Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780751512250
ISBN number: 0751512257
Label: Time Warner Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Time Warner Paperbacks
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: February 01, 1988
Publishing house: Time Warner Paperbacks
Sale Popularity Level: 135043
Studio: Time Warner Paperbacks
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Product Description:
Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it. Most will go peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, the horrors will come, skipping, to fetch them off to the highway of the damned ...From the brilliant World Fantasy Award winner Clive Barker come fourteen spine-chilling stories of darkness unleashed, gathered together in one volume for the very first time. These are visionary tales of terror which will curdle the very marrow in your bones ...
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Rated by buyers 
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Classic short Stories from Barker that were written and published in the mid 1980's and still remain essential reading for fans of dark fantasy and horror fiction. A must have for your collection!
Rated by buyers 
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THIS REVIEW IS DEDICATED TO THOSE GOOD PEOPLE WHO LOST THEIR LIVE IN THE "WORLD TRADE CENTRE" ATTACK,AND ALSO TO THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN WHO LOST THEIR LIVES TRYING TO SAVE THE VICTIMS...Nigel.
A fairly good read.I would not give this more that three stars for the simple reason that others may give it it five.And that reason is that the stories are 1)short
2)Too nasty and bloody,it stinks!
But the reason I have to give the writer some credit is because he maintains his good writing skills for most of the stories in this book.
I generally dislike short stories because they give you some hope,and before you know it,the story is finished.(I just read these stories for the record,since I am a fan of clive barker)
Anyway,you read the following and decide if the story is worth the read.
THE BOOKS OF BLOOD VOL 4(also know as the inhuman condition)Three stars.
1)The body politic:
A very fascinating story.It is simply about a world where our "hands"(yes our hands) have a mind of their own,and can control our bodies.In this story the left hand of a particular person decides to take over the world!
2)The inhuman condition:
A good story as well.In this story a few guys beat up a vagrant,robbing him of a piece of rope,which is tied into knots.Sometime after,one of the guys start to unravel the knots,and with the unravelling his friends start to die off. The guys then seeks the vagrant for help,after realizing what had been done...
3)Revelations:
A woman is unwillingly taken on a tour by her husband, a preacher.They go to a motel.The room in which they were staying was previously the room of two murdered victims...The victims,now ghosts,hunt the woman and her husband.
This is really a strange story,because,I mean,the dead made love!
4)Down Satan:
This is not one of my favourites.I hate this story.A guy,bored with god,decides to build a place on earth for satan.His plan goes bad and a lot of lives are lost.
5)The age of desire:
(The best story in this vol 1)....A man is part of a science experiment.The purpose of the experiment is to test an Aphrodisaic...The man then kills the scientists and excapes from the lab...He then starts to run around the place,having sex with people,raping people,and even killing people...A very funny,horror story....
THE BOOKS OF BLOOD VOL 6....Three stars.
1)The life of death:
In this story a woman becomes obsessed with a demolished church.She broke into a tomb and unknowingly caught a disease,which she was immune too(she became a carrier).But other people were not immune to it,so it quickly spreads to some of her friends,killing them.
In the end of this story the woman is raped and killed by a serial killer...And guess what?The killer gets the disease but is immune to it as well...he becomes a carrier and continues to spread the disease..
2)How spoilers bleed:
A couple of men bought a piece of land.But when then went to claim it they discovered that the land was occupied by Indians..The decided to force the Indians out ,but shot one of them...The chief then put a curse on the men and they start to die out one by one..(this is the good part)
The bad part is how they die! Let me explain how the men died...
Their skin became thin as toilet paper and tender as a piece of scab.Their skin was abraded with the smallest of contact.Even a piece of dust had the potential to peel of the skin from their hands,thereby leaving their flesh exposed.
They soon started to bleed to death.(a very gross story)
3)Twilight at the towers:
I did not like this story and didn't manage to read it through...I can't say what it is about though.I apologise for the inconvience.Sorry.
