Sacrament

As a child, Will Swift encounters ancient, evil forces that reveal certain secrets of life to him, and as an adult, Will discovers that the forces have come back for him and most of life on Earth. By the author of Everville. 125,000 first printing. $175,000 ad/promo. Tour.

From Publishers Weekly

A giant of horror strides toward mainstream fiction in this awesome but skewed novel. Not that Barker (Everville, etc.) has forsaken the fantastic and outre; but here, the premier metaphysician of dark fantasy mutes his usually riotous imagery, placing it in the service of an elegy for the natural world. He also creates his first proudly gay hero, Will Rabjohns, celebrated for his photographs of endangered species. Will's profession, as well as his sojourns in San Francisco's gay community, reflect the themes of the novel?creation and, above all, extinction, both of animals and of humans, especially of gay men through AIDS. The story opens with Will being mauled by a polar bear and plunging into a coma from which he recalls his boyhood in England. In flashback, Will meets Steep, a gaunt, inhuman creature clad in human form, and Steep's lethal, lamia-like partner, Rosa. Steep's passion is to snuff species into extinction; his mate's, to give birth to her and Steep's progeny. Awakening from his coma, Will travels to S.F., then to England for an apocalyptic climax at a hovel inhabited by lost species and souls. Barker's prose is as fertile as always, and his characters are rubbed raw with life and death; but the story line lacks the narrative urgency and grand arcs of his other works. The symbolism can be strained at times. Likewise, despite the thematic paste, the gay and fantasy elements don't bond well, though both provoke moments of breathtaking drama. Even in this fractured tale, Barker presents an astonishing array of ideas, visions and epiphanies; but they're seen as if through a glass beveled and crazed. $175,000 ad/promo; simultaneous HarperAudio; dramatic rights: Sterling Lord Literistic; author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Barker, known for his literate, imaginative dark fantasy (Incarnations, HarperCollins, 1995), tries his hand at more mainstream work here. Brilliant, gay wildlife photographer Will has spent his career chronicling death?something he doesn't dwell on until an accident sends him into a coma. During his physical stasis, Will's mind explores the past, and he relives his life-altering meeting with the inhuman Joseph Steep. Steep taught Will the pleasures of causing death. Will lives Steep's memories and sees things that weren't intended to be remembered, which shapes the next 30 years of his life. But the eyes of an adult see differently from those of a child. Will awakens to new purpose: to uncover or perhaps recover a powerful artifact. Sacrament is not as inventive or all-encompassing as Imajica (HarperCollins, 1991) or The Great and Secret Show (LJ 1/90), but it should appeal to both established Barker fans and a more general audience.-?Jodi L. Israel, Westwood, MassCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Burned-out wildlife photographer Will Rabjohns, famous for grim pictures of just-dead animals, is mauled by a polar bear near Hudson Bay and falls into a coma. While he is unconscious, strange incidents from his childhood in Yorkshire, England, vividly recur to him. He had encountered an oddly compelling man and woman in a ruin outside his village, a couple soon guilty of gruesome murders and about whom Will is suspected of knowing more than he told; during his meetings with the pair, Will bonded with the man and, far weirder, with a talking fox he saw in a vision. When he revives, Will returns to his adult home in San Francisco's gay Castro district. He plans to assemble a final book of photos and then . . . he doesn't know what. But the fox reappears and finally melds with him, freaking out an old love with whom Will's trying to reconnect. Then a brutal attack on his father calls him back to the scenes of his boyhood and, in a climax beautifully set on a Hebridean island, to a showdown with the mysterious couple. Barker restrains the gore-splattering of much of his work in fiction and film to produce an adult cousin to his children's fantasy, The Thief of Always (1992). Its message may be that when a man sets out to save his soul, he may indeed save the world as well. It deserves to be as big a hit as anything Barker's done; may the fact that its hero is gay not turn off too many of the fans. Ray Olson

