Books of Blood

Overview

Clive Barker's tagline for Books of Blood was: "Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red." The opening story, "The Book of Blood", introduces the premise of the anthology series by revealing that a fake psychic is attacked one night by genuine ghosts and spirits who decide to make him a true messenger by writing stories into his flesh. This makes him a "Book of Blood" and the narration then invites the reader to read these stories. The UK editions of Volume 6 close with a story, "On Jerusalem Street", that features a man who pursues the fake psychic in order to skin him and take his Book of Blood. Thus, a framing story is created around the anthologies.

The stories range in genres. Some are traditional horror, some are described by Barker as "dark fantasy," some are comical, and "The Last Illusion" is notable for being a mixture of horror and noir while also introducing the occult detective Harry D'Amour. A common thread is that most of the stories feature everyday people in contemporary settings who become involved in violent, mysterious, and/or supernatural events. Barker has stated in Faces of Fear that an inspiration for the Books of Blood came when he read Dark Forces in the early 1980s and realised that a horror story anthology didn't need to have narrow themes, consistent tone or restrictions to be considered a proper collection. Instead, the stories could range wildly in genre and tone, from the humorous to the truly horrific.

Volumes I-III are sold as "The Books of Blood", Volume IV is sold as "The Inhuman Condition", Volume V is sold as "In the Flesh", and Volume VI is sold as "Cabal", which includes four or five additional short stories, depending on the edition.

For some editions, Clive Barker illustrated the book covers.

Stories

Volume One

The first story of Volume 1 acts as a frame story to the Books of Blood anthology series (along with "On Jerusalem Street", the closing story presented in UK editions of Volume 6).

The story mentions that the afterlife involves "highways of the dead" that sometimes intersect with the living world. A psychic researcher, Mary Florescu, has employed a young medium named Simon McNeal to investigate a haunted house. Unknown to Florescu, who is attracted to McNeal, the man is a fraud. He fakes visions as he has done many times before, pretending to hear names and stories told to him from beyond the mortal world; but this time ghosts assault him, carving names and "minute words" into his flesh, leaving his body covered in stories – the stories of this anthology series. Florescu nurses the young man and begins transcribing his tales, thinking of him as a "Book of Blood" and her as his only translator.

This prologue, along with closing story "On Jerusalem Street" from Volume 6, was adapted and directed twice. First for the film Book of Blood by John Harrison and then for the 2020 Brannon Braga film Books of Blood.

Office worker Leon Kaufman has recently moved to New York City, a place that he has long idolised as "The Palace of Delights." Since arriving, he has become disillusioned, seeing the dirt and depravity in a city like any other. Meanwhile, a man named Mahogany is killing people in subway trains, identifying as a "Butcher" in pursuit of "fresh meat." Kaufman falls asleep on a late-night subway train to Far Rockaway, Queens, and awakens to discover that Mahogany has killed four passengers in the neighbouring car and the train conductor is cooperating with him. After Kaufman kills Mahogany in self-defense, the train arrives at a secret station where ancient, withered humans board and consume the bodies. The creatures, the "City Fathers," have been the secret rulers of New York for centuries, the people who founded and initially built the city. They eventually present Kaufman to the incomprehensible "Father of Fathers," who has lived there since before the arrival of the first humans in America. One of them pulls out Kaufman's tongue, stating that he will "serve in silence," and recruits him as their new Butcher tasked with bringing them fresh meat. Kaufman passes out as the conductor announces the next destination as "home." Kaufman is later awakened by the conductor in a secret, pristine subway station and helped off the train as cleaning crews come on to cover up the previous night's events. The conductor states that he has much to learn before he begins his job that evening and presents him to the cleaners, who look at him with reverence. He exits the station and goes onto the streets in the early morning as the city wakes up and comes alive. He falls to his knees, kisses the ground, and swears his loyalty to the city.

