Clive Barker, page 1 of 6

I started this read-through of Barker’s fiction wondering why it was I’d stopped reading him the first time round, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it. I think I’d have bought and started reading Galilee (1999) when it first came out in paperback, but I can’t remember finishing it. Reading it this time, I came to a point where I was absolutely ready to give up (as I’m sure I actually did, back then), and it was only my determination not to bail out on this Barker read-through that meant I broke through to the later (better) parts of the book. Maybe this one just isn’t for me—it certainly had mixed reactions among its initial reviewers—but I think there are parts of it that just aren’t up to Barker’s usual standards. And, this being a long book (his second-longest, after Imajica; in some pre-interviews, he talks about it being a two book series) those parts are as long as other people’s actual novels.

Galilee is also the furthest Barker has got from the Books of Blood-style horror that initially made his name. Even in the novels that followed, where he took pains to point out that what he was writing was fantasy, not horror, the darkness was still there, and was still weird, demonic, and grandiose in that very Barkerish way. Galilee is subtitled “a romance”, and although it’s a romance tinged with fantasy, it’s not, to my tastes, tinged enough. (For me, romance needs something else to make it work—Jane Austen levels of wit and social satire, for instance—or should boil along in a subplot alongside adventure, mystery, horror, or whatever.)

Galilee is the tale of two families whose destinies became entwined in the dying days of the American Civil War. On the one hand, we have the Barbarossas, whose roots lie in Africa, but whose generations are few, because their central line are immortal divinities. As the titular Galilee explains, he has no grandparents, because his parents weren’t born. (There are “those creatures God made, but also those who made themselves by force of will or appetite”, and Cesaria and Nicodemus Barbarossa are two such. Though, it has to be said, Nicodemus has managed to get himself killed over a century ago, leaving only the fearsome matriarch Cesaria to preside over the family.)

The Barbarossas live hidden away in their house called L’Enfant des Carolinas (designed for Cesaria by her one-time lover Thomas Jefferson), and it’s there that one of Nicodemus’s bastard sons (the half-divine, half-human Maddox) sets out to write this book, the history of his family. But he realises he can’t write about the Barbarossas without also writing about the Gearys.

The Geary clan are, we’re told, “American royalty”, “As rich as the Rockerfellers and as influential as the Kennedys”. Where the Barbarossas have magical power, the Gearys have worldly power—and a dark heart, for they are “fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred… iron-willed and long-lived… casually cruel and just as casually charismatic”:

“There was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary daemon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights.”

Although it starts out sounding as though it’s going to be a dynastic history, chock-full of events from the past, Galilee really just focuses on one event from the present, the marriage of Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary. Mitchell—rich, handsome and single—is the most eligible bachelor in the USA; Rachel is just an ordinary (but beautiful) girl from an ordinary background, who catches Mitch’s eye while working in a jeweller’s shop. He asks her out, they go on dates, they get engaged and married—it all sounds like a fairy tale. Then Rachel realises how shallow Mitch is—charming, but shallow—and how loveless their relationship is. But the Geary women are used to this, and have a solution. Rachel is told to go for a stay at a certain house on the island of Kaua’i, which only the Geary women are allowed into. There, she’s visited by Galilee Barbarossa, who, it turns out, provides a certain service for all the Geary women when their marriages prove empty. One night with him gives them “A taste of an emotion that struck deep into their being, and offered them a glimpse of what their souls needed to stay bright.” After which they can return to their empty lives. Only, Rachel doesn’t want to return. She and Galilee fall in love, and that love will destroy the delicate balance of hatred and power that exists between the Gearys and the Barbarossas.

Quoted in Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds (by Phil & Sarah Stokes), Barker says, of this novel:

“What I tried to do is take what I learned about writing about the real world in Sacrament and marry it to what I learned about writing a sort of poetic, almost religious fantasy in Imajica. I wanted those to be put side by side.”

He goes on to add: “it’s much easier to relate to some of the chief characters, because there they are, living in our world”.

