So, as I’m working on recreating the shelves of my surroundings in digital form I came upon this book and I was once again reminded of my disappointment.  Clive Barker has for a very long time been one of my favorite authors but this last novel left me yearning for the pages of his previous titles.  Though this would be a masterpiece for the majority of writers that attempt to be authors these days, spawning from the genius hand of Barker it is more than lacking.   

I had expected to find myself once again happily drowning in pages that created vast worlds, vivid atrocities and gnawing emotion with mere words.  Barker has this unreal and unnatural ability to summon unimaginable things from his imagination, a feat in and of itself just to harness and comprehend these thoughts; To be able to convey these across a blank page, with the most intricate details to a point that a reader can actually invision the very cells that make them, is heroic.  He had always done this fluently and painlessly, no matter how tourturous the events; making him almost mythic.  My eager expectations were far from sated. 

It’s just not the Clive Barker of old, to put it simply.  Yes, the grotesque creatures, mayhem and truly original plots are all there, but it’s as if he provided half of everything and let someone else add the rest.  He put forth ‘Dev-’ and some other pen wrote ‘-il’ and left it at that.  The Barker of,the past would have seen ‘De-’ and created Devinity in his Devil.

Though I’m saddly let down by this addition to his works, he remains one of my favorites.  I can, and probably will at some point, go on for ages about the brilliance of his earlier books.  It would take miracles to destroy the monuments he created previously.

I’d like to know how others feel about this.  Perhaps it’s only me.