 | Clive Barker's inventiveness reaches new heights in Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War. What might have been just another portal fantasy in which a girl from our mundane world becomes crucial to the affairs of a fantastic one next door becomes something rich and strange because of the book's strong visual imagery. Barker spent many months painting at random and then used those paintings to create, and illustrate, the world of Abarat, where each island of an archipelago lives in the perpetual light or darkness of a single eternal day. Abarat is a world of the monstrous, the bizarre and the beautiful--this is the book which most totally embodies Barker's strange talent since the short stories of The Books of Blood. There is power and suspense to this book's buildup to a final confrontation between the monstrous, treacherous and pathetic Christopher Carrion and the ingénue Cindy Quackenbush, but in a sense its point is all the decorations along the way; this second volume of Barker's quartet delivers on the promises of the first.--Roz Kaveney |
