Randomly I got The Midnight Meat Train from Netflix because I heard it was really good and I really quite enjoyed it. Based on a short story from Clive Barker's Books of Blood collection, it tells the story of a murderer who collects corpses on a train for some underworld creatures.

It really reminded me of how much I really enjoy dark horror and one author I've never gotten into: Clive Barker. I'm a huge Hellraiser fan...well....I really enjoyed the first two films, but I've never read any of his stuff so randomly I went to the local book nook and got Galilee (twenty five cents!) and Weaveworld (1st edition hardcover: $2.00!), arguably (among fans) the worst and the best of his work.

Galilee is a romance novel-at heart-but it also has to do with some crazy characters. The novel is told, first-person, by Maddox-an immortal who lives his with immortal stepmother and half-sisters in an old house in the middle of a swamp. He starts writing a family history of sorts relating to his brother, Galilee, which the whole family has disowned because some certain business with the Geary clan-involving a woman that he fell in love with.

What comes to pass is a go-between where we are introduced to all of the immortal characters and when Maddox starts writing about Rachel, the said woman who Galilee fell in love with. What results is a garbled six-hundred-some page book that's full of frothy love, filler sections, and no, real, horror to be found.

Clive Barker is known for his horror and his fantasy books-where he usually interlaces the two quite frequently, but I thought that his romance would be an interesting departure for him so I read this one first. It starts out, at least for the first hundred or so pages, really well and I was really intrigued by the characters, but from there I got not only bored, but very sorely disappointed.

As the main character, Maddox, keeps writing about what happened between Galilee and Rachel-he drops these hints that what he's about to write is going to blow your mind or that it's epic in some way...but he never delivers. Even at the end of the book when I was expecting a huge showdown between the Barbarossa (Maddox's) family and the Geary family, which was promised upon throughout the entire long book, it never comes to pass.

Not only that, but there is no plot whatsoever. No real up or downs. There's a death in the book, but it didn't really have anything to do with anything. What kept me reading were two things: Once I get past fifty pages of a book, I have to finish it. Call me crazy, but it's always been a rule of mine. #2: I kept being promised by the narrator that something really interesting was going to happen. The book seemed as if Barker really had a good idea that could have been really epic, but sort of backed out and procrastinated the rest. 

Even the love story that he created was so farfetched and uninspired that reading it felt like I was being smothered by sugar really fast. And not only that, but I found that the sections that didn't involve the "real-time" Maddox parts (i.e. the parts about Rachel and Galilee) were the worst parts of the book. They were boring and at times I found myself skimming. I was more interested in the immortal characters and how crazy they were like Maddox's lesbian, drugged out half-sister.

For how uneven and bad the book was, the most surprising part about it was how much I really enjoyed Barker's writing. Granted, the story was stupid (what story?) and the overall nature of it was poorly done, but the way he describes things and his prose about how he talks about them is quite lovely. He could describe a chocolate covered piece of crap and tell me how delicious it was and I'd eat it.

Now, just because I read Galilee and I didn't like it at all, wouldn't make me discount the rest of his novels since this one is the one most divided amongst fans. About 95% of Barker people really don't like it and the remaining percent claim this as his best work. I'm part of the percentile that really didn't like it. Maybe I should have read one of his more famous works that are more renowned like Weaveworld (which is next on my list) or his Books of Blood, but I guess that maybe I was trying too hard to enjoy this book. One star.

© Jason Haskins, 2009

Recommended: No

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