Man I really should have written this when i first finished the novel. Anyway here goes... Potential spoiler warning. I'm not really going to skate around spoilers or anything in this review. I'm just gonna ramble about how I feel about the book now that it's over.
Clive Barker really knows how to write an ending that sits with you man. If there's anything I remember about this book, it's that when I finished it it was about 8 AM and I was waiting for the bus to cony island in lower manhattan, not too far from the world trade center train station. Cal was in a coma after having defeated the scourge, and I didn't know where the bus stop was. I left world trade center PATH station and wandered my way to the bus stop with the aide of GPS and a compass. It really isn't very smart to use my phone's GPS, since the battery life has gone down serverely since whe nI first bought it (i have replaced it with a stronger one, but the software bloat does not help at all). I found the bus stop and stood around for 30 minutes as the story was drawing to a close. About ten minutes after the story ended, tbe bus arrived, and I had a wonderfull day at the Cony Island Maker Faire.
My memory has always been terribly unreliable. I have little follow through on a lot of things. You could be talking to me, and giving me the most important information of my entire life, and I would be forgetting it as you say it. One thing that I've realized about myself after reading a lot of these novels, is that if I go to a new place while listening to them, the memory of the story and the real world become irreversibly linked in my mind. One time I was listening to a podcast about the gamecube game Eternal Darkness while cycling through a neighborhood I don't often go to. Every time I go to that neighborhood, I recall the woman's retelling of her experience with the video game. Similar experience with both Bedside Manor: Tales from the Gas Station and Dune.
The fact that I can so vividly place these experiences in my mind is testament to what I feel is the story's quality. If you're not into dark fantasy, horror, and/or Clive Barker's other works, you will probably be repulsed by this book. If you are, however, consider this required reading. I wish Geraldine had a bit more of a character arc at the end tho, she kinda vanished and is somewhat of an important character.
3:27 PM November 2nd, 2023