end of the first book, The Drive In 2: Not Just One of them Sequels introduces dinosaurs on the loose, carnivorous film stock, and a young woman who, adept at martial arts (like Lansdale himself), survives The Orbit apocalypse but meets up with Popalong Cassidy, a monstrous dude that maybe could have stepped whole and breathing from Videodrome. Now the world seems to be on a soundstage existing for the pleasure of alien filmmakers. Really. Truly.

I don't know if I'd recommend reading these two back-to-back, for as much as Lansdale can be ridiculous and satirical with his characters trapped in a cartoony, absurdist nightmare, he doesn't shy away from the uglier, more realistic depictions of people pushed to extremes. It got kinda overwhelming actually. Still, The Drive In and The Drive In 2 really are unique in the annals of horror fiction; a two-shot bizarro sci-fi/pulp horror/apocalyptic-comic paean to trash culture in a world that's probably forgotten what "double feature" even means.

Crucifax by Ray Garton (1988): Little Angelfuck

A luridly sensual cover for a book that took me some time to track down in good condition; I couldn't even find a cover image online of Ray Garton's Crucifax. It was somewhat notorious in its day not for what was there, but for what wasn't: a chapter describing in graphic detail an extremely monstrous and bizarre abortion. Originally published in 1988 by small press publisher Dark Harvest in hardcover under the title Crucifax Autumn, the paperback publishers, Pocket Books, got nervous at such a depiction and edited it from this June 1988 edition. However, this censored chapter was widely published in 1990 in Paul Sammon's anthology Splatterpunks.

Dark Harvest hardcover, 1988

Crucifax concerns an underground Pied Piper/Manson-esque figure haunting the streets of the San Fernando Valley looking for disaffected teens. And lord, there's plenty; one even has raw, forbidden dreams about his pretty young sister as the back cover so charmingly puts it. Garton, as I've mentioned before, published paperback originals with copious amounts of sex and violence but had a bit of a social conscience too, so you didn't entirely feel like taking a shower after reading one of his books.

Dark Gods (1985) and The Ceremonies (1984) by T.E.D. Klein: Children of an Elder God

The sadly non-prolific T.E.D. Klein published his only novel, The Ceremonies, in 1984. 1984! His second book, a year later, the collection Dark Gods, is comprised of novellas written the decade prior. He was, however, editor of Twilight Zone magazine, which published well-respected short horror stories until its demise in 1989. Although all of his fiction is set in the modern era, its care and subtlety hearken back to late 19th/early 20th century masters like M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Sheridan Le Fanu, Lovecraft, etc. Modern purveyors of this style work in what has been dubbed "quiet horror." Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Charles L. Grant and Dennis Etchison are all familiar names in this sub-genre. These writers pride themselves on creating moods and atmospheres, a sense of awe, mystery, providing chilling intimations of fear and dread rather than, as Stephen King once put it, "going for the gross-out."

I quite like the Bantam cover of Dark Gods at top: out of a vast stormy sky an inchoate face, raging, fanged, demonic, a living darkness threatening a solitary rural house (it's from "Petey). The covers are larded with the kinds of blurbs from reviews any young writer would kill for. The first novella, "Children of the Kingdom" (originally published in the game-changing anthology Dark Forces in 1980), takes place in the midst of the infamous New York City blackout of summer 1977 at an old folks' home where the narrator's grandfather lives. Slowly and surely Klein builds the atmosphere, dropping hints and clues throughout, mixing vague supernatural dread with real-life threats caused by the blackout. The sewers of New York, it turns out, harbor more than just baby alligators, and roving gangs might not be from the next block over.

"Black Man with a Horn" (1980), one of Klein's most lauded stories, has as its narrator an old horror fiction writer who once knew Lovecraft himself. After a chance meeting with a nervous missionary returning from Malaysia on an international flight, the narrator learns the true meaning of a horrific bogeyman from ancient myth - myth he thought was made up entire by Lovecraft and his fellow circle of Weird Tales writers. Bookish and self-referential, "Black Man with a Horn" is similar to the works of Thomas Ligotti; it is both a sly, ironic meditation on the art of horror as well as a creepy, satisfying story on its own. "Petey" and "Nadelman's God" are the two other quite good novellas included, both worth reading; virtually all are whispery and mythic, tinged with nightmarish imagery, and even touch on tensions between urban and rural, upper class and lower, age and memory. Nicely done, Mr. Klein.

