mewsings in March 2026

As the 1970s moved towards the 1980s, and as punk rock replaced prog, it seems the inner city began to replace the countryside as the standard location for YA novels. Where formerly the natural world had been the more closely associated with childhood (endless summer holidays spent mucking around in fields), the inner city, with its more evident social problems, came to seem the more authentic, or at least relevant. Judy Allen’s first two YA books, The Spring on the Mountain and The Stones of the Moon, were firmly set not just in the country, but in the Earth Mysteries-flavoured country of Janet and Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain—stone circles, ancient tracks, Merlin, Arthur, druids and so on. With her next two YA fantasies, Lord of the Dance (1976) and The Dream Thing (1980), the action moved to the town/city, and the fantasy element was no longer ancient forces in the landscape but dreams and the inner world.

(After writing on her first two YA fantasies a while back, I was hoping to review her next book, Lord of the Dance, but it’s been impossible to find a copy. Eventually, I gave in and read the ebook version that’s currently available, only to find something odd. It was originally published in 1976, but the ebook contained references to things like CDs and horror films on home video. I looked up some reviews for the original release, and even their brief plot summaries made me realise it must have been extensively rewritten at some point, presumably in the 1980s.)

The Dream Thing starts with its teen protagonist Jen sitting down to write a school essay about what matters most to her, and realising what she’s most concerned with is hate. Some gypsies have recently moved into a patch of unused land under a nearby motorway flyover, and she wants nothing more than for them to go away. She herself is half-gypsy—her father was a gypsy, though he was killed in a fight with his cousin before he could marry her mother, and before she herself was born—and now everyone at school is taunting her about “her relatives” having moved in, and asking if she’s going to join them.

She starts to have a frightening dream dominated by some monstrous thing, all sharp metal scales and a big tail spike. Convinced the gypsies (whom she early on confronts, telling them they’re not wanted round here) have put a curse on her—she also feels random sharp pains all the time, is convinced she’s going to die, and thinks she’s being followed—she draws this dream monster, in an attempt to work out what it might be. Having finished the drawing, she realises this dragon-like thing has no eye, so she puts one in, to finish it—and, like the old rabbi putting the final letter on the golem’s forehead, she feels something change, as though it has now come alive. Soon after, one of the gypsy caravans seems to have been attacked, with a large dent and suggestive scratches along its side, as though something big and rough had scraped against it.

Jen learns from her friend Tom (whose fascination with Native Americans, and his understanding of their persecution by European settlers, makes him sympathetic to the gypsies) that the land the travellers are on was bequeathed to the public over a century ago. Researching the exact wording of the bequest in the local library, she finds the land was actually given to the residents for their use, which, strictly speaking, excludes the gypsies; she brings the book to Tom’s and accidentally-on-purpose lets his parents (who are very much anti-gypsy) see it. Soon after, the police turn up in force to tell the gypsies to move on. They can’t immediately—one of them has recently given birth—so they’re given a week. Jen, weirdly open and honest about her dislike of them, takes the opportunity to let the head gypsy know that she was the one who provided the clue that meant they were going to have to move. But when she finds herself still gripped by nightmares of the dream-thing, her mother says the only thing to do is go to the gypsies and ask if they, with their knowledge of such things, can help.

Jen is plainly not what you’d call an entirely sympathetic character. Having decided it’s the gypsies’ fault she’s being bullied at school, she focuses entirely on wanting rid of them. In a way, the reader is left in the position of watching the car crash she’s making of the situation, how she’s letting this hatred of the gypsies take over her life, to the point where it acquires a supernatural life of its own. (And mentioning car crashes, I couldn’t help wondering if the patch of wasteland the gypsies occupy might be near the one where Maitland is stranded in Concrete Island, while Crash’s Robert Vaughan perhaps cruises by on the motorway above. Such hemmed-in remnants of the natural world took on a certain resonance in this time of cultural handover from countryside to city.)

