Books of Blood

This story has been made into a film, with Jackson Rathbone playing Steve. The film diverges from the short story and introduces new characters, but retains some basic concepts.

"Hell's Event"

Every one hundred years, during an annual

"Jacqueline Ess: Her Will And Testament"

Jacqueline Ess, a housewife struggling with

This story is also published in the book I Shudder at Your Touch as well as in "Behold! Oddities, Curiosities & Undefinable Wonders".

"The Skins of the Fathers"

After his car breaks down in

The idea of a group of people sinking in quicksand which then hardens around them was later used by Barker in the film Lord of Illusions.

"New Murders in the Rue Morgue"

Lewis is a 73-year-old man who goes to Paris after his friend, Phillipe, is arrested for butchering a young woman. After insisting that an orangutan committed the murder, Phillipe commits suicide in his cell. Lewis does not believe the story until he sees the primate firsthand. The beast is dressed like a person, completely shaved, and wields a razor. Lewis learns Philippe, a notorious eccentric, raised the animal himself as a strange experiment based on the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Despairing at the fact others seem unable to see the orangutan as the animal it is, Lewis throws himself into the Seine, as the orangutan continues to present and live as a human.

Volume Three

"Son of Celluloid"

An escaped convict dies behind a film screen while hiding from the police. Over the months following his death, a cancerous

During an unusually warm summer in rural Kent, the ancient monster Rawhead, a nine-foot tall malevolent humanoid, is accidentally awakened from his underground imprisonment. Rawhead goes on a rampage through a local village, killing and eating several townsfolk, corrupting the local verger to serve him and fatally wounding the village's vicar, Reverend Coot. The vicar lives long enough to instruct local man Ron Milton, father of one of Rawhead's victims, to find a talisman within the church to fight the beast; the talisman depicts a pregnant woman, Rawhead's antithesis and the only thing he fears. While Rawhead attempts to burn down the village, Milton uses the talisman to stall him long enough for the enraged villagers to overpower and kill him.

"Rawhead Rex" has a structure similar to Alien or The Thing from Another World, but uses a rural setting. The story was later turned into the film Rawhead Rex (1986), which Barker wrote but then disowned after being dissatisfied with the direction and overall production.

"Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud"

Ronnie is a rule-abiding Catholic falsely implicated by the Mafia to be the leader of a pornography cartel. After killing two mobsters in revenge, Ronnie is brutally tortured and murdered by the Mafia, after which he manifests as a ghost. Animating the shroud covering his body in the morgue, he takes revenge on the rest of his enemies. After being chased by the animated shroud, the mob boss primarily responsible for Ronnie's ordeal runs into his home, only to find his wife cheating on him with his assistant, so he shoots both of them dead. In a gory climax, the ghost enters the mouth of the mob boss and turns him inside out. Afterwards, the ghost uses his remaining few moments on Earth to knock on the door of a priest, wanting to receive last rites, but the priest is too busy photographing a naked girl and does not answer.

The story is written as a black comedy, revolving around the visual gag of a real ghost actually taking on the form of a floating bedsheet.

"Scape-Goats"

A yacht is stranded on the beach of a deserted island that is located at a point in the Atlantic Ocean where converging undersea currents bring all the human bodies of sailors drowned at sea. The hundreds of bodies littering the ocean floor, unfortunately for the stranded crew, aren't as dead as they should be.

"Human Remains"

A young bisexual prostitute is hired by an

In a bizarre version of a revolution, it appears that all human beings' hands have their own consciousness and are not happy at being ordered what to do by their owners. The hands of a factory worker named Charlie plan to lead the revolution. Charlie's hands even have their own personalities, with Left being more cautious and Right being very determined and even proclaiming itself a Messiah. Right – against Charlie's own wishes – chops off Left, who scuttles away to summon other hands to do the same before returning to rescue Right, starting a violent revolution of human limbs.

This story was later adapted and used, in part, for the film Quicksilver Highway.

