Publishing House: Sonzogno
Necklace: Best Seller
ISBN Code: 88-454-1891-X
Pages: 203
Price: 5.11 euros
"There is no pleasure equal to fear. [...] There is no pleasure equal to fear as long as it belongs to someone else."
The wildest fantasy and the deepest love of the macabre come together beautifully in this second volume of the Books of Blood. With Ectoplasm Clive Barker drags us deeper and deeper into the darkness of the abyss, determined to leave us dumbfounded, to arouse in us the deepest disgust, to acquaint us with the most disturbing discomfort, occasionally allowing a subtle vein of irreverent black humor to shine through.
Not even time to catch our breath and immediately we find ourselves immersed in one of the most incisive tales ever to come from the pen of the creator of Hellraiser: Fear. Stephen Grace is a young college student, Quaid his "life teacher," fear the subject of a lecture at the end of which both will find themselves groping in the darkness of their souls, hunted by their innermost and most secret terrors.
Instead, he runs with all the breath in his body the protagonist of The Challenge of Hell: he runs to save his own life and to win a race on which the fate of the entire world depends.
Boredom, fatigue, frustration: existence seems to have nothing else in store for Jacqueline Ess. That is, at least until she discovers within herself a power that is both extraordinary and terrible, a will that can alter human matter at will. Jacqueline Ess: Her Last Will is a story of love and despair, lived in the balance between delirium of omnipotence and blind terror, which will lead its protagonist to destroy herself and everyone around her.
Demonic entities and at the same time wondrous beings, "creatures too fantastic to be real, too real not to be real," populate the pages of The Skin of Fathers, while closing the anthology we find New Crimes in the Rue Morgue, an homage to E.A. Poe's famous short story, from which the author takes his cue to bring a chilling new murder to life.
Barker's style, direct, flowing, uncompromising of any kind, perfectly suits the nature of these shocking and wonderful nightmares at the same time. Pity about the difficult availability of the Sonzogno edition, now out of print, but, pending a new, desirable reprint, the only one still traceable among the stock of Italian bookstores.
Reviewed by Marco Zolin