4)The last illusion:
It this volume,I think this is my favourite story..It is with a magician who made a deal 32 years ago with some group of devil people.
Now he is a famous magician(illusionist)how is performing at broadway.
One day after performing he goes into his room with a prostitute,while reaching to pick up something from the ground a sword falls on top of him and killls him.Was it an accident?Was it murder?
Sometime after his death his wife receives a mysterious letter from him.Apparently written by the magician before his death.He wanted to be creamated.
A guy who deals with the occult and paranormal activites is hired by the wife to help watch over the magician's body until it is cremated.
Meanwhile the "devil people" want the body for themselves because the magician didn't complete his part of his promise to them....
This guy who deals with the paranormal activites is caught up between hell ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
In this second half of the highway of the dead, Clive Barker takes us even deeper than we could have ever dreamt into the empire of death. Every story is a miracle and a fascinating marvel. Every story deserves our attention and energy. But some are maybe slightly more conspicuous, at least for me. But these stories seem to be fascinated by various parts of the body, various parts and pieces that have total freedom to do as they like, be they hands that sever their attachment to human beings to live their autonomous life and get rid of the human race ; or the righteous christian soul - a very gullible appendage or appendix indeed - of a preacher who is ready to kill if necessary to impose his vision of the final apocalypse, at least if he has enough time to do it before being executed by his prospective victims ; or the sexual impulse of a man boosted by some prophetic prefiguration of viagra, an impulse that will have to run its course to the end which necessarily means death for the body that is nothing but the tool of that drive ; or the fascination of the eyes, and the camera that is nothing but an extension of these eyes, of this research worker who discovers the deepest pulsating need of mystery, horror and fear in the minds of ordinary simple people who invent the Candyman to inhabit their nights with some thrilling experience ; or the deepest voracious cannibalistic female mother of everything and everyone, a madonna that controls, dominates and generates the whole world that is so willing to be so possessed that no one sees or realises it ; or the killing instinct of one's grandfather once hanged for his murdering crimes and now able to revisit his grandson in order to make him do again what he himself did in order for this grandson to take his place in the city of the damned and for him to get on the road to eternal life or non-existence since freed of any torturing and waiting ; or the very death we all carry in us and that can be turned into a living deadly organism that is transported and scattered around like a plague, as if death was an organ of ours among many others ; or the greed that gets punished somewhere in Amazonia through a curse from Indian victims of the voracious western ogres who need to eat the flesh and drink the blood of innocent prehistoric survivors of ancient nature-oriented civlizations ; or the real beast that lives in some of us and that is controlled by psychiatric expertise into obedience and service to the secret clandestine forces that stabilizes the obscure balance of the world split in two camps, at the time of the cold war when Clive Barker was writing, and yesterday at teh time of the war on terrorism ; or the satanic magic one can buy from Lucifer against one's own soul that one can always retain or recapture by mocking the devilish master and using Satan's magic to block the recuperation of one's body after death without which the soul is nothing, in fact not even detained. One may be surprised and even shocked by the quantity and diversity of bodily fluids that are shed in those pages, but Clive Barker has a fluid and liquid imagination and his world would have no density without those life-providing even and especially diabolical fluids. We could also wonder why Clive Barker needs so much sex in his stories, and particularly non-kosher sex, that kind of sex that is associated to Sodom and Gomorrha. But once again the potency of Clive Barker's style is in the sexual dimension of the delirium he calls his imagination. Writing for him is nothing but intercourse with this imagination of his who definitely rapes him over and over again page after page in all possible variations and nuances. And the most hellish form of rape is for him scatological, which means the release of another bodily fluid of sort. Fragile-psyched and delicate-sensitivitied readers are rather heartily advised not to enter these deep lanes and paths down into the pestifirous crypt of human haunting delusions which are nothing but, over and over again, the last illusion that will charm us into either stupidity or complete vegetable stupor. Maybe some will be illuminated, but these lights are nothing but the mesmerizing power of IT, of the longed-for molesting we all hope will one day assault us with delicious ecstacy.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne
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