But as an adult reader, I couldn’t help being aware of Jen as a troubled child (a teen, yes, but still a child) under serious pressure. The gypsies didn’t just kick off a spate of isolating bullying at school—which even her supposed friend Tom joins in with—their presence brings up Jen’s buried feelings about her father, whom she never knew, and his violent death. And all this is packed into the dream-thing: not only is it a scaly metal dragon-thing intent on attacking the gypsies, it’s also an armour-plated symbol of Jen’s own spiky self-protectiveness covering her emotional vulnerability. It’s also a thing that persecutes her, through nightmares and a sense that she’s being followed, just as this melange of hatred and fear is persecuting her. She’s a girl in serious need of guidance.

Her mother does make some attempts at help, but I can’t help feeling they’re woefully inadequate (though perhaps up to 1970s standards). Learning that Jen is being bullied at school, her mother says “they tease you because you rise to it”, as though it were basically her fault. In a midnight talk after one of Jen’s nightmares, after which Jen admits to feeling she’s going to die, her mother does at least talk about Jen’s father’s death, but goes on to say that Jen is too young to think about death and should just not do it. (Despite the fact that Jen’s father clearly died too young.) There’s a distinct sense of the adults giving one piece of cool advice, with an air of, “Well, I’ve told you how to deal with it, the rest is up to you.” (Jen’s best friend Tom, meanwhile, tells her “You share the Führer’s views on gypsies.” True—if exaggerated—but also perhaps a little unhelpful.) It’s the how of dealing with it that Jen clearly doesn’t have, and nobody guides her towards it.

Dream-fantasy like this, with a clear psychological grounding, can easily turn into straightforward allegory: Jen’s hatred of the gypsies gains a monstrous autonomy in the dream-thing dragon-scorpion whatever-it-is. Her hatred is monstrous, and the monster is her hatred. But that symbol, of the armour-plated spiky monster, has a lot more resonance than that—as I said above, it’s as much about Jen’s self-protection and self-persecution as it is her hatred. But I can’t help feeling that The Dream Thing resolves by treating it entirely as Jen’s hatred, and nothing else. The head gypsy tells her “Your dream… is born of your venom. It has nothing to do with us…” Which is perhaps a truth Jen needs to be told, but it’s also not the whole truth. The symbol of the dream-thing itself is far more eloquent than any of the reductive explanations, but there’s an air, at the end, of tying it to this too-simple explanation, and so leaving its many resonances unexplored. We’re left with a simple message: hate is bad, and it can take you over. But the roots of that hatred in fear and loss and isolation aren’t addressed.

(To give another example. Jen lives with her mother in a small flat, and the building is surrounded by a black metal fence with semi-ornamental spikes. The fence is only a short distance from the building itself, so what it’s protecting is a basically useless strip of land, and anyway, the fence can just be walked around, so its protecting nothing. It is, instead, an embodiment of the feelings people have about their homes, the need that they have a certain space around them, and an air of protection. In the limited space of a city, this has to be formalised into an ornamental fence and a tiny strip of land, but the psychological value is still there. The metal of the railings, and the spikes of the ornaments, clearly tie in with the metallic spikiness of the dream-thing, and bring out the feelings of self-protection rather than hatred in the dream-thing—though, such self-protection can also spill into hatred: the gypsies offer no threat, but so many people want them “not in my back yard”.)

I can’t help feeling that if the fantasy element had been given freer reign instead of being tied down to one interpretation, the ending might have been richer and more satisfying—a true resolution rather than a lesson only apparently learned. If, for instance, Jen had seen her own dream-thing in the metal/flesh, she might have seen herself in it, both her vulnerability and her spikiness. (A situation handled far better, and also with a dragon-sized thing of hate, disgust, and vulnerability, in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark.) But she doesn’t face it like that, it’s explained away. The fantasy loses its resonance, and becomes an allegory.

The Dream Thing’s ending does have a certain bleakness of realism. The gypsies are forced to move on. Jen’s friend Tom is no longer speaking to her, but she has a female friend in reserve, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s all part of the messiness of growing up.

It’s an interesting book, praised in its day for the realism of its characters, and certainly unafraid to take its main character through some uncomfortable emotions. It was reissued in 1990 (and, from a quick comparison of the text thanks to an Archive.org scan, it seems the same as the 1978 version, rather than being rewritten as with Lord of the Dance).

