Like the earlier Tortured Souls, an account of bizarre-and agonizing-transformations, Infernal Parade is tightly focused, intensely imagined, and utterly unlike anything else you will ever read. This astonishing novella, Infernal Parade, perfectly encapsulates Barker's unique abilities. His body of work constitutes a great and varied contribution to modern popular culture. His films include Dread, Tortured Souls: Animae Damanatae, and Hellraiser.From the beginning of his distinguished career, Clive Barker has been the great visionary artist of contemporary dark fantasy, a form that Barker himself has termed “the Fantastique.” Through his many novels, stories, paintings and films, he had presented us with unforgettable images of the monstrous and the sacred, the beautiful and the grotesque. His printed works include The Candle in the Cloud, Absolute Midnight, The Scarlet Gospels, and Black is the Devil's Rainbow: Tales of a Journeyman. Preoccupied with the craft of writing and with its effect on the reader, Barker is an innovator of formula and genre, often parodying the former in order to change the philosophical contour of the latter.īarker has achieved commercial success not only with his short fiction but also with his novels, which tend to be epic in scope and to blend elements of horror with those of high fantasy.īarker is one of the more influential voices in horror cinema, having written and directed a number of films. Barker underscores his work with complex subtextual metaphors and artistic allusions. He has introduced strong elements of sex and graphic violence into his fiction, but these elements are employed with an artistic objective. More than any other author of contemporary horror fiction, Barker has had a major impact on the direction of the genre. Primarily a playwright during this period, he also produced short fiction that he would eventually publish as part of his six-volume collection titled Books of Blood (1984-85). Born in Liverpool in 1952, Barker attended the University of Liverpool but moved to London in 1977, where he worked as a commercial artist and became involved with the avant-garde theatrical community.

The result is a series of highly compressed, interrelated narratives that are memorable, disturbing, and impossible to set aside'-Jacket.Ĭritics of the horror story have frequently called Clive Barker the 'British Stephen King'. Golems, vengeful humans both living and dead, and assorted impossible creatures parade across these pages. Tom becomes the leader of the eponymous 'parade,' which ranges from the familiar precincts of North Dakota to the mythical city of Karantica. 'Infernal Parade begins with the tale of a convicted criminal, Tom Requiem, who returns from the brink of death to restore both fear and a touch of awe to a complacent world.

Infernal parade by clive barker