Volume Two

Steve, a young university student, becomes acquainted with an older classmate named Quaid, an intellectual who has a morbid fascination with dread. Quaid reveals to Steve that he kidnapped a vegetarian classmate of theirs and imprisoned her in a room with merely beef for sustenance, only releasing her when she finally overcame her dread of eating meat to prevent starvation; she eats the meat even though it has spoiled. Steve becomes Quaid's next candidate for his experiments, held captive in a dark, silent room, forcing him to relive a childhood period of deafness that terrified him. Steve is driven insane by this forced sensory deprivation and eventually escapes. Steve then happens into a homeless shelter where he is mistaken for a drug-addicted vagrant and is given new clothes and shoes, but these don't fit him well. He is mad, pale with shock, and his lips are red and chapped from dehydration. Later, Steve steals a fire axe from the shelter and breaks into Quaid's home. Quaid's experiments, all along, were to try to help him understand the nature of fear in order to cure his own coulrophobia, but he is ironically butchered by Steve, whose ghastly appearance, ill-fitting clothes, and over-sized shoes have given him the appearance of a clown.

This story has been made into a film, with Jackson Rathbone playing Steve. The film diverges from the short story and introduces new characters, but retains some basic concepts.

Every one hundred years, during an annual London marathon, Satan sends one of his representatives to compete against (unsuspecting) human runners. If Satan's minion wins, he gets to rule the Earth. An athlete taking part in the event, Joel, realises the actual stakes of the race when the other runners begin to fall, ravaged by some unseen beast. A satanist politician, Gregory, has made a bargain with Hell on the outcome of the race. Before he can win, Joel engages in a struggle with Hell's runner, who bites off his face. As they struggle, the last surviving human runner makes it to the finish line and Hell loses once again. Gregory is punished for his overconfidence by being gruesomely slain.

Jacqueline Ess, a housewife struggling with depression and ennui, attempts suicide and is found by her husband. She recovers only to find that she has an ability to manipulate people's flesh and bodies. Disturbed by his attempts at sedating her, and by his lack of sympathy and understanding of her condition, Jacqueline kills her therapist and then causes her husband's death by willing their bodies to tear apart or fold in on themselves. She temporarily finds peace with a man named Oliver Vassi, whose testimonies make up part of the text. After an unspecified amount of time, she leaves him in order to pursue a rich and powerful man, Titus Penifer, in the hopes of learning from him "how to use power." Their relationship continues despite his inadequacy as a lover, until he attempts to break up after being blackmailed by an employee. Jacqueline kills the extortioner in cold blood and escapes, while Titus grows further obsessed with her and tracks her down. After having her imprisoned, he begs her to kill him. Jacqueline comes to the realisation that all the men in her life, with the exception of Vassi, have used her for their own interests, and refuses to murder Titus. Instead, she warps his body into that of an animal, and one of his bodyguards shoots him in disgust. Vassi manages to track Jacqueline down in Amsterdam, where she has become a sex worker whose clients only survive one night with her. She is shown to be losing control of her powers, and when she is reunited with her old lover they embrace each other and willingly die together.

Volume Three

An escaped convict dies behind a film screen while hiding from the police. Over the months following his death, a cancerous tumour in the convict's body gains sentience from the strong emotions of the cinema's audiences and comes to life. After one night's show, the creature hunts down several patrons remaining in the cinema, projecting images of John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe as vivid hallucinations to lure them in and consume them, but it is seemingly destroyed in turn by the cinema's usher. Some time later, the usher, having tracked down a girl who escaped after being taken over by the creature, confronts it with acid and kills it once and for all.

During an unusually warm summer in rural Kent, the ancient monster Rawhead, a nine-foot tall malevolent humanoid, is accidentally awakened from his underground imprisonment. Rawhead goes on a rampage through a local village, killing and eating several townsfolk, corrupting the local verger to serve him and fatally wounding the village's vicar, Reverend Coot. The vicar lives long enough to instruct local man Ron Milton, father of one of Rawhead's victims, to find a talisman within the church to fight the beast; the talisman depicts a pregnant woman, Rawhead's antithesis and the only thing he fears. While Rawhead attempts to burn down the village, Milton uses the talisman to stall him long enough for the enraged villagers to overpower and kill him.

"Rawhead Rex" has a structure similar to Alien or The Thing from Another World, but uses a rural setting. The story was later turned into the film Rawhead Rex (1986), which Barker wrote but then disowned after being dissatisfied with the direction and overall production.