"Revelations"

A woman named Virginia is unwillingly taken on a tour through the U.S. by her unfeeling husband, a preacher named John Gyer. They stay at a motel which is visited by the ghosts of Buck and Sadie, a married couple who stayed there thirty years before. In the same room, Sadie murdered Buck and was subsequently put to death for the murder. Buck and Sadie find that Virginia has the ability to both see and hear them. Meanwhile, a scuffle ensues when John discovers their driver, Earl, has been giving Virginia pills to help her deal with her anxiety issues. While looking for Earl to confront him about the pills, John finds the married driver in bed with the daughter of the motel owner, Laura-May. Virginia ends up getting her hands on the same murder weapon used by Sadie thirty years prior, which Laura-May has kept as a souvenir. Virginia uses the gun to try to kill Buck's ghost, who managed partial materialization in order to attempt to

"Down, Satan!"

The shortest story of the collection relates the tale of a wealthy middle-aged businessman, Gregorius, who becomes depressed when he believes God has deserted him, and he comes up with a plan to build a Hell on Earth to summon Satan, believing that God will then sweep him (Gregorius) out of Satan's clutches and into his heavenly fold. In his vast Satanic Cathedral, Gregorious soon loses sight of his original intention of attracting God's attention, and is captured after torturing hundreds of people to death in the well-equipped torture chambers. It is deliberately left ambiguous whether Gregorius went insane, or if he really did succeed in tempting Satan into taking residence in his own personal Hell.

"The Age of Desire"

A private laboratory runs experiments on volunteers to investigate the libido and try to develop a chemical aphrodisiac. One of the experiments goes wrong, when a man suddenly goes insane with lust. His perpetual state of arousal erodes his respect for morality or the law. He rapes, murders, and mutilates one of the scientists and then escapes to cause wanton mayhem, eventually burning himself out and dying.

Volume Five

Published in the United States as In the Flesh.

"The Forbidden"

Helen is a university student doing a thesis on graffiti who selects a run-down estate as a focus for her study. She notices disturbing graffiti that references an urban legend called the Candyman. Further inquiries lead her to believe this is connected with recent murders and mutilations, although the locals are reluctant to discuss the incidents. She eventually encounters the Candyman himself.

This story was later adapted and made into the successful film series Candyman, starting with the 1992 film.

"The Madonna"

A man named Jerry is trying to talk a local shady businessman into financing the redevelopment of an old swimming pool complex. However, the pool has some mysterious inhabitants in the form of nude teenage girls who flee should Jerry or his would-be financial backer encounter them. Curiosity leads Jerry and the businessman to explore the complex and they separately discover a swimming pool in the centre. It is unlike the other pools in the building in that it is full, glows with a strange light, and appears to be inhabited by some misshapen life-form: the Madonna. While the businessman flees and mutilates himself in horror before falling into the Thames and drowning, Jerry stays and sleeps with one of the girls, returning home to wake up the following morning and discover he has been transformed into a woman. When he returns to the complex to find it being demolished, he dives into the pool to join the girls and the Madonna within.

"Babel's Children"

A young woman named Vanessa Jape happens across a secluded compound in which a group of elderly scientists and scholars use their great minds to determine the outcome of major world events. After living there for many years in seclusion, their decisions have deteriorated and are now based on games of chance. When Vanessa and the men seek to flee the compound, they experience a car accident; all the elders are killed with the exception of one who refused to go along. Vanessa returns to the compound, forced to participate in the games of chance with the survivor until replacements can be found.

