There is no delight the equal of dread.
With the second book in this series, released the same year as the first, Clive Barker once again crafts an extremely compelling short story collection. This one is a bit less perfect than Volume One in my opinion. Whereas I’d consider each of the five main stories in Volume One to be a masterpiece, I’d give that appellation to only three of the five stories here. Of the other two, one of them is entertaining and appealingly gruesome while the other is a straight up whiff, just a miss. You know, every author has them. But this book starts off extremely strong with Dread, which is probably the strongest story in this book and one of the most down-right meanspirited things Barker’s ever written, a tale of a university student fascinated with, well, dread and the way it can snap sanity like a twig when administered in just the right way. There’s nothing paranormal about this story and really nothing at all fantastic (there’s nothing really supernatural or paranormal about In the Hills, the Cities either, but it’s certainly fantastic); just a nasty little story about nasty people doing nasty things and it’s genuinely haunted and disturbed me for years. Revisiting it, it hasn’t lost a step. The other two masterpieces are as different from each other and from Dread as stories could be. Jacqueline Ess: Her Will & Testament is a phenomenally weird tale of feminine liberation (?) and it’s a gripping exploration of the will to power that also features Barker’s best female character so far, a flawed, compelling, fascinating and troubling woman that only feels more human the more fantastic her powers become. Meanwhile, The Skins of the Fathers is a straight up monster story, the tale of a broken down car, an isolated town in the desert of the American Southwest and an assortment of monsters as mind bending and jaw dropping as only Barker can envision them. The ending to Skins of the Fathers is one that will haunt you for quite some time. Those three stories are absolute knockouts and I’d set them all up as the equals, more or less, of the stories in the first volume.
Unfortunately, Volume Two ends with the weakest story so far, New Murders in the Rue Morgue, which is, as it sounds, kind of a pastiche/thought experiment on Poe. Barker does a good job writing in the voice of the main character here; one of his gifts is his ability to write in very different voices for his different stories and the main character here is an elderly writer, quite unlike any character Barker’s written up to this point, so there’s some pleasure in the prose. Beyond that, this story is the one real loser in the first two volumes of this series, so it’s too bad that it’s the one that closes this book out as it kind of leaves you feeling a bit underwhelmed. Well, so what, go back to the beginning and read Dread again. You know you want to anyway. Even with that last story being pretty dull, I can’t downgrade this volume at all really because of those three absolute masterpieces that hold down the bulk of the book. I’d put this one on the shelf next to Volume One as essential reading. It’s not the unnaturally perfect specimen that the first volume is; it’s more like a normal short story collection with a range of quality, but the highs are exceptionally high. Two volumes in, the blood is still flowing.
tl;dr – if not quite as perfect as Volume One, Volume Two is still a compelling short story collection featuring three absolute masterpieces and only one disappointment. 4 stars.