The Great and Secret Show

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The clues lead Jaffe to New Mexico where he encounters a shoal, a sort of oracle for this other world. He learns of the ”mystical dream sea Quiddity and the islands within it known as the Ephemeris. Quiddity, as it turns out, is visible exactly three times to an ordinary human: The first time we ever sleep outside our mother's womb, the first time we sleep beside the one we truly love and the last time we ever sleep before we die.” The thing about Barker is his imagination is one of the most fecund of any writer in the world. What for some storytellers would be the premise of an entire book, film, or TV series, is, for Barker, just one small part of a macro-cosmic whole. The Great and Secret Show is divided into seven parts, and each feels unique. We move from a story of an insignificant but secretly corrupt man’s rise to demi-godhood through a discovery of the “secret world” around him, to a war between two evolved beings, to a tale of four virgins collectively assaulted by a force beyond their control, to the story of a quiet American town’s demise and lost dreams, to a Lovecraftian narrative of an impending confrontation with eldritch beings. Somehow, all are intimately connected. I apologize to the megazillion adoring fans of this novel for my unfavorable review, but how/why anyone is fascinated with this book will be the 9th Wonder of the World to me the many times I'm sure my mind will stray towards this when thinking of Clive Barker's stories & novels.

Whenever you start to feel a bit confused with this convoluted and brilliantly conceived plot, keep the following line in mind: ”Reason could be cruel; logic could be lunacy.” Having said that, Chet Williamson has a rather monotone and sonore voice and does not differentiate much betwwn characters. He did not succeed in drawing me in. The number of taboo subjects he covers is astounding. I am not easily offended and generally welcome a taboo topic in a story here or there - if I care about the characters it can add a little excitement or drama, sure! In this book it is completely without purpose so it comes across as crude and seems he is trying to offend as many people as possible. I never listen to books, narrated by American speakers, but I'll conceed that a story like this, wholy based in the US, needs a native US narrator, rather than a Brit. William Witt: He is a voyeur who spies on the four virgins while they are bathing in the cave. He holds this scene dear in his memory for the rest of his life. As an adult, he becomes a realtor who is secretly obsessed with pornography. He has an altercation with Jaffe and Tommy-Ray at Buddy Vance’s house where he encounters a terata. Since Quiddity has been somewhat revealed to him, his fantasies materialize