From Kirkus Reviews

Another ambitious and challenging dark fantasy from the popular author (Imajica, 1991; Everville, 1994, etc.) and filmmaker (Hellraiser), who is almost single-handedly elevating supernatural fiction to new levels of both literacy and intensity. Barker begins in characteristic fever-pitch fashion, with a horrific extended tableau set in the frozen wasteland of Canada's Hudson Bay, where famed wildlife photographer Will Rabjohns is mauled and nearly killed by a polar bear. Sunk in a coma, Will dreamily relives his early years in England: the death of his much- loved (and favored) older brother, his lonely childhood in a small English village, and his fateful and formative encounter with a pair of otherworldly recluses, Jacob Steep and Rosa McGee. Jacob, a self-styled ``Death's Agent'' committed to changing the shape of the world by destroying creatures that are ``the last of their kind,'' and Rosa, a kind of lamia who lures men to sex and to death, came to be accepted by the incipiently psychic Will as ``his connection to something bigger than the life he'd been leading.'' Recovered now from his bear wounds, Will returns to his home in an increasingly moribund San Francisco: He is gay, and he finds ever more friends and lovers dying. Then, in a provocative imaginative leap, he perceives that the destruction of animal species and the wholesale slaughter inflicted by the AIDS pandemic are akin and may spring from the same source--so he returns to England, seeking a reunion with Steep and McGee and the meaning of the riddle with which Jacob had encouraged Will's fascination with dying things: ``Living and dying, we feed the fire.'' By turns suspenseful, intellectually exciting, wildly melodramatic, turgid, and bombastic, Barker's novel is charged--in its complex development and surprising resolution--with very real, very human emotion. A weirdly absorbing and entertaining tale that offers more disturbing delights from one of our most inventive and risk-taking writers. ($175,000 ad/promo; author tour; TV and radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher

Sacrament  is a novel unlike any that Clive Barker has written. Neither horror nor fantasy, though partaking of both, this masterful work plunges far deeper and soars even higher. It is the story of Will Rabjohns, perhaps the most famous wildlife photographer in the world, who has made his reputation chronicling the fates of endangered species, including his own. For even as Will rises to the pinnacle of his career, he is witnessing his own world -- the close-knit San Francisco community that has nurtured and liberated him -- ravaged by AIDS. Then an almost mystical encounter with a bear in the Arctic leaves Will all but dead. In the depths of his coma, he revisits the wildernesses of his youth in England and relives the terrifying encounter that created him, both as an artist and a man. Befriended by a mysterious couple, Rosa McGee and Jacob Steep, the young Will is granted the love he has been denied by his own family. But with that love comes a grim education. For while Rosa shows him the cruelties of passion, Jacob teaches him the purities of death -- seducing him with the possibility that he might one day slaughter the last of a species and thus change the world forever. When Will stirs from his long sleep, he realizes that this dark dream, which he thought he had put behind him is still very much a part of who he is. Haunted by its echoes and driven by the certainty that he must face Rosa and Jacob one final time, he sets out on a journey of self-discovery -- a journey that will lead him from the familiar streets of San Francisco, back to the Yorkshire moors and on to the stark beauty of Scotland's Western Isles. There he will penetrate the ultimate mystery -- The Domus Mundi -- and finally discover the secret that links his destiny to that of the innumerable creatures with whom we share our planet. Sacrament  is the book Clive Barker's millions of readers knew he had to write someday: the troubling and passionate masterwork from the pen of one of today's most acclaimed authors.

About the Author

Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, in 1952 and now makes his home in Los Angeles, where, in addition to his work as a novelist and short-story writer, he is also a painter and filmmaker. He is the author of numerous worldwide bestsellers, including The Books of Blood, The Damnation Game, Weaverworld, Imajica, and most recently, Everville.The films he has written, produced, or directed include the Hellraiser series, the Candyman pictures, Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions, and the forthcoming The Thief of Always.

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