Books of Blood
Books of Blood are a series of horror fiction collections written by the British author Clive Barker.
There are six books in total, each simply subtitled Volume 1 through to Volume 6, and were subsequently re-published in two omnibus editions containing three volumes each. Each volume contains four or five stories.
They were published between 1984 and 1985. With the publication of the first volume, Barker became an overnight sensation and was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror". The book won both the British and World Fantasy Awards.
Although undoubtedly horror stories, like most of Barker's work they mix fantasy themes in as well. The tales invariably take place in a contemporary setting, usually featuring everyday people who become embroiled in a terrifying or mysterious events.
One of the stories, "The Forbidden," was adapted into the movie, Candyman, although the film was set in the US whilst the story was set in England.
Each book's cover was illustrated by Clive Barker himself.
Story List And Synopsis
Volume One
The Book of Blood
This is the frame story for the entire Books of Blood series. A psychic researcher, Mary Florescu, has employed a quack medium named Simon McNeal to investigate a haunted house. Alone in an upstairs room, McNeal at first fakes visions, but then the ghosts really do come for him. They attack him and carve words in his flesh, and these words, claims the narrator, form the rest of the stories, stories written on a literal, living Book of Blood.
The Midnight Meat Train
A man, Leon Kaufman, falls asleep on a New York subway train, only to wake up at a secret station beyond the end of the line. Kaufman encounters a man named Mahogany, who has killed and butchered several people and hung their bodies up on the train. Kaufman fights Mahogany and kills him in self-defense, but then the train doors open and strange malformed creatures board the train. The creatures eat the dead passengers, then force Kaufman to serve them as their new butcher, cutting out his tongue to ensure his silence.
The Yattering and Jack
Jack Polo is a gherkin importer who's haunted by a minor demon called the Yattering. Despite its determined efforts to drive Jack mad, the Yattering is frustrated by his good cheer and apparent obliviousness. Bound by the powers of Hell to stay in Jack's house until it succeeds, the Yattering subjects him to increasingly severe torments, killing his cats and terrorizing his family, but all fail. Eventually Jack tricks it into leaving the house, and by violating the orders of its demonic masters, the Yattering becomes Jack's servant.
Pig Blood Blues
A supernatural story set in a juvenile detention facility.
Sex, Death and Starshine
A story of ghostly actors.
In the Hills, the Cities
Two men, Mick and Judd, go on a romantic but strained vacation in Yugoslavia. In an isolated rural area, they witness an astounding event: two entire cities, Popolac and Podujevo, create massive communal creatures by binding together the bodies of their citizens, thousands of people walking as the body of a single giant. It's a ritual that occurs every ten years, but this time, something goes wrong, and the Podujevo giant collapses, killing thousands horribly. In shock, the entire population of Popolac goes mad, and in losing their individual minds actually become the giant they are strapped into. The giant itself goes mad, killing Judd and carrying Mick away with it as it disappears into the hills.
Volume Two
Dread
A young student, Steve, becomes acquainted with an older student named Quaid. Quaid is an intellectual with a morbid fascination with fear. He eventually shows Steve how he, Quaid, kidnapped a vegetarian woman and imprisoned her in a room without any food but for a steak, only releasing her when she finally overcame her dread of eating meat in order to prevent starvation. Steve becomes Quaid's next candidate for his experiments, held immobile in dark silent room, forcing him to relive a childhood period of deafness. Steve is driven insane and eventually returns to Quaid's house and butchers him with an axe. Quaid's experiments, all along, were to try to help him understand his own fear of being axed to death by a deadly stalker, but ironically his experiments in phobias made his own come to life.
Hell's Event
Every one-hundred years, a race is held in London. Satan sends one of his representitives to run it against the (unsuspecting) human runners. If Satan's minion wins, then he, Satan, gets to rule the Earth. A athlete taking part in the event, Joel, begins to realise the true meaning of things and what is at stake when his fellow human competitors begin to fall, savaged by some unseen beast. We also learn of the deal a satanist, Gregory, makes with Hell. He has staked his life and soul on this race. Meanwhile, Joel does not win the race due to a struggle with Hell's shape-shifting runner, who bites off Joel's face. However, the last surviving runner jogs past them to the finishing line. Hell loses out once again. Gregory is hardly surprised when he is punished for his overconfidence by being gruesomely slain.
