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Everville 
Clive Barker
HarperCollins, hardback, 640 pages, £15.99 
Published September 1994
ISBN 000223985X
Voyager Classics, paperback, 600 pages, £7.99
Published August 2009
ISBN 9780006472254
Review by Steven Blake (1994)

Book 2 of The Art, a sequel to The Great and Secret Show. We’ll say at the start that this book is a failure. The law of diminishing returns has been well and truly activated. Is Clive Barker finished? Will his books continue to get worse? Will his films and the films based on his books and stories continue to get worse? I don’t know, but on this evidence the man is in trouble. Everville reads like its author doesn’t know where to stop. 

Everville is a small town in Oregon, founded in the mid 19th century with blood and gore and religious prejudice. After a brief flashback to those times we skip to the present. It takes a while for the prologue to take effect, but it does turn out to be very much a part of the same story. Barker is writing an epic – I think he’s trying to make The Art as long as War and Peace or something – here and takes his time. The tale is too long to be gone into here (‛You have 400-500 words, preferably about 450’ – thanks for the clarity), full of apocalyptic stuff, portals, millions of characters (I told you that it’s like War and Peace), a big monster from the dark side of dreams, lots of nasty horror scenes, and reminders that the true monsters are inside ourselves (this is a Clive Barker book). This isn’t reactionary horror. There’s no question of rewarding the nice and punishing the bad.

Some of this stuff is very memorable. If Barker has forgotten how to be succint, he hasn’t forgotten how to write. To my mind The Art really could be a set of several long stories, like one or two volumes of The Books of Blood. There’s some lovely stuff here, and ‛less is more’ might show it off better. 

I have to mention the problem of the names. Quiddity. Everville. OK . . . Kissoon – hmmm. The Lad Uroborus? Or the Iad for short? Bloody hell. Surely shome mishjudgement here.

The case for the defence is that if my theory is correct then Everville will stand revealed as just the middle, or part of the middle, of one long novel. If so then it’s OK that some characters aren’t fully explored, because we shouldn’t judge the story now. 

The case for the prosecution is that Everville and The Great and Secret Show have been published as is. I keep coming back to this, because Everville keeps raising the issue. Enough is enough. Everville is more than enough. Not without its good points, worth having if you want The Art 2 – but Clive Barker should slow down and take a breath before he writes The Art 3.