Books of Blood
"Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red." For those who only know Clive Barker through his long multigenre novels, this one-volume edition of the Books of Bloodis a welcome chance to acquire the 16 remarkable horror short stories with which he kicked off his career. For those who already know these tales, the poignant introduction is a window on the creator's mind. Reflecting back after 14 years, Barker writes: I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore.... We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.Reading these stories over, I feel a little of both. Some of the simple energies that made these words flow through my pen--that made the phrases felicitous and the ideas sing--have gone. I lost their maker a long time ago.
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What Hacker News says
- Recently I have begun reading more than one book at a time, which I have never done before.
I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...
Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me
- Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Stephen King's stuff up until the early 90s (I later found out the point where the books turned boring was when he'd stopped using drugs), short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and The Destroyer pulp novels, particularly after Will Murray started writing them.
- I only listen to fiction when it comes to audiobooks. That said, I really like Clive Barker stuff who I discovered relatively recently. In particular, I like "Books Of Blood" [0].