It’s always been an archetypal situation for Barker—and one of his strengths as a writer—presenting the effect on ordinary people of encountering the fantastic, and having it transform their lives. It was only while reading Galilee that I realised this “encounter with the fantastic” occurs in other ways in Barker’s fiction, too: people are also transformed in his stories by encounters with super-heated passion (think of Julia’s one-night-stand with her husband’s brother Frank in The Hellbound Heart). That’s what happens in this novel, too—Galilee is, in a sense, the novel-length version of novella-length Frank—but Rachel’s life is also transformed by her encounter with another sort of the unordinary, the world of the incredibly wealthy. (Only, that’s not a positive transformation.)

And it’s here where one of my complaints about the book lies. Barker says this is a novel where it will be easier to relate to the characters because they’re living recognisable lives, but, aside from a couple of minor back-story characters, none of these characters is living a life that could be described as normal. Even Rachel, who comes from an ordinary background, is obviously beautiful enough to attract the country’s most eligible bachelor, so she’s already out of the ordinary. And once she’s swept up into the world of the ultra-rich (which doesn’t take long) her life is not ordinary, and nor are the people around her. That wouldn’t matter, but these characters are all so uninteresting. They are what I imagine the ultra-rich to be: spoiled, festering in their own insecurities, hang-ups and (this being Barker) perversities, but so very shallow, and I just don’t care about them or, sadly, Rachel. Compared to them, the plainly dysfunctional but gleefully Bohemian Barbarossas are by far the more “normal” people, despite being semi-divine. (Though, for all but the fearsome force of nature that is Cesaria, that divinity extends to nothing more than being long-lived. And being long-lived hasn’t exactly imparted wisdom on these messed-up beings.)

This wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if it wasn’t for my other complaint about Rachel’s story (which takes up most of this book). The non-fantastic parts—dealing with Rachel’s wooing, her marriage, the breakdown of that marriage—are boring. Nothing surprising happens, and the dialogue is just platitudes and clichés. Perhaps this is an expression of the emptiness of the Geary family, but the limpness of the dialogue extends to Rachel herself, and even to the most lively of the Geary wives, the down-to-earth and frankly alcoholic Margie, who becomes Rachel’s closest ally. This section of the book just had nothing to offer me, as a reader—no wit, no character, no surprises, no ideas. It’s certainly where I’d have stopped reading on my first go at this novel.

But this time I pushed on through, and things got a little better. If nothing else, I was driven by my interest in the themes Barker has developed throughout his fiction, and how they play out in this book. (Though I have to say, I found Galilee the most devoid of the sort of metaphysical and philosophical ideas that can usually be found in his work.)

Fictionally, the stand-out moments for me were two background stories. Both, notably, are about genuinely ordinary people encountering the fantastic. The first was the tale of the fisherman Zelim who meets Cesaria and Nicodemus as they’re baptising their first-born, Galilee. This one moment is enough to upend his life, and he eventually becomes a renowned storyteller. (Which echoes Sacrament’s tale of an encounter with a fantastic couple leading to a life driven by imagination and creativity, making me think this may be Barker’s own version of the artistic initiation story.)

The other is the story of Captain Holt, who meets Galilee in the final days of the American Civil War, a moment which recalls another Barker trope, this one from his first novel, The Damnation Game: the Faustian pact made in the aftermath of a war. There, it was a deal made in the ruins of WWII-era Warsaw that led to a man becoming fabulously wealthy; here, it’s a deal made in the Civil War-ravaged south that leads to the Geary clan becoming fabulously wealthy. In both cases the deal turns toxic, as Faustian pacts do.

As I say, there’s a lot of another Barker archetype—Uncle Frank from Hellraiser—in the character of Galilee. Not only does he spice up the lives of the Geary women, and Rachel in particular, with his skills in the bedroom, but he goes through something of Frank’s painful reconstruction when Rachel nurses him back from near-death following a shipwreck. (This makes me start to see this painful-return-to-life trope in Barker’s fiction as something almost shamanic. In some traditions, the shaman’s visionary initiation sees them being torn apart, stripped to the bones or cooked in a big pot, then reconstituted before their return to the world.)

