I’m on record as absolutely loving the first two volumes of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series. I think they’re two of the best short story collections around, not just in the horror genre, but in basically any genre. The first one especially is really perfect; the second one has a couple of lesser stories, but the great stories in it, like Dread, rank among the best things Barker’s ever done. When I first encountered the series years ago, I remember that I read the first three volumes and then didn’t progress into the next three. I remembered very little about this third volume, so I was excited to revisit it. Unfortunately, I’ve found that the details that I didn’t remember this volume very much and that I never moved on past it in the series are both connected to the fact that this third volume in the series is just not very good. Barker remains a solid prose stylist, so there are some beautiful passages here, but in terms of the characters and stories, there’s just nothing here to really equal even the weakest stories from the first two volumes. Two of the stories here are just downright bad. Son of Celluloid involves a strange haunting at a revival movie theater and the story’s use of movie imagery is terrible including a murderous John Wayne and a prank calling Peter Lorre. Scape-Goats is an utterly pointless retread of a story we’ve all seen a hundred times. Rawhead Rex is the tale of an ancient pagan god who is accidentally awakened and runs rampant through a small English pastoral village and it’s probably the most consistently satisfying story in the book. There’s not much depth to it, but it is Barker, one of the best writers of grand guignol in the genre, essentially just writing pages and pages of people being brutally murdered by a towering monster, so there’s energy and some great gore. The best section in the book is in Human Remains, the final story. It’s a solid five pages or so of absolute terror as a gay sex worker accompanies a client back to his apartment and then, when the client disappears, he explores the large apartment seeking clues for what has happened. Do I need to tell you that this section of the story climaxes in a bathroom? Well, it does and it’s a sequence of absolute nail-biting tension and terror. This is the section of this book that feels the most like the first two volumes of this series in terms of just how incredibly effective and scary it is. Unfortunately, that’s the way Human Remains opens and the rest of the story is not nearly as good as that opening. All things considered, this volume of Barker’s seminal, ground-breaking Books of Blood series is a sad letdown, a batch of predictable, pretty shallow, occasionally downright bad horror writing. The mediocre quality is made even more evident because of its proximity to the brilliant Volumes 1 & 2. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – weak stories, weak characters and occasionally downright bad material sink this follow-up to the first two marvelous entries in this ground-breaking series. 1 ½ stars.