Ronnie is a rule-abiding Catholic falsely implicated by the Mafia to be the leader of a pornography cartel. After killing two mobsters in revenge, Ronnie is brutally tortured and murdered by the Mafia, after which he manifests as a ghost. Animating the shroud covering his body in the morgue, he takes revenge on the rest of his enemies.

After being chased by the animated shroud, the mob boss primarily responsible for Ronnie's ordeal runs into his home, only to find his wife cheating on him with his assistant, so he shoots both of them dead. In a gory climax, the ghost enters the mouth of the mob boss and turns him inside out.

Volume Four

Published and sold as "The Inhuman Condition".

In a bizarre version of a revolution, it appears that all human beings' hands have their own consciousness and are not happy at being ordered what to do by their owners. The hands of a factory worker named Charlie plan to lead the revolution. Charlie's hands even have their own personalities, with Left being more cautious and Right being very determined and even proclaiming itself a Messiah. Right – against Charlie's own wishes – chops off Left, who scuttles away to summon other hands to do the same before returning to rescue Right, starting a violent revolution of human limbs. As hundreds of freed hands surge into the hospital to free Right, Charlie lures them to the rooftop and hurls himself off the edge, followed by the hands, which die with him and Right as they hit the ground. One human survivor, who lost his legs to a train while escaping, awakens to find his severed legs standing and watching him. Fearing the rest of his body will revolt, he waits, "...heart in mouth, for the fall of the Empire".

This story was later adapted and used, in part, for the film Quicksilver Highway.

A young man named Karney and his friends beat up a vagrant for fun. As they leave, Karney takes a strange knotted piece of string he finds on the vagrant. A keen fan of puzzles, Karney eventually undoes the first of the very intricate knots but in doing so, he releases a creature which proceeds to kill his friends. When the second knot is undone and the third seems almost to undo itself, two more creatures are released each progressively more advanced, appearing to evolve with each knot. But their true target is not Karney but the vagrant who enslaved them through his "forgotten science: the design of knots".

A woman named Virginia is unwillingly taken on a tour through the U.S. by her unfeeling husband, a preacher named John Gyer. They stay at a motel which is visited by the ghosts of Buck and Sadie, a married couple who stayed there thirty years before. In the same room, Sadie shot Buck and was subsequently executed for the murder. Buck and Sadie find that Virginia has the ability to both see and hear them. Meanwhile, a scuffle ensues when John discovers that their driver, Earl, has been giving Virginia pills to help her deal with her anxiety issues. While looking for Earl to confront him about the pills, John finds the married driver in bed with Laura-May, the daughter of the motel owner.

Volume Five

Published in the United States as In the Flesh.

Helen is a university student doing a thesis on graffiti who selects a run-down estate as a focus for her study. She notices disturbing graffiti that references an urban legend called the Candyman. Further inquiries lead her to believe this is connected with recent murders and mutilations, although the locals are reluctant to discuss the incidents. She suddenly encounters the Candyman himself, who is displeased at her skepticism of his existence. As the Candyman requires the belief of the estate's inhabitants to exist, she is lured by him into a bonfire on Bonfire Night, where she is burned alive as part of a sacrifice to contribute to his legend and continue the locals' belief in him.

This story was later adapted into the film Candyman (1992) by Bernard Rose.

A man named Jerry is trying to talk a local shady businessman, Garvey, into financing the redevelopment of an old swimming pool complex. However, both men discover the pool has some mysterious inhabitants in the form of nude teenage girls who flee should Jerry or Garvey encounter them. Curiosity leads the men to explore the complex and they separately discover a swimming pool in the centre. It is unlike the other pools in the building in that it is full, glows with a strange light, and appears to be inhabited by some misshapen life-form: the Madonna. After encountering the Madonna, Garvey discovers he is being physically reshaped and mutilates himself in horror before falling into the Thames and drowning, while Jerry returns home and wakes up the following morning to discover he has been transformed into a woman. When he returns to the complex to find it being demolished, he dives into the pool to join the girls and the Madonna within.

A young woman named Vanessa Jape happens across a secluded compound in which a group of elderly scientists and scholars use their great minds to determine the outcome of major world events. After living there for many years in seclusion, their decisions have deteriorated and are now based on games of chance. When Vanessa and the men seek to flee the compound, they experience a car accident; all the elders are killed with the exception of one who refused to go along. Vanessa returns to the compound, forced to participate in the games of chance with the survivor until replacements can be found.

