![]() ![]() ![]() And the stories themselves are a solid, inventive, original bunch that more than justified the hardcover and the wider-spread readership that would bring. I well recall the excitement I felt when I saw Barker's latest was in hardcover the intent to build prestige for him worked on me and I started to really see him as a serious writer - or more importantly, that other people saw him as a serious writer. ![]() This was how he became not just another acclaimed paperback horror writer with a King-size blurb, but a brand-name author with huge publisher promotions behind him and TV and radio appearances - which Barker, not unaware of the origin of his name, took to like a natural. No, it was high time for Barker to step up to the bestseller world of Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub, get him into the all-important literary and fantasy book clubs of the day. I assume it was because a different publisher, Poseidon Press, had the rights to those books and wanted to put them out in fancy little hardcover editions no more of those déclassé paperbacks that cluttered up spinning metal racks at the local drugstore (although I'm sure that's still exactly where the above 1987 Pocket Books - art by Jim Warren - edition ended up). When the final three volumes of Clive Barker's Books of Blood were published in the United States, they were each retitled for a (seemingly random) story in the collection, and so Vol. ![]()
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