Just to tick off another Barker theme I’ve noted in his fiction since The Books of Blood, here we also have the situation where women are allied to fantastic males or monsters, as opposed to human males, who are presented, in this trio, as murderous and toxically powerful. It’s been there since “Skins of the Fathers”; the Geary women and Galilee versus the nasty Geary men (most of whom are murderers and abusers of women) are just the latest version of it.

It may be that Galilee just isn’t my type of book. Contemporary reviews I’ve been able to find have certainly been polarised. Kirkus Reviews said it was “Overheated and intermittently risible, but the thing is entertaining”; The Birmingham Mail said “This is Barker’s greatest achievement—an addictive read that is nigh-impossible to put down.” But The Bookseller said, “We’ve all been waiting for another Weaveworld, but sadly this isn’t it… It’s a fan’s book, I feel—not one to expand his readership.” And Maxim magazine (not one I’d usually go to for literary analysis) called it “well-written Jackie Collins with a dose of X-Men,” but went on to note that “Loyal Barker fans will feel cheated.”

Barker himself was certainly in a happy place when he wrote it (the character of Galilee was based on his new partner at the time, and the house on Kaua’i was inspired by Barker’s holiday home on the same island). And he deliberately chose to make the book narrated—in fact, written—so he could freely comment on his own creative process. So, we get some glimpses of how he feels when he’s writing:

“Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities and show you the loveliness of filth.”

As well as perhaps his most explicit echo of William Blake:

“I suspect, by the way, that in the creation of divinities we see the most revealing work of the human imagination. And of course in the life of that imagination, the most compelling evidence of the divine in man.”

My own reading of Galilee was more powered by my interest in Barker’s work as a whole than the book itself, but I’ve found my enthusiasm for this Barker read-through undampened. For some reason I’ve got my heart set on reading Coldheart Canyon no matter what, perhaps because I bought it but never read it when it first came out. Here’s hoping it’s a return to the sort of Barker I like.

Having by now spent ten years publishing blockbuster novels that mix horror and fantasy on an often Biblical scale, Sacrament (first published in 1996) saw Barker taking a step back from the multiple worlds and earth-shaking events of Imajica, The Great and Secret Show and Everville to something less chock-full of entire carnivals of the fantastique. Here, he addresses some issues of concern in the real world around him. And though, this being Barker, there are still moments when it all strays into the metaphysical, fantastic and luridly horrific, it does, at times, even get a little autobiographical.

The protagonist of Sacrament is Will Rabjohns, a world-renowned wildlife photographer known for his images of animals brought up hard against humankind’s impact on their home environments. The novel opens as he’s finishing his latest project, on polar bears hunting through the rubbish tips of Balthazar in northern Canada. But a bear attack puts him into a four-month coma, during which he revisits the events of thirty years ago when, as a thirteen year old, he encountered a strange and beautiful pair of vagabonds, Jacob and Rosa.

Back then, Will’s parents had just moved from Manchester to the Yorkshire village of Burnt Yarley following the death of Will’s older brother, who had always been his parents’ favourite. Still left very much in the shadows of his parents’ affections, when he meets this strange pair, and finds Jacob taking a keen interest him, Will decides to run away with them.

Jacob has a strange avocation as “the Killer of Last Things”: he seeks out the final mating pairs of dying species, documents them thoroughly in his journal, then kills them, thus making what he sees as an irreversible impact on the world. Something passes between Jacob and Will, and the boy experiences some of the older man’s memories, including one of a dead painter, Thomas Simeon, from two centuries ago (Jacob and Rosa are, it seems, immortal, and have a Cenobitish air of ennui’d repletion about them), whose body, left in the wilds, was partially eaten by a fox. (In his coma, Will sees that fox once more and speaks to it—Lord Fox, it calls itself.) In the end, events transpired to prevent Will from joining this dangerous but alluring couple, but he left the town and his parents as soon as he’d grown up: a gay man, he knows his parents—and, indeed, most of society at the time—couldn’t accept what he was. He left England for America, settling in San Francisco.

