SolidShoe's Full Review: Clive Barker - Books of Blood: Volumes One to Thre...
Not to beat around the bush, but this book royally screwed with my head for a long, long time. I was unfortunate enough to have picked up one of the three books that make up the compilation, back when I was very, very young.
Reading Raw Head Rex as an eight year old kid
could not have been more of an insane thing to do, and as a result, I suffered a spell of chronic bedwetting that you wouldn't believe.
And it wasn't until years later, when I was 20, that I dared to venture into the books again. Surrounded by halls of flesh, immersed in amounts of blood you wouldn't believe, I conquored my fears...well to a point, for to this day, I refuse to read RawHead Rex.
That's how powerful Clive Barkers' Books of Blood are. The tenderest of minds are cautioned to stay away from this book, for it may tip you over the edge.
Sickness, Thy name is Clive
'Books' is anything but simple. It's not simply horror, but, if can believe it, almost like a drug induced orgasm of pain and suffering. Reading about the atrocities that Barker has depicted is somehow...romantic, in a taboo sort of way. It's like watching an old 85 year old couple have sex, you know good and well you shouldn't, but if you did....just what if?
'Books' is that what if. You get the feeling that it was never meant to be read by normal gents. It's horror on a poetic, deliciously sickening scale that is certainly an aquired taste.
A youth has his skin used as paper by spirits with shards of glass. A man meets the true populace of the great city, and has his tongue torn off for his troubles. A child and pig merge to tear the soft digits from the hands of the naive. Two cities made of human flesh battle it out in the country side.
Raw...gasp...Head Rex eats kids, rips babies from their wombs, and generally scares the $#%$ out of me to this day. He also urines on priests who gladly accept the offers.
There are more, many more. They very in sickness, but all are superbly written, and some are downright brilliant. At its lowest level, 'Books' is simply death imagined on a separte plane of thought than our own. At its best, 'Books' is to horror what the sex is to life: you keep coming back, again, and again.
Because these pages draw you in. They are filled with brilliant insight, flowing prose, superb characters, and terrifying ordeals. People are made to endure the worst the mind of a madman can come up with, and Barker was indeed a brilliant visionary of the scare back in the day.
Though he would carry it over in "The Human Condition", Barker was never more sick, or fantasic, than with the Books of Blood. Read them.
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