"In the Flesh"

A prison inmate named Cleve gets a new cellmate, a mysterious young man called Billy, who admits that he committed a crime with the sole intention of coming to this particular prison. Billy believes he has been summoned there by his grandfather Tait, a supposedly powerful sorcerer who was buried in the prison after his execution for murder many years before. Billy's efforts to summon Tait's spirit cause Cleve to be haunted by dreams of a purgatory for murderers, where killers are obliged to spend some portion of their afterlife in a replica of the scene of their crime. Later, Billy vanishes from his cell. His grandfather's coffin is exhumed and found to contain Billy curled up next to his grandfather's corpse. Once released, Cleve finds his travels to purgatory have left him able to hear when others have thoughts of murder. He becomes disillusioned with humanity and becomes a heroin addict to suppress his newfound powers. Cleve later commits a murder himself and is shot dead by the police. He spends an indeterminate amount of time in his own purgatory, then discovers escape is possible via reincarnation.

Volume Six

Several of these stories are also published in Cabal.

"The Life of Death"

Following a brush with cancer and a subsequent

"How Spoilers Bleed"

Several European

"Twilight at the Towers"

A British spy named Ballard stationed in

"The Last Illusion"

The story begins when an illusionist named Swann is killed backstage by one of his own tricks, with several swords falling on him. Before his death, Swann gives his wife Dorothea a letter stating she must cremate his body immediately before enemies take action. Believing there are unseen dangers at play, Dorothea hires Harry D'Amour to guard the body, having read in newspapers that the private investigator seemingly encountered supernatural forces during a case in Brooklyn. D'Amour learns that the illusionist once made a deal with demons in order to possess actual magical power. With the assistance of Swann's underling Valentin, secretly a demon himself, D'Amour protects Swann's body and cremates it. A demon called Butterfield tells D'Amour that he is now marked as an enemy of the forces of Hell.

This story was the debut of Harry D'Amour, who would appear in other Clive Barker writings and eventually encounter Barker's popular creation the Hell Priest (Pinhead). This short story was later adapted by Barker himself into the 1995 film Lord of Illusions.

"On Jerusalem Street" (a postscript)

Only included in some UK editions of the Books of Blood, this tale is a sequel to "The Book of Blood" from Volume One, creating a framing story. Wyburd is hired to obtain the stories of Simon McNeal, the Book of Blood, for a collector. He captures McNeal and skins him. Later, the skin bleeds and won't stop, finally drowning Wyburd. He ends up on the highways of the dead, where he tells his own story.

This story, along with the prologue from Volume One, was adapted and directed twice. First for the film Book of Blood by John Harrison and then for the 2020 Brannon Braga film Books of Blood.

Reception

With the publication of the first volume, Barker became an overnight sensation and was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror".^[2] The book won both the British Fantasy Award,^{[citation needed]} and the World Fantasy Award.^{[citation needed]}

Neil Gaiman reviewed Books of Blood for Imagine magazine, and stated that "for those of you who wonder how far it is possible for an author to go, you need look no further, as hands attempt to rule the world, frogs succeed (sort of), and there's something unpleasant behind every door."^[3]

In other media

Comics

Eighteen of the stories in the Books of Blood have been adapted by Eclipse Books in the comic series Tapping the Vein as well as other titled adaptations.

Film and television

Novelette "Rawhead Rex":

• Rawhead Rex (1986), film directed by George Pavlou

Novelette "The Forbidden":

• Candyman (1992), film directed by Bernard Rose
• Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), film directed by Bill Condon, based on characters
• Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (1999), film directed by Turi Meyer, based on characters
• Candyman (2021), film directed by Nia DaCosta, based on characters

Novella "The Last Illusion":

• Lord of Illusions (1995), film directed by Clive Barker

Novelette "The Body Politic":

• "The Body Politic", first story of the TV movie Quicksilver Highway (1997) directed by Mick Garris

Novelette "The Midnight Meat Train":

• The Midnight Meat Train (2008), film directed by Ryuhei Kitamura

Novelette "Dread":

• Dread (2009), film directed by Anthony DiBlasi

Short stories "The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street":

• Book of Blood (2009), film directed by John Harrison
• Books of Blood (2020), TV movie directed by Brannon Braga

Novelette "The Yattering and Jack":

• Episode 7 of the fourth season of the television series Tales from the Darkside (1987), adapted by Clive Barker

References