clive-barker

Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...

Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.

I didn't read the book. I burned it after the first sentence.

We__e making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love

That's half of your trouble," muttered the crocodile. "You believe everything's true.""That's because everything is," replied Mr. Bacchus.

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my __inhead Mood Music_. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi__ familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect.

The dead have highways." Clive Barker