Weaveworld

I've never read a Clive Barker novel before, horror just really not being my thing, but this appealed to me in the used book store. It turns out not to be horror at all. Weaveworld is dark fantasy, which I do tend to like, though I know the line between that and horror is a fine one. I enjoyed this.

I want to copy just a couple of quotes from the book:

"It's about being borm, and being afraid of dying, and how love saves us."

It was good to look up during the day and know that the stars were still above his head, even though he couldn't see them. It was doubtless the same for countless other mysteries. That they shone, but the world shone more brightly, and blinded him to them.

from the dust jacket:

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.