First published in 1994, Everville is the sequel to 1989’s The Great and Secret Show, and so the second Book of the Art. It is, according to Barker himself, “the first of my large novels written on my adopted soil” (the USA), and it’s also the first of his novels to return to a world and characters he’d written about before (not counting Harry D’Amour’s appearance in The Great and Secret Show, after his introduction in the Books of Blood story “The Last Illusion”).

Everville opens with a prologue set in America’s pioneer days. A wagon train is heading west from Missouri to Oregon, floundering as it encounters the Blue Mountains. Among its number is Harmon O’Connell, a man who has created in his mind, and in countless drawn plans, the shining city of Everville, which he intends to found once they reach their destination. He has a gold cross, given to him by a man named Owen Buddenbaum, to plant as a foundation to the city—not a crucifix, but the fellow to the one owned by Randolph Jaffe in the previous novel, emblematic of the magical Art, showing a human figure at the centre of four paths: “One to the dream-world, one to the real; one to the bestial, one to the divine.” When this seemingly Satanic cross is discovered by his fellow travellers, Harmon is blamed for all the ill-fortune that has befallen the trip so far and is killed. His 10-year-old daughter Maeve takes the cross and escapes, to found her father’s dream-city herself.

Skip to the present, where five years have passed since the events of The Great and Secret Show. Tesla Bombeck, carrying the spirit of the evolved monkey Raul within her, has been ranging across America, and picks up rumours that Fletcher, whom she’d immolated at his own request back in Palomo Grove, has somehow returned. Meanwhile her old friend Grillo, now holed up in Omaha (where the previous novel began), is using a bank of computers to collate the endless stream of weird news stories popping up throughout the nation. Both, along with noir-ish private eye Harry D’Amour in New York, are drawn to the Oregon town of Everville, just as it’s holding its annual festival. Also arriving there are Owen Buddenbaum—still alive after all these years, and ready to reap what he sowed when he gave that gold cross to Harmon O’Connell—and that figure who some think is the returned Fletcher, but who turns out to be something much darker. Added to this are some new characters, drawn from the ordinary folk of Everville, and yet to be introduced to the weird wonders coming their way: solicitor Erwin Toothaker, who uncovers a scandal in the town’s past; teen Seth Lundy, who “can hear angels hammering on the sky from Heaven’s side”; and Phoebe Cobb and her lover Joe Flicker, whose affair, once discovered, leads to Joe having to go on the run, and his finding an open doorway to the shores of Quiddity in the mountains above the town.

One thing to ask about Everville, it being the second book in a trilogy, is whether it’s worth reading, given that the third book of the series has yet to be (perhaps is never to be) written. I’d say that, just as the first book, The Great and Secret Show, works on its own, Everville could easily be the concluding part to a duology: it picks up characters from the previous book (I’m not so sure you could start with Everville), but finishes what it starts in terms of character and plot. The only way in which Everville doesn’t feel like a satisfactory conclusion is in terms of its themes. There’s so much going on, so many characters, so much incident, and lots of ideas offered up along the way, but none of those ideas is really pursued to the sort of depth you’d expect of an overall central theme. As such, the book doesn’t end with the feeling that it’s just delivered a big novel’s-worth of meaning—which Barker certainly did in Imajica (with its meditations on the need for balance in the spiritual and divine powers that govern us) or The Great and Secret Show (which could be read as a fable about the imagination being a battleground between fears and dreams).

There’s plenty that Everville could have pursed to greater depth. The Great and Secret Show was about the glitzy, glamorous side of America; Everville addresses itself to the complimentary small-town side of petty prejudices, small scale dreams and local scandals. The series itself has some ideas baked into it, for instance about evolution, whether physical or spiritual (as Raul says in this book: “We’re born to rise. To see more. To know more. Maybe to know everything one day.”), but Everville doesn’t take those notions any further than The Great and Secret Show. There’s the corresponding idea of change, and how things don’t end but merely transform (and this is a novel where at least two major characters spend a good time of the book as ghosts), but this feels more like an aspect of Barker’s world in general than something he’s directly addressing here.

