The Books of Blood Volume 1

By Clive Barker,

Book cover of The Books of Blood Volume 1

Book description

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE HULU ORIGINAL FILM

Rediscover the true meaning of fear in this collection of horror stories from Clive Barker, New York Times bestselling author and creator of the Hellraiser series.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

In this tour de force collection…

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Why read it?

5 authors picked The Books of Blood Volume 1 as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book originally consisted of six short collections of novellas and stories, but they’ve since been gathered into a two-volume set, so I’m hoping I can count them as one. They go together, and I think they’re nearly all excellent.

When I was a kid, these stories helped build a bridge for me, from the likes of Stephen King (whom I still adore) to new imaginative worlds of horror that include all kinds of transgressive imagery.

I love how Barker combines the fantastic with the visceral, blurs lines between the monstrous and the human, and makes desire dark, dirty, and…

Personally, I have owned 3 copies in my lifetime, two of which I read into tatters. Clive Barker remains one of the most unusual imaginations in horror to date. If you can’t find something in this collection that you enjoy, pull out the femoral stick. These stories have been translated into film almost as often as Carrie

From K.V.T.'s list on unconventional horror.

When I was young, a had minor surgery which laid me up for a bit but gave me plenty of reading time. A family friend gave me Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and it was my first foray into horror fiction. Years later, I read an article in FANGORIA about a rising British author that King was a fan of (I have seen the future of horror and his name in Clive Barker!”) So, I tracked down The Books of Blood and was instantly drawn into a dark fantastical world of horror! Barker’s writing became a…

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Book cover of The Ballad of Falling Rock

The Ballad of Falling Rock by Jordan Dotson,

Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…

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.

Bloody, brilliant, and ground-breaking, Clive Barker’s six-volume masterpiece mixes urban drama with fable, myth, legend, and gallons of blood. This gave us body horror, gore, agony. It gave us “Candyman” and “Rawhead Rex”, mythic monsters that stay with me to this day; it gave us the astonishing imagery of “In The Hills, The Cities”—tens of thousands of citizens stand together to form giants as tall as skyscrapers—and “The Skins Of The Fathers”—wretches sink into quicksand that then horrifically hardens around their partly sunken bodies (an image later used in Barker’s film, The Lord Of Illusions). A necessary collection that…

From Thomas' list on red in tooth and claw.

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Book cover of The Ballad of Falling Rock

The Ballad of Falling Rock by Jordan Dotson,

Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…

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