Helpful Score: 2
Although I'm a long time Barker fan, I sometimes sympathize with his critics who think his stories are too drawn out. This is not the case with Mister B. Gone. This book gives the reader a well paced tale that often times breaks away to allow the main character (who is imprisoned in the pages) to plead and threaten you to BURN THIS BOOK!
Helpful Score: 1
Not his best work by a long shot. I guess it seemed to me like lazy writing and rushed. I don't know. read for yourself...
Helpful Score: 1
Not at all what I expected. If it wasn't for the vivid details of torture and gore it would've been a children's book
I enjoy Clive Barker's novels. However with this novel, I don't know if this was meant to be a horror because I considered it more as a dark comedy, a satire. The book dulls a bit with a continuous plea to burn the book, so there is only 3/4 of a novel in there. I got so bored with the pleas that I began to skip them until I came up upon the actual story part.
It's hard to resist a book that begins with the words, "Burn this book."
In Mister B. Gone, Clive Barker hits the ground running in the first sentences, spinning the tale of his main character, a demon that has been trapped in the pages of the very book the reader holds. Barker's narrator, a minor demon called Jakabok Botch, breaks from the telling of his story repeatedly throughout the story to urge the reader to destroy the book -- for their own good. Of course, destroying the book would actually unleash Jakabok on our world, and we don't want that, do we?
Clive Barker is quirky, there's no doubt about it. I think fans of his work will enjoy this story the most (I loved The Great and Secret Show, for example) but any curious reader will get caught up in the story of this strange and deliberatly unlikable character, who gets hauled out of the abyss and pulled through all the levels of hell before arriving in our world. It's not like anything I've ever read before, so it scores points for originality. I didn't love it, though.
In Mister B. Gone, Clive Barker hits the ground running in the first sentences, spinning the tale of his main character, a demon that has been trapped in the pages of the very book the reader holds. Barker's narrator, a minor demon called Jakabok Botch, breaks from the telling of his story repeatedly throughout the story to urge the reader to destroy the book -- for their own good. Of course, destroying the book would actually unleash Jakabok on our world, and we don't want that, do we?
Clive Barker is quirky, there's no doubt about it. I think fans of his work will enjoy this story the most (I loved The Great and Secret Show, for example) but any curious reader will get caught up in the story of this strange and deliberatly unlikable character, who gets hauled out of the abyss and pulled through all the levels of hell before arriving in our world. It's not like anything I've ever read before, so it scores points for originality. I didn't love it, though.
not his best work but i was entertained.
