Weaveworld

Clive Barker

Crossroad Press

About this ebook

Here is storytelling on a grand scale — the stuff of which a classic is made. Weaveworld begins with a rug — a wondrous, magnificent rug — into which a world has been woven. It is the world of the Seerkind, a people more ancient than man, who possesses raptures — the power to make magic. In the last century they were hunted down by an unspeakable horror known as the Scourge, and, threatened with annihilation, they worked their strongest raptures to weave themselves and their culture into a rug for safekeeping. Since then, the rug has been guarded by human caretakers.

The last of the caretakers has just died.

Vying for possession of the rug is a spectrum of unforgettable characters: Suzanna, granddaughter of the last caretaker, who feels the pull of the Weaveworld long before she knows the extent of her own powers; Calhoun Mooney, a pigeon-raising clerk who finds the world he's always dreamed of in a fleeting glimpse of the rug; Immacolata, an exiled Seerkind witch intent on destroying her race even if it means calling back the Scourge; and her sidekick, Shadwell, the Salesman, who will sell the Weaveworld to the highest bidder.

In the course of the novel the rug is unwoven, and we travel deep into the glorious raptures of the Weaveworld before we witness the final, cataclysmic struggle for its possession.

Barker takes us to places where we have seldom been in fiction--places terrifying and miraculous, humorous, and profound. With keen psychological insight and prodigious invention, his trademark graphic vision balanced by a spirit of transcendent promise, Barker explores the darkness and the light, the magical and the monstrous, and celebrates the triumph of the imagination.

 

Ratings and reviews

Full of wonders dark and glorious. I love the way this novel is set out with chapter titles instead of chapter 1,2,3 etc. It gives an element of anticipation, tempting you to unroll its fabric and weave you into the warp and weft of a people self-exiled from Eden as humankind - the Cuckoos - spread across the lands. Through love and magic they hid themselves into something as innoocuous as a large rug and passed down through the ages via several Custodians until a time and age that is safe for them. However, the Incantatrix known as Immacolata and her hag sisters rejected by the Seerkind has been seeking revenge. And the human and salesman, Shadwell, is also seeking its power. Oh, what price Wonderland!

So good I've read it twice. Once when it first came out and again years later. It was almost like reading it for the first time and I was very sad to see it come to an end. But you know what that means, quickly pick up another one! 😉

I read this book years ago lent it to a student who as usual kept hold of it. It does not get any older even reading it decades later, and remains my favourite book. Now we need an animated film 😁😁😁