Recovering from the coma, Will says he’s finished with photography, but has no plans for what he’s going to do instead. He returns to San Francisco, only to find himself in a community ravaged by AIDS. And Lord Fox, stirred into wakefulness inside him, starts visiting, enlivening his senses with a fresh acuity, and driving him to Barkerian excesses in the city’s gay nightclubs. Will realises he has to rid himself of this troublesome animal spirit just as Jacob, elsewhere in the world, decides he needs to rid himself of the connection he still feels to Will. To this end, Jacob and Rosa return to Burnt Yarley and assault Will’s father, putting him into hospital, thus sending the message that they want Will back for a confrontation.

As ever with Barker’s fiction, that confrontation doesn’t go according to anyone’s plan, and turns into a quest that heads further north to the Isle of Tiree, where Jacob and Rosa’s former master—perhaps, even, creator—the magician Rukenau, dwells in the magical structure known as the Domus Mundi, the House of the World.

Barker has said this is a novel infused with autobiographical elements (his biographer Douglas E Winter says “Sacrament is arguably the best of Clive Barker’s novels, and one of the most directly and profoundly autobiographical of his fictions”). It’s broad strokes stuff, though, as this is a novel about a creative gay man who has moved from the north of England to the West Coast of the USA. And Will’s critics say, of his art, what Barker must have heard many times himself: “Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”

The main fantastical element centres on Jacob and Rosa. (Winter writes: “The bloodthirsty scourge known as Jacob Steep is only the most recent of the light-bearing zealots who burn their way through the pages of [Barker’s] fiction,” which is a wonderful description.) Both have some power, most explicitly in Rosa’s case, as she has an animated string of rosary beads that does her bidding (usually murder). Like so many Barker figures, the couple exist in a twilight world, or perhaps an elevated version of this one, their concerns philosophical and aesthetic rather than the mundane ones of daily survival, blessed visionaries and cursed wanderers in one.

As so often in Barker’s fiction these are figures on a quest for deeper, or higher, knowledge. Like The Great and Secret Show’s Jaff or Weaveworld’s Shadwell the Salesman, their power derives from an awareness of another world, but one they are not the masters of. Jacob and Rosa, in fact, do not really understand what they are. They know they’re immortal; they’re haunted by certain memories (an ice palace they visited many years ago reminded them of something, though they can’t recall what). Jacob in particular is troubled and inconsistent. Despite his extinction-killings, he seeks forgiveness somehow, and a clear view of God—who is drowned out, in this world, he believes, by the “smothering, deafening fecundity” of its animal life, hence his need to kill it off—but, at the same time, he’s contemptuous of the deity, saying “God’s a coward and a show-off, Will… He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are…” Zealot he may be, but his faith blows hot and cold.

Jacob and Rosa know they owe their existence to the magician Rukenau, who dwells in the Domus Mundi—which they, somehow, helped build—and it’s when they, and Will, start to learn more about both Rukenau and the painter Simeon (who was, for a while, Rukenau’s partner in magical endeavours) that the novel really starts engaging with its ideas, and became much more fulfilling, for me.

Simeon’s is the clearer, more positive, vision, as he (in one of the memories Will has experienced) holds up a flower petal to Jacob and provides the novel with its title: this petal is “the true sacrament”, “the Holy of Holies… the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself”, as is all of the natural world. He has something of Algernon Blackwood’s panpsychism about him as he says: “God knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service…”

But Simeon died centuries ago, and we only get to meet Rukenau here, living a squalid existence in the out-of-this-world structure known as the Domus Mundi. Whatever it is or was meant to be, this structure (I don’t recall it getting a full explanation) is a shining thing that seems to contain the essence of the world’s animal and plant life, a light full of “hints of living things”—or would do, but because Rukenau is unable to face its constant light, he has covered the interior walls in “mud and excrement”—the main image that lingered from my first reading of the book, making me wonder at the time just what Barker was saying. (I’m still not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s more by way of a complaint, that we live in such a wondrous world, but insist on polluting it in every way we can?)