Volume Six

Several of these stories are also published in Cabal.

Following a brush with cancer and a subsequent hysterectomy, a woman named Elaine becomes fascinated with a church that is being demolished. She encounters a cheerfully morbid man with skeletal features named Kavanagh, who shares her fascination. The demolition soon reveals a tomb of plague victims that had been fermenting for centuries, and Elaine breaks in at night to see the bodies. Later, when her friends begin to die off and the police come after her, Elaine takes refuge with Kavanagh, who she firmly believes is really Death. Kavanagh, a serial killer and necrophile, strangles and rapes Elaine. As her soul flees her body, Elaine feels a sick sort of glee when she realises that Kavanagh is now the carrier of the plague she contracted in the tomb, and will spread it far and wide.

Several European mercenaries, led by a cold-hearted man named Locke, have bought land in the jungles of South America that is inhabited by a tribe of Amazonian natives. When the tribe refuse to leave, one of Locke's cohorts impulsively and accidentally shoots a native child dead. The elder of the tribe puts a curse on the men which strikes them down one by one with a gruesome condition that makes their bodies incredibly delicate; a mote of dust can slice their skin open, the soles of their feet crack when they stand, etc. After his men die off, Locke returns to the tribe to beg for forgiveness. However, when he gets there, the tribe has been massacred by some of his other colleagues. Locke begins to suffer the symptoms of the deadly curse just as he realises there is now no way of having it removed.

A British spy named Ballard stationed in Berlin meets with a KGB counterpart named Mironenko. After their meeting, Mironenko disappears. As Ballard investigates, he witnesses a vicious mauling, which in turn, leads him to discover that he and Mironenko are both werewolves, trained by each agency to defeat the other. Both governments raid their meeting place, causing Mironenko to transform fully. Ballard runs and wakes up in a fellow operative's house. Ballard's rival, Suckling, arrives and kills the agent, only to be killed by the transformed Ballard. Ballard seeks Mironenko, and finds him reading from the Holy Bible to a group of werewolves. The passages he has chosen strongly imply that Mironenko believes God wants them to rule over humankind.

The story begins when an illusionist named Swann is killed backstage by one of his own tricks, with several swords falling on him. Before his death, Swann gives his wife Dorothea a letter stating she must cremate his body immediately before enemies take action. Believing there are unseen dangers at play, Dorothea hires Harry D'Amour to guard the body, having read in newspapers that the private investigator seemingly encountered supernatural forces during a case in Brooklyn. D'Amour learns that the illusionist once made a deal with demons in order to possess actual magical power. With the assistance of Swann's underling Valentin, secretly a demon himself, D'Amour protects Swann's body and cremates it. A demon called Butterfield tells D'Amour that he is now marked as an enemy of the forces of Hell.

Reception

With the publication of the first volume, Barker became an overnight sensation and was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror". The book won both the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

Neil Gaiman reviewed Books of Blood for Imagine magazine, and stated that "for those of you who wonder how far it is possible for an author to go, you need look no further, as hands attempt to rule the world, frogs succeed (sort of), and there's something unpleasant behind every door."

In other media

Comics

Eighteen of the stories in the Books of Blood have been adapted by Eclipse Books in the comic series Tapping the Vein as well as other titled adaptations.

Film and television

Novelette "Rawhead Rex":

Rawhead Rex (1986), film directed by George Pavlou

Novelette "The Forbidden":

Candyman (1992), film directed by Bernard Rose

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), film directed by Bill Condon, based on characters

Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (1999), film directed by Turi Meyer, based on characters

Candyman (2021), film directed by Nia DaCosta, based on characters

Novella "The Last Illusion":

Lord of Illusions (1995), film directed by Clive Barker

Novelette "The Body Politic":

"The Body Politic", first story of the TV movie Quicksilver Highway (1997) directed by Mick Garris

Novelette "The Midnight Meat Train":

The Midnight Meat Train (2008), film directed by Ryuhei Kitamura

Novelette "Dread":

Dread (2009), film directed by Anthony DiBlasi

Short stories "The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street":

Book of Blood (2009), film directed by John Harrison

Books of Blood (2020), TV movie directed by Brannon Braga