Imajica

 

 

© 1991 by Clive Barker

 

When I was a young lad I devoured a lot of horror literature.

 

In high school I mostly read Stephen King. I had a friend who had all of King’s books in paperback, and he’d feed them to me one by one. By the time I graduated I read every one from Carrie to the Bachman books, including his short story anthologies. The following year I read It, and the year after that, The Tommyknockers. I stopped reading Stephen King around the year 2001. I think Dreamcatcher was the last one of his I read.

 

In the late 80s I shifted to Dean R. Koontz. Within three or four years I put away something like 18 of his novels. Though somewhat formulaic, they all were quick, fun reads, always with a dash of horror, a lot of suspense, and usually a happy ending. The thing I liked best about his stories was the fact that you could never predict what the solution to the existential threat was. If Koontz wrote Dracula instead of Bram Stoker, the monster would be revealed at the end not to be a vampire of the traditional sort but a secret government black ops scientific experiment mixing human, bat, and alien DNA gone terribly awry. With some form of time or interdimensional travel tossed in. That kinda thing.

 

A few years ago I read on a message board that, broadly speaking, King could be regarded as the Rolling Stones of horror and Koontz, the Beatles. I agree.

 

I also read a smattering of other horror writers in my teens and twenties. Peter Straub, John Saul, Whitley Strieber, William Peter Blatty, Peter Benchley, Thomas Harris. And, of course, Clive Barker.

 

I moved on to Clive Barker roughly after reading through most of Koontz: Cabal, Weaveworld, The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, The Thief of Always, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, and, lastly, Imajica. Barker is quite different from the aforementioned horror writers. His stories are more fantastical, more occult-ish, populated by various forms of magic and myriads of strange, grotesque creatures, both good and evil. There is a sexual amorality (“anti-morality” I initially wrote) that is quite in vogue now but wasn’t so much 30, 35 years ago. While not on the same equivalence of, say, the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Barker seems to be well acquainted or aspires to such dark things.

 

Anyway, my Halloween reading back in 2019 was a re-read of Weaveworld. The next year, during the Summer of Wu Flu, I re-read The Great and Secret Show. The first took me 12 days but I burned through the latter in 5. In other words, both fun reads. The stories were weird and out there – in Weaveworld, a magic carpet that unfurls in our world and grows to enormous dimensions releasing warring factions that includes an all-powerful but psychotic angel and a salesman who’s jacket can cause anyone to do anything, and in The Great and Secret Show the inter-generational struggle of two men trying to master a form of sorcery known as “The Art” and control a mythical dream sea and the evil beings that inhabit it. Whew. Heavy and heady stuff. I read most of Barker’s works originally at my parents’ weekend house at Lake George in upstate New York, so a lot of that imagery was mixed in with Barker’s. I enjoyed the re-reads.

 

So it was with anticipation I cracked open Imajica on October 1. If I kept to a brisk schedule, I could finish the 827-page novel on Halloween night.

 

Alas, I set it aside three weeks in. I couldn’t finish it.

 

Now, I remember having difficulties wading through Imagica way back in the early 90s when I last wrestled with it. Recall a giant push for the last 150 or 200 pages to finish it. The memory’s very hazy. It seems, however, that the same thing happened to me this time around, thirty years later. Now I’m much, much more careful with how I spend my time as I’m getting up there a bit in years, and I just didn’t think a 150 or 200 page push to get the novel done was worth it.

 

Now, YMMV, as they used to say here on the internet a few decades back.

 

I don’t feel like rehashing the plot; perhaps a quick summary like the ones above might suffice. “Imajica” consists the five dominions, of which Earth is the fifth. The main characters meet other characters who know how to travel between the dominions. There are your typical Barkian malformed monsters and semi-human sub-species, there’s magic, there’s war between the forces of magic and those that want to eradicate it. There is an evil sorcerer Autarch who rules the four dominions (not Earth, the fifth, though that’s on his plate) from his palace in the first dominion. There are shapeshifters, dopplegangers, and lots of Catholic piety twisted slightly askew in that Barkish way.

 

 

I may not have enjoyed Imajica, but Charlie wants to give it a go

 

On paper this seemed to be an enjoyable read. A whole new worldview is developed for the novel with its accompanying landscapes, much more so than his prior works, even Weaveworld. I originally compared it to a warped version of Middle-earth. But it didn’t work for me, and I think, having ten days or so to reflect on it, I think its because the main goal and the main threat of the novel wasn’t fully developed or communicated to me, the reader. I didn’t feel the “ticking time bomb”, though there is one. The stakes didn’t keep me turning the pages. The characters kept having emotional crises and there are loads of indecisions and 180-degree turns that motivations did not seem to make sense to me. The main twist in the plot, which I saw early on during the first read and never forgot this second read, didn’t glue me to the pages in anticipation but just felt like another dreary task I had to wade through to get to the last page. And there was also one scene which, as a father of daughters, truly turned my stomach, a scene I did not remember first time around.

 

I dunno. Mixed feelings are still washing over me. I wanted to like it, truly. But I’m a different man than that young lad of 30 years ago. Horror is no longer an upfront interest for me, and Catholic piety is much more so in my daily life (or at least the struggle to attain it). I do seek out new literary worlds, but I need something more enlightening, more expansive, something I can take with me, possibly, beyond the grave. Not sure if this makes any sense, to you or to me. But these are my mixed feelings over Clive Barker’s Imajica.