In fairness, his focus on the fucked-up is fun for a few pages, and the prologue in particular is powerful. Yet instead of implementing the central lessons it looked like he’d learned in the course of crafting The Books of the Abarat-instead of making use of that forward momentum- The Scarlet Gospels gets it absolutely back-asswards, picking up precisely where its author left off a decade or so ago, alternately neglecting the fundamentals and leaning oh so laboriously on the crutch of yuck that became Barker’s marque. This, then, is a novel of no small significance: a homecoming to horror that stands to give Barker his bite back.

Kiernan and Robert Shearman-have taken his place at the side of King, the so-called Dickens of our day. A new breed of authors-not least Adam Nevill and Alison Littlewood, Caitlín R. Gone, Barker has been gone from the genre so long that it’s moved on. Excepting the minor experiment in metafiction that was Mister B. Only three of the five planned Candy Quackenbush books have been released in the fifteen years between Coldheart Canyon and The Scarlet Gospels.

Instructive as it was, the process proved painfully slow-and it’s ongoing.

At bottom, The Books of the Abarat made Barker a better writer because they left him nothing to hide behind.īut there’s bad news too. This casting aside of the naughty and the nasty meant that Barker’s storytelling had to take up the strain: his plots and characters and scenarios had to stand for something in and of themselves-something more meaningful, at least, than the preamble to some sudden act of savagery or sexual sadism. These were to appeal to younger readers, and thus they had to be free of the finery most foul that Barker had practically trademarked. Barker was about to lose his bite-such that it was a relief, really, when he changed gears completely.Ĭapitalising rather smartly on the Harry Potter phenomenon, he set about building The Books of the Abarat: a series of phantasmagorical fantasies featuring a chipper chosen one called Candy Quackenbush. The macabre amalgam of visceral violence and exotic erotica that had set his narratives apart from the pack at the start had, by the time of its samey culmination in Coldheart Canyon (2001), diminished his fiction. But over the years, the man became a brand. In the late '80s and all through the '90s, his seamless weaving of the stuff of sex together with the inevitable perversity of death led to a string of critical and commercial successes including Weaveworld (1987), Cabal (1988), Imagica (1991), and Everville (1994). Time was, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Stephen King and his kith and kin as one of the heavy hitters of popular horror.

The scarlet gospels review