Jacqueline Ess: Her Last Will And Testament
Jacqueline Ess is a housewife who attempts suicide after becoming bored with her life. She recovers only to find that she has an ability to change people's body shapes simply with her mind. She accidentally kills her therapist and then - somewhat less accidentally - kills her husband, simply by willing their bodies into tearing apart or folding in on themselves. One man becomes obsessed with her and tracks her down. Jacqueline eventually becomes a prostitute, her abilities giving her the power to give men the ultimate sexual experience, albeit one that always proves fatal. She has by now lost control of herself and has to be watched whilst sleeping in case she unconsiously mutilates her own body. The man obsessed with her eventually makes love to Jacqueline and they willingly die together by Jacqueline's powers.
The Skins of the Fathers
Davidson is stuck in Arizona after his car breaks down. He then witnesses a bizarre parade of freakish monsters. It turns out that these creatures mated with a woman in a nearby town six-years previously and are intending on reclaiming the child, which they promptly achieve. Davidson reaches the town where a posse of gun-toting locals are eager to set out to slay the monsters. Everything goes wrong, however, and Davidson and just a few other survivors end up with a horrific fate; they sink in quicksand which then hardens when they are half-buried (one man is left with just his face exposed, the rest of him in the solidified ground) and are left for dead in the burning desert heat.
New Murders in the Rue Morgue
Lewis is a seventy-three-year-old man who goes to Paris after his friend, Eugene, is arrested for butchering a young woman. Eugene eventually commits suicide in his cell after babbling about an orangutan that is half-human who committed the murder he had been arrested for. Lewis does not believe it until he sees the primate - dressed like a human and wielding a razor - for himself.
Volume Three
Son of Celluloid
A story of a ghost in a movie theater.
Rawhead Rex
An ancient, malevolent giant, Rawhead and Bloody Bones, is accidentally awakened in the town of Zeal. Rawhead goes on a rampage, killing people until it is defeated with the help of its only weakness, a menstruating woman.
Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud
Ronnie is a straightlaced man who is set up to look like the king of a pornography cartel. He kills some of his enemies, but is murdered by their cohorts. Awakening as a ghost, he possesses the shroud that covers his body in the morgue, and in the shape of the shroud takes revenge on the rest of his enemies.
Scape-Goats
Human Remains
Volume Four
(published in the United States as The Inhuman Condition)
The Body Politic
In a bizarre version of a revolution, it appears that all our hands have their own consciousness and are not happy at being ordered what to do by their owners. The hands of a factory worker named Charlie plan to lead the revolution. Charlie's hands even have their own personalities, with Left being more cautious and Right being very determined and even proclaiming himself a Messiah. Left - against Charlie's own wishes - chops off Right, who scuttles away to summon other hands to do the same before returning to rescue Left.
The Inhuman Condition
A young man named Karney and his friends beat up a vagrant for fun. Karney steals a strange knotted piece of string he finds on the vagrant. A keen fan of puzzles, Karney undoes the knots that evening, not knowing that in doing so he is releasing demons who proceed to kill off his friends. When he realises what he has done, Karney has to seek out the vagrant for his help.
Revelations
A woman is unwillingly taken on a tour of the USA by her unfeeling preacher husband. They stay at a motel which is haunted by the ghosts of a couple who killed each other there years before. The ghosts try to compel the unhappy wife of the preacher to do something about her present state.
