December 30 2025, 16:54

Books of Blood, Vol IV

Author: Clive Barker

First published: 1988

I’ve owned these stories in compendium form since I was a teenager in the late eighties, but only read a handful then, and I haven’t read any of them since. My memory is that, compared with Stephen King, and even James Herbert, the stories were too gritty and lacked heart. I can’t remember why I pulled the second volume (Books IV-VI) off the shelf now. Perhaps it was a podcast recently where someone read Rawhead Rex? I’m not sure.

It’s a dense edition, with 44 lines per page, and the stories are long, 30-40 pages on average, which makes them comfortably over 15,000 words each, bordering on novellas. That’s not something I’ve seen before. I wonder how he hoped to get them published, or if that was even a consideration. Books of Blood IV has five stories, but Down, Satan! is only a few pages and more like a modern short story in length, if not in content.

The opening story, The Body Politic, was unexpectedly dull, even if the concept of human hands having minds of their own was clever. It felt like an exercise, or an attempt at comedy, but I struggled with it and almost put the collection down. Luckily the next two stories were excellent, with better drawn characters and some decent stakes for them. (It’s good to understand why I don’t like something.) The Inhuman Condition follows a young man in with the wrong crowd who steals from a homeless man an enchanted string of knots. My favourite was Revelations, set in a Texas motel where a wife murdered her philandering husband thirty years before, now visited by a famous preacher and his put-upon wife. It showed a different side to Barker’s writing, more empathic, with female characters, and it was inspiring to see him find a radically different voice. The Age of Desire returns to the multi-character many-points-of-view style of the opening story, and a similar clever concept.

These stories have some DNA from The Twilight Zone, Quatermass/Nigel Kneale, mixed with black magic. I struggle with the concept-driven ones that don’t have an emotional heart. It’s just not my sort of story.

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