Product Description

Terrifying and forbidding, subversive and insightful, Clive Barker's groundbreaking stories revolutionized the worlds of horrific and fantastical fiction and established Barker's dominance over the otherworldly and the all-too-real. Here, as two businessmen encounter beautiful and seductive women and an earnest young woman researches a city slum, Barker maps the boundless vistas of the unfettered imagination -- only to uncover a profound sense of terror and overwhelming dread.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137707 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Library Journal
Four novellas by horror writer Barker ( The Inhuman Condition ) make up this slim but worthwhile collection. In one, a prison inmate is haunted by the spirit of his grandfather; in another, a young woman studying graffiti in a seedy housing project encounters a local legend in the flesh. This British writer's plots are extremely inventive and creative; like Peter Straub, he produces intellectual horror stories that are truly frightening. Only the final story, in which an American tourist stumbles across a strange asylum, with world-shaking results, is weak in comparison to the compelling eeriness and atmosphere of the others, yet still clever. Horror fans unacquainted with Barker's work will enjoy a new author; established fans will be enthusiastic. Recommended for large fiction collections. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates. Eric W. Johnson, Univ. of Bridgeport Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
The Philadelphia Inquirer Fiendishly good...unnerving, inspired...death, sex, fear, and self-knowledge come forth in many guises. -- Review

Review
Detroit NewsWith elegant, terrifying strokes, Barker draws a universe of fear underlying the commonplace....Behind every mirror, under every carpet and in the heart of dirty streets is an elemental evil, a raw and hungry power....This is good, scary, stuff...The pacing is inexorable, the settings chilling, and the fates remorseless. In the Flesh makes you wonder what horror lies around the corner.

The Boston Herald[Barker] gives his stories the certainties of bad dreams...The first and last stories in this collection stand out as horror classics, meriting frequent glimpses into dark cornersfor a good while after they are done.

The Philadelphia InquirerFiendishly good...unnerving, inspired...death, sex, fear, and self-knowledge come forth in many guises.

The New York Times Book Review...plays upon our unconscious terrors...What a breath of fresh, if chilling, air.

Customer Reviews

4 miniatures from a master craftsman
This is subversive literature of the best kind. It targets and fires at male sexual identity, the educated upper middle class and the world's governing clan, turning them on their ear and leaving them the worst for damage. Barker is a great aesthete of the fantastic and an iconoclast that leaves no turn unstoned. Here are four short stories that show a master spellbinder at work:

"In the Flesh": Cleveland Smith, recurrent criminal, is undergoing one of his usual stops at jail. Unable to leave the crime life, he studies, searching for the origin of sin. When a spooky new kid is put as his cellmate, he is placed on the threshold to the answers he is looking for...

"The Forbidden": An English academic steps out from the Ivory Tower into the housing projects, and learns from the local gossip the urban legends of everyday violence and death. Yet she refuses to believe them. So the urban legend materializes for her own benefit, in the shape of the Candyman...

"The Madonna": Two men, a racketeer and an ineffectual businessman, plan to turn an abandoned swimming pool spa into a recreational complex. But this two men, who go around displaying their confused manliness, are about to find how fragile their masculinity can be, and whether anything will be left of them afterwards...

"Babel's Children": Vanessa Jape always refused to take the clearly signaled road. She just had to venture through the unmarked path. So it was no surprise she ended getting lost during her vacation at Greece. What she wasn't expecting, though, was finding the convent, the unusual dwellers therein, and the real rulers of the world...

From gory horror to cosmic dread to a fable beyond classification, Barker is one of the best writers of dark fantasy you will ever find.

The Forbidden and Others
This was one of Clive Barker's early books, a collection of short stories. Included is the novella for one of the most realistically terrifying horror films ever made, and an icon of its time, The Candyman. As far as horror series go, this is one of the scariest because it's so realistic. As far as Barker goes, I can respect him. As a teenager and young adult I idolized him, then as I began doing my own projects I emulated influences like Barker's kind of disturbing Christian constructs and also those of [...]. I think that Clive Barker will remain an icon of the 80s and 90s generation of gothic horror because Pinhead and The Candyman are right up there with Freddy or Jason, which they somehow continue to make today. The new Hellraiser movies became stereotypical staring with the fourth one to the newer ones, as it remained realistic, moreso making the cenobites seem like the good guys amongst a mess of caricatures.

fantastic story-telling
I enjoyed this book of four short stories. It was well-written and very subtle. Barker tells four very different stories about the human mind. The first story was the most interesting, focusing on two inmates in a prison. It focuses on the question of original sin.