Zusatztext Praise for Clive Barker's Books of Blood Our most accomplished purveyor of horror fiction. The New York Times Book Review He scares even me...What Barker does in the Books of Blood makes the rest of us look like we've been asleep for the last ten years. Some of the stories were so creepily awful that I literally could not read them alone; others go up and over the edge and into gruesome territory...He's an original.Stephen King Barker's dark! powerful imaginationand his skill in pacing to keep stories surprisingmake the horror grisly and effective. People Barker's eye is unblinking; he drags out our terrors from the shadows and forces us to look upon them and despair or laugh with relief. The Washington Post Mixing elements of horror! science fiction and surrealist literature! Barker's work reads like a cross between Stephen King and South American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He creates a world where our biggest fears appear to be our own dreams. Boston Herald Clive Barker assaults our senses and our psyche! seeking not so much to tingle our spine as to snap it altogether. Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Born in Liverpool in 1952, Clive Barker has written and produced a number of plays, including The History of the Devil and Frankenstein in Love, which are as diverse in style and subject as the fiction he has written since. His volumes of short fiction, Books of Blood, earned him immediate praise from horror fans and literary critics alike. He won both the British and World Fantasy awards, and was nominated for the coveted Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary award. His bestselling novels include The Damnation Game, Imajica, Coldheart Canyon, The Thief of Always, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, the Abarat series, and The Scarlet Gospels. He is also the creator of the now-classic Hellraiser films as well as Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions. Klappentext 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 of brilliantly disturbing tales, Clive Barker combines the extraordinary with the ordinary, bringing to life our darkest nightmares with stories that both seduce and devour. As beautiful as they are terrible, the pages of this volume are stained with unsettling imagery, macabre humor, and visceral dread. Here then are the stories written on the Book of Blood. Read, if it pleases you, and learn.... This Volume includes: "The Book of Blood" • "The Midnight Meat Train" • "The Yattering and Jack" • "Pig Blood Blues" • "Sex, Death and Starshine" • "In the Hills, the Cities" Zusammenfassung 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 of brilliantly disturbing tales! Clive Barker combines the extraordinary with the ordinary! bringing to life our darkest nightmares with stories that both seduce and devour. As beautiful as they are terrible! the pages of this volume are stained with unsettling imagery! macabre humor! and visceral dread. Here then are the stories written on the Book of Blood. Read! if it pleases you! and learn.... This Volume includes: The Book of Blood • The Midnight Meat Train • The Yattering and Jack • Pig Blood Blues • Sex! Death and Starshine •...

Autorentext

Born in Liverpool in 1952, Clive Barker has written and produced a number of plays, including The History of the Devil and Frankenstein in Love, which are as diverse in style and subject as the fiction he has written since. His volumes of short fiction, Books of Blood, earned him immediate praise from horror fans and literary critics alike. He won both the British and World Fantasy awards, and was nominated for the coveted Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award. His bestselling novels include The Damnation Game, Imajica, Coldheart Canyon, The Thief of Always, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, the Abarat series, and The Scarlet Gospels. He is also the creator of the now-classic Hellraiser films as well as Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions.

Klappentext

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 of brilliantly disturbing tales, Clive Barker combines the extraordinary with the ordinary, bringing to life our darkest nightmares with stories that both seduce and devour. As beautiful as they are terrible, the pages of this volume are stained with unsettling imagery, macabre humor, and visceral dread. Here then are the stories written on the Book of Blood. Read, if it pleases you, and learn....

This Volume includes: "The Book of Blood" • "The Midnight Meat Train" • "The Yattering and Jack" • "Pig Blood Blues" • "Sex, Death and Starshine" • "In the Hills, the Cities"

Leseprobe

The dead have highways.

They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity. Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into view.

They have signposts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have turnpikes and intersections.

It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross, that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our world. The traffic is heavy at the crossroads, and the voices of the dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers that separate one reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable feet.

Such an intersection on the highway of the dead was located at Number 65, Tollington Place. Just a brick-fronted, mock-Georgian detached house, Number 65 was unremarkable in every other way. An old, forgettable house, stripped of the cheap grandeur it had once laid claim to, it had stood empty for a decade or more.

It was not rising damp that drove tenants from Number 65. It was not the rot in the cellars, or the subsidence that had opened a crack in the front of the house that ran from doorstep to eaves, it was the noise of passage. In the upper story the din of that traffic never ceased. It cracked the plaster on the walls and it warped the beams. It rattled the windows. It rattled the mind too. Number 65, Tollington Place was a haunted house, and no one could possess it for long without insanity setting in.

At some time in its history a horror had been committed in that house. No one knew when, or what. But even to the untrained observer the oppressive atmosphere of the house, particularly the top story, was unmistakable. There was a memory and a promise of blood in the air of Number 65, a scent that lingered in the sinuses, and turned the strongest stomach. The building and its environs were shunned by vermin, by birds, even by flies. No woodlice crawled in its kitchen, no starling had nested in its attic. Whatever violence had been done there, it had opened the house up, as surely as a knife slits a fish's belly; and through that cut, that wound in the world, the dead peered out, and had their say.

That was the rumor anyway . . .

It was the t…