The second volume of the "Books of Blood" treads the same paths of death that the first volume of the series carved out. Clive Barker successfully combines the most repulsive fears of readers with heinous creatures that only a few have the mental capacity to conceive. The five stories, these five paradoxical tales, included in this volume undoubtedly provoke shock, nausea, and terror. It is a celebration of perversion, a carnival of monsters in which the reader never feels safe. Barker's iconographic language, the grotesque element, and the intelligence of his irony offer an iconography of the paradoxical and the perverse.

Barker does not write to reassure the reader. Quite the opposite. The author takes you by the hand, closes your eyes, and throws you, helpless, into the hell of his absurd, virtual metaphors, leaving you to struggle on your own. The kind of horror he writes aims to tear the veil of mystery and deconstruct every aspect of reality. His stories transform conventional sentiments and confront the reader with a uniquely different view of the world and reality, highlighting the web of relationships that develop between desire and fear. Barker creates an entirely believable mythological universe in which the monstrous resides—and dominates. If the author promises anything, it is a constant, dangerous oscillation of the reader between normalcy and absurdity, between reality and fantasy, an oscillation that undermines social norms by ultimately presenting possible, different realities.