Acid Blood Books 2

The second volume of "Books of Blood" treads the same paths of death that the first volume of the series blazed. Clive Barker successfully manages to combine readers' most hideous fears with hideous creatures that few have the mental capacity to conceive. The five stories, these five paradoxes, included in this volume are undeniably shocking, nauseating and terrifying. It is a celebration of perversion, a carnival of monsters in which the reader by no means feels safe. Barker's figurative language, the grotesque element and the wit of his irony offer an iconography of the paradoxical and perverse. Barker does not write to reassure the reader. On the contrary. The author takes you by the hand, closes your eyes, and throws you, helpless, into the hell of his absurd, figurative metaphors, while he leaves you to struggle alone. The kind of horror he writes is meant to tear away the veil of mystery and deconstruct every aspect of reality. His stories transform conventional sentimentality and bring the reader face to face with a uniquely different view of the world and reality, projecting the web of relationships that develops between desire and fear. Barker creates a completely believable mythological universe inhabited by - and dominated by - the monstrous. If the author promises anything, it is a constant, dangerous flatulence of the reader between normality and absurdity, between reality and fantasy, a flatulence that undermines social norms by presenting, ultimately, possible, different realities.