But I was little taken with The Ceremonies; all I can recall of it two years later is the sense of disappointment I felt while reading it. It is based on his acclaimed novella "Events at Poroth Farm" (1972), which, sadly, is not included in Dark Gods (it can be found in Year's Best Horror: Series II). That's one of the problems I had with The Ceremonies - it absolutely felt like an expanded short story, overstuffed and at times, simply boring. Another bookish narrator, a college professor who repairs to a farm in rural New Jersey to read Gothic literature to prepare for his upcoming class. But the countryside proves less restful than imagined. Of course it does! Perhaps my taste runs more towards bloodier, more intense horror than I think it does; maybe Klein's reputation has been magnified by his virtual disappearance from writing in the intervening 25 years.

Klein's work is not difficult to find despite having been out of print for years; copies abound on Amazon and eBay as well as in good used bookstores. While opinions may vary on The Ceremonies, I have to say that Dark Gods (perhaps) proves the genre functions best in the short story or novella format; it's an important piece of horror fiction, one that respectfully earns its place upon the shelf next to its mighty elders.

Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta (1975): Children in Heat II

I have never had any interest in reading Audrey Rose, one of the quintessential bestselling horror novels of the mid-1970s. When I worked in a used bookstore in the late '80s it seemed everybody wanted to trade in their busted-ass copy; we had dozens of them (along with other '70s moldy-oldies Jaws, The Flame and the Flower, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Love Story - that last title many Americans' sole enriching literary experience of the decade, Harlan Ellison once said). "A novel of reincarnation" makes it sound more like "housewife horror" to me than anything cool, bloody, or really fucked up. I was probably inclined to think so by Stephen King, who wrote in Danse Macabre (1981):

Most of them [horror novels] are just downright bad, and I have no taste for the job of beating the field's most spectacular violators with their shortcomings. If you want to read John Saul and Frank De Felitta, go right ahead. It's your three-fifty.
Three-fifty?! Ha. To this day I have no idea who author Frank De Felitta is or what happened to him. I certainly don't think of him as a forgotten horror novelist awaiting rediscovery. Sorry, Frank. Blame Stephen King. Blame the decidedly mediocre film version. But little girls on fire--! Man, after The Exorcist, everybody must've hated 'em. I cannot deny the creepy, malevolent, and unsettling image of Audrey Rose herself on the cover of the book, which I'm sure many folks my age remember sitting on their mom's nightstand or taking up the racks at the grocery store. I know I do. And that makes for some good vintage horror cover art.

1982 sequel

Weaveworld by Clive Barker (1987): The Uses of Enchantment

Only his second novel, Weaveworld shows Clive Barker already stretching as a writer of visionary horror fiction. At an epic 700 pages, it is an ambitious, genre-straddling work, evoking William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and other fantasists and magic realists rather than the outright horror of Books of Blood and his first novel The Damnation Game (1985). Later titles like The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Imajica (1991) would find Barker continuing in this particular blend of fantastical worlds filled with both guttural horror and transcendent beauty - as well as splendidly perverse eroticism.

True to its title, there is a world woven into a carpet, a carpet which comes into the hands of Cal Mooney, an ordinary young man whose life in Liverpool seems to drift aimlessly. Called the Fugue, this world is inhabited by a race of mythical people known as Seerkind who through history had been viciously hunted by man (Cuckoos to the Seerkind), but have spirited themselves into this carpet to escape persecution. The human guardian of the Weave has fallen ill while several evil forces, led by exiled Seerkind sorceress Immacolata, attempt to destroy it.

Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, each subtly different from its neighbor. The effect was not overbusy; every detail was clear to Cal's feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if band together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border, others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there... its colors as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could read each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.

Pocket Books Oct 1987

This first edition of the US paperback has some pretty ridiculous cover art. There are a couple recognizable characters but on the whole I prefer the UK edition at the top, which clearly, and cleverly, incorporates specific images, people, places, and events from the novel into a carpet-like design. More cover artwork from around the world can be found here.

Inside Pocket Books '87 edition - art by Jim Warren

Barker has always spoken of the "subversive" qualities of the imagination, of its ability to save us from banality and a stifling status quo, and that's precisely what happens to Mooney once he's swept up into adventure. Weaveworld may not be Barker's best work - in his introduction to the 2001 edition he writes he was "on occasion irritated that [the book] found such favor among readers when other stories seemed more worthy" - but I certainly have enjoyed reading it several times over the years. And as a prose stylist Barker is unmatched; it's simply a pleasure to read his writing in a way not usually common in the genre.

Ahead there were such sights unfolding: friends and places they'd feared gone forever coming to greet them, eager for shared rapture. There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noon-day visions and midnight glory...

There is more than a touch of sentimentality, but Weaveworld is a good recommendation for people who don't enjoy straight-up horror novels. "That which is imagined need never be lost," Barker writes, intimately understanding the value of imaginary fiction and storytelling. People are enchanted by the myths and fairy tales woven into our cultural subconscious over the ages, and the most useful of all are not those that allow us to escape our nature, but the ones that dare to confront it directly; Weaveworld is one of those indeed.