One notable shift in Barker’s fiction that comes through in this novel is its attitude to death. In his previous fiction, death has only ever been a transformation, a change of state rather than an ending, and one it’s possible to return from (however painfully—think of all those half-made Uncle Frank-like “walking anatomy lessons” throughout the novels). In Imajica, a man who died from AIDS became a voice that spoke from the afterlife, an “angel” to one of that novel’s characters; here, when a man dies from AIDS, it’s the end. Resurrection has been a key theme of Barker’s fiction from the start, but “This is not a world of resurrections.” Rather, it’s a world of “early and unexpected goodbyes”, where “Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.”

Jacob and Rosa, though, belong “to a race or condition which was in some unfathomable fashion beyond the frailties of disease, or even death.” In the end, though, they are revealed to be not human at all. They form part of another theme in Barker’s novels, of created beings, like the homunculus of his play The Magician, or the magical doppelgängers of Zacharias and Judith in Imajica.

What humanity they have, in particular their characters as a man and a woman, was acquired by “learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them”. Jacob, then, is death (“It was one of this appetites as a man; to love the hunt, the blood-letting and the kill”); Rosa is a combination of lust and a constantly-frustrated desire to have babies.

Overlapping with this Barker theme of the created being is another that’s closely allied to it, the relationship between fathers and sons. Here, it’s dealt with in entirely non-fantastic terms in Will’s relationship with his monstrously unemotional father, a philosopher whose response when his son says they should try to talk his mother out of her mournful depression, is to go on about the inadequacy of words to express any sort of meaning. “Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels,” Hugh tells the boy, which is basically his excuse for doing nothing. His mockery of the idea of human emotion reaches its nadir when, pushing the question to its absurd extreme, he asks Will to imagine “a portion of excrement which may be dubbed loving”, and thinks that this disproves love, when it in fact only invalidates his methods of enquiry. Will finds a far better father-figure in the murderous Jacob, who at least, for a while, is interested in the lad (even if he later wants to kill him).

Sacrament received some friction at the time for centring on a gay character, both from critics and its first (soon-replaced) editor (who apparently asked Barker if he couldn’t swap Will’s boyfriend for a girlfriend, scared it would hurt sales). Surprisingly, for a book that depicts the gay community as Barker knew it, and so which presumably could have provided it with a de-stigmatising voice at the time, the sequences in San Francisco are a little bleak, and not just because of the presence of AIDS. (Douglas E Winter writes: “its take on gay lifestyles is by no means a gentle or encouraging one”.)

Kirkus Reviews, though, gave the book a mostly-thumbs up critique:

“By turns suspenseful, intellectually exciting, wildly melodramatic, turgid, and bombastic, Barker’s novel is charged—in its complex development and surprising resolution—with very real, very human emotion. A weirdly absorbing and entertaining tale that offers more disturbing delights from one of our most inventive and risk-taking writers.”

I certainly enjoyed it, perhaps more than the first time around, as I can maybe appreciate its maturity and depth a bit more. The first half felt a little unsatisfying, perhaps because of the lack of Barker’s usual profusion of fantastic images and ideas suddenly leaving his characters with nothing to be beguiled by, but as the themes kicked in, in the second half of the novel, it certainly grew on me.

Some questions seemed unanswered, particularly about Rukenau (just what was he up to when he had the Domus Mundi built?), but ultimately it’s a book that retains Barker’s usual visionary concerns, just versed in slightly less fantastic terms. Inclusionist that he is, Barker sees the wonders of creation at all levels of existence, in all aspects of being human, and in the natural world:

“The creators of the world had not retreated to the heights. They were everywhere. They were stones, they were trees, they were shafts of light and burgeoning seeds. They were broken things, they were dying things, and they were all that sprang up from things dying and broken. And where they were, [Will] was too. Fox and God and the creature between.”

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.