Even on the plot level, big ideas raised in The Great and Secret Show don’t seem to get much further examination. The nature of the Iad Orobouros, for instance, which in the first book we were told thirsted “For purity. For singularity. For madness.”, and again represents the main ticking-bomb threat as their dark wave travels across Quiddity towards our world. Although there are speculations about the nature of the Iad (is it created from the dark side of the human unconscious, or were humans in fact created from its depths?), there are no answers, and the Iad sort of peters out at the end, more of a maguffin to drive the plot than a carrier of meaning.

Two of Barker’s key strengths, I think, are his depiction of believable human beings encountering realms of the fantastic and having their lives transformed, and his creation of fantastic cosmologies that capture some essence of the human experience untouched by many authors. But in a way, Everville, being the second book in a series, is setting itself up not to play to those strengths. We’ve already been introduced to the cosmology, and as I say, it’s not really explored to any greater depth (though there is a lot more paddling about); and, as many of the novel’s key characters are returning from the previous book, they’ve already had their transformative moments—and the new characters’ encounters with the fantastic are got over more quickly, as Barker no doubt felt it was material he’d already dealt with.

What I’d say Everville is, is a generous slice of Barker: it’s well-written (more readable than The Great and Secret Show), full of interesting characters, weird images and situations, and constantly sparking off ideas (there’s enough ideas to fuel another couple of Books of Blood, if he’d wanted), but it’s not doing anything new. It reads like a horror-fantasy adventure, written with a great deal of invention and verve, which would be enough for any other author. But I think Barker is capable of going deeper. Perhaps, this being the second book of a series, he didn’t have the elbow room to really turn it into something new.

In the novel, Tesla finds a note Grillo left himself on how he should address his attempt to write up what happened in Palomo Grove (the events of The Great and Secret Show): that he should let the telling “be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.” Perhaps that was Barker talking to himself here, too, giving himself permission to let the story sprawl, like the growth of that meant-to-be shining town of Everville itself. If so, perhaps the permission was needed because he perhaps felt, at some level, he should have been pushing Everville into some sharper focus, some more definite meaning, some higher level than the previous book of the series? (It’s towards the end of the book that Barker takes up the idea of “the story tree”, and how every human life is a telling of one leaf of that tree—an idea, I’d say, that would definitely have given this book the thematic weight it was lacking, if only it had been woven in from the start. Instead, from what I’ve read of Barker’s intentions, this is actually the idea he’s going to pursue in the third Book of the Art, if it gets written.)

There are plenty of recurring Barker tropes, in Everville—something I always like to keep track of—sometimes changed in new and interesting ways: the showman/salesman semi-villain, in the figure of Owen Buddenbaum; the “walking anatomy lesson” of a painfully reforming being, in Phoebe Cobb bringing her dead-but-not-dead lover Joe back to corporeality and being interrupted halfway, resulting in him existing for a while in “an agonised and unfinished state”; the massacre of a secret group of beautiful creatures; the intolerant mob roused into action by incursions of the fantastic; a key character turning out to be the offspring of a human mother and a monstrous (or non-human) father—a theme from some of the earliest Books of Blood—though in this case the progeny is itself monstrous in the moral sense… And most of all, the feeling that one should embrace every aspect of the human condition: the transcendent and the bestial, the fantastic and the normal. Barker is a thorough inclusionist, a celebrator of the entire human carnival. (It’s such a Barker-ish thing that Maeve O’Connell kicks off her father’s dream city by opening a whorehouse. In any other writer’s hands, this could be a satirical commentary on America’s being driven by money and selling the idea of a certain type of unrealistic dream; but for Barker, it’s just a carnal counterbalance to the ideas of spiritual transcendence behind the “shining city”: for him, there has to be both sides of the flesh-spirit equation.)

Everville isn’t a bad book. All the same, I’m looking forward to getting on with the later, mid-career Barker novels, each of which was standalone, and written by a man who has now very much found his place as a purveyor of wild, weird, transcendent and carnivalesque fantasy-horrors. Though actually it’s with his next novel, Sacrament, that I remember stumbling as a reader of Barker the first time round. I’m interested to see how I feel about it on a second read.