Well this was a much shorter read than I was expecting. This post took about double the time it took to read it. This is mostly because the book is a little packed with, reasonably good, filler-content; artwork and title-page taking up 4 whole pages per short story, swiftly running up to about 24 pages of the whole 81. That plus the 8 pages from title page until the start of the first short story and it gets a little hard to describe this book as 'getting bang for your buck'.
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| Title page for Tom Requiem, other title pages look the same as this, but of course with different titles |
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| Tom Requiem's Clovio, Heeler and Bleb |
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| Mary Slaughter's symbolic representation of the lady herself. Oddly, the only artwork that doesn't outright depict a physical character of the story. |
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| The Golem, Elijah's very loose interpretation of a golem |
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| The thing with two heads in Dr Fetter's Family of Freaks |
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| The Stand-out artwork of the collection depicting the beast from which the short story derives its name; The Sabbaticus |
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| Bethany right before she bleeds in Bethany Bled |
Pure filler at work. But hey, during these days, when I'm not getting much reading done, I welcome the change of pace.
Art, both interior illustrations and cover, by Bob Eggleton which is good enough to have persuaded me immediately, on seeing the cover to try and purchase it. The interior illustrations are hit and miss but the cover, which is the illustration for The Sabbaticus writ large, is simply awesome.
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| Taking a few liberties with the beast's size, but its symmbolic shadow stretches long indeed. |
So, with not an especially high story pagecount it was easy and swift reading and definitely not even close to the best of my experiences with Clive Barker so far, but, still servicable.
What we have here are actually six short vignettes with six different characters as the focus, within one loosely overarching narrative.
The first story follows handsome Jesus-Look-a-like and liar, Tom Requiem, as he's about to be sentenced for the murder of his partner in crime. But it soon becomes clear that there's an unnamed party at work that has a plan for his future.
Mary Slaughter takes a look at its titular character, who happens to be Tom Requiem's ex-partner in crime. Still very obviously dead, and with a newly acquired power over swords, this story is mostly about how these two characters interact after their last... ahem, falling out.
The Golem, Elijah is the story of a little boy, Luis, who tries to find a way to kill his family. It seems he could achieve his ends by being taught by an armless man, metaphorically armed, with secret knowledge of ash and divine essence.
In Dr Fetter's Family of Freaks, detective Dietrick is hired to find the aforementioned doctor's aforementioned family of freaks. Things are not as they appear though and Dietrick might have to keep his eye out to avoid getting into trouble.
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| Likely, an early concept for The Sabbaticus, Repurposed here as art for the book's title page. |
The prize of the collection is the short story about The Sabbaticus' titular beast. In a massive city governed by the rules of ancient and powerful religions, a group of priests, desperate to hold on to power, schemes to undo the progress of a lone man striving for righteous justice not based on cruel gods. Their actions summon up more than they can handle.
Bethany Bled's story is a story of lust and witchcraft, torture and love. Which are synonyms of eachother, of a sort. A look at loneliness and the hope for the alleviating of that sad condition through pacts which may or may not belong to this world, but probably, certainly, don't.
When I had done reading, apart from wanting to know more, what bothered me most about this book is that there doesn't seem to be an actual pay-off. Right before the final story I was still awaiting the time when I would get to see the Infernal Parade at work, scaring away the complacency of the stagnant world of man, but that never actually happened.
The stories are literaly just vignettes, focusing each on a character and the events leading to their partaking in the Infernal Parade, but nothing else; we don't get to see the Infernal Parade itself and there's no resolution. There's vague, tantalizing hints to heaven and hell, their relationship and power on and over earth, but nothing very concrete.
So I looked online to see if I missed anything and what do you know, apparently I did.
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| From left to right, Tom Requiem with Clovio, Bethany Bled, Elijah the Golem, Mary Slaughter, Various of Dr Fetter's family of Freaks and the Sabbaticus with Bleb and/or Heeler. |
In 2001 Clive Barker teamed up with Todd Mcfarlane to create a few sets of horror figurines; Tortured souls. They came with their own short-story vignettes and The Infernal Parade seems to be the third of those sets.
Pretty cool looking items, and unlike the other two sets, this one's more of a blend between fantasy and horror, but it's a little bit of a shame that there seems to be no substantial fiction to back it up. It would have been nice to have an actual grand narrative for these characters to move around in. As it is, the short stories seem a tad thin. For once I'd claim the artwork and the figurines are better than the written prose. They manage to summon up more wonder and curiosity than the tales themselves do, which are lacking in Clive Barker's normally wild imagination.
Just for completion's sake, pictures of the naked book.
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