Down Satan
One of the shortest stories relates the tale of a wealthy middle-aged businessman, Gregorius, who becomes depressed when he believes God has deserted him, and he comes up with a plan to build a Hell on Earth in order to summon Satan, believing that God will then sweep him (Gregorius) out of Satan's clutches and into His heavenly fold. In his vast Satanic Cathedral, Gregorious soon loses sight of his original intention of attracting God's attention, and he is captured after torturing to death hundreds of people in the well-equipped torture chambers. It left deliberately ambigious as to whether Gregorious went insane or if he really did succeed in tempting Satan into taking residence in his own personal Hell.
The Age Of Desire
A private laboratory runs experiments on volunteers to investigate the libido and try to develop a chemical aphrodisiac. One experiment goes wrong when one man goes wild with lust, feeling perpetually aroused without thought for morality or the law. He rapes, murders and mutilates one of the scientists and then escapes to cause wanton mayhem.
Volume Five
(published in the United States as In the Flesh)
The Forbidden
A University student named Helen is doing a thesis on graffiti, and selects a run-down estate to focus her study. She notices disturbing graffiti in an abandoned building that makes references to some sort of mythical figure, known as the Candyman. Further enquiries lead her to believe this is connected with recent murders and mutilations in the neighbourhood, although the locals are seemingly reluctant to discuss the incidents. This book was later adapted and made into the movie Candyman.
The Madonna
A man named Jerry is trying to talk a local shady businessman into financing the redevelopment of an old swimming pool complex. However, the swimming pool has some mysterious inhabitants in the form of nude teenage girls who flee should Jerry or his would-be financial backer encounter them. A swimming pool in the centre is, unlike the other pools in the building, full, and glows with a strange light and appears to be inhabited by some mishapen life-form. Curiosity leads Jerry to return to the place, which somehow causes him to wake up one morning to see that he has been transformed into a woman.
Babel's Children
A woman finds herself at a strange type of retirement home in the middle of nowhere. The cheerful old men there tell her that they run the world, doing so by seemingly going about their lethargic business.
In The Flesh
A career criminal named Cleve has a new cellmate, a mysterious young man who admits that he committed a crime with the sole intention of coming to this particular prison, because he believes he has been summoned there by his grandfather, who is buried in the jail having been executed for murder years before. Cleve is later haunted by dreams in which he is in a form of purgatory for murderers, where killers are obliged to spend some portion of their after life in a replica of the scene of their crime. In the end, Tait vanishes from his cell. His grandfather's coffin is exhumed and found to contain Tait curled up next to his dead grandfather. Cleve goes partially insane and, once released, commits a murder and is shot dead by the police. He soon finds himself in the murderer's purgatory he previously saw in his dreams.
Volume Six
(these stories are also published in Cabal)
The Life of Death
Elaine, a 36-year-old woman, has just had a hysterectomy following a brush with cancer. Feeling lethargic and empty after the operation, she becomes fascinated by a cemetery that is being demolished. She encounters a cheerfully morbid man named Kavanagh who shares her fascination. The cemetery demolition soon reveals a tomb of plague victims, and Elaine breaks in at night to view the bodies. When her friends begin to die off she realises she is a carrier of the plague (immune to it, but able to spread it) and when the police come after her to stop her from spreading the disease, Elaine takes refuge with Kavanagh. It turns out Kavanagh is a serial killer and necrophile; he strangles and rapes Elaine. As her soul flees her body, Elaine takes a sick glee in realising that Kavanagh will now be the carrier of the plague and will spread it far and wide.
How Spoilers Bleed
Several European men, lead by a cold-hearted man named Locke, have bought land in the jungles of South America, uncaring that it is inhabited by a tribe of Amazonian natives. When the tribe refuse to move, Locke shoots one of them dead to intimidate them. The elder of the tribe puts a curse on him and his men which, one by one, strikes them down with a gruesome condition that makes their bodies incredibly delicate; a mote of dust can slice their skin open, the soles of their feet crack when they stand. After his men die off, Locke goes back to the tribe to beg for forgiveness. However, when he gets there, the tribe has been massacred by some of his other colleagues. Locke begins to suffer the symptoms of the deadly curse just as he realises there is now no way of having it removed.
(to be completed)