Mister B. Gone

Clive Barker

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

The long-awaited return of the great master of horror. Mister B. Gone is Barker's shockingly bone-chilling discovery of a never-before-published demonic 'memoir' penned in the year 1438, when it was printed - one copy only - and then buried until now by an assistant who worked for the inventor of the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg.

Review by Chrissi (070908) Rating (7/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 7/10
The narrative opens with an entreaty to burn the very book you hold in your hands, a plea from a demon trapped within. He offers many reasons for you comply with his request, offers, entreaties and threats abound within the pages but all serve to make you (of course) read on.

I have to say that although well written, it is a little dark for my taste as it deals with the rather more base aspects of humankind. In it we see the demons behave in ways that are supposed to repulse us but are communicated with such a light tone that we accept such behaviour as being normal for the characters but as nothing particularly gruesome to outrage us. It does kind of make you think about the nature of evil and its relationship to good, and that an agent of whichever power and whether every action or decision they make will be true to their nature. But even in this, the level of horror and gore was somewhat prosaic.

I found the repetitive demands and threats to be disturbing to the flow of the narrative, it was annoying and resulted in my being more likely to put the book down and make a cup of tea rather than wade on through, and hence the delay in my writing my review – my underwhelming overall impression of this book some period after completing my reading was disappointment, I loved Imajica and Weaveworld, and the Books of Blood were sublime in their elegance but this just wasn’t. Maybe I was looking forward to reading a really good Clive Barker a little too much but this just was not it, ah, well, I suppose that I will have to wait for another one and a much hoped for return to form.
Chrissi (7th September 2008)