Books of Blood, Volume 1
Why this book?
Clive Barker transcends the subgenre label of “splatterpunk,” infecting an array of lofty speculative traditions with mutilation and viscera. The author’s prose style is elegant, often gorgeous, and his depictions of violence connect to a provocative, career-long interest in the cosmic, glimpsed often by means of extreme physical experience. For my money, "The Midnight Meat Train" is one of the great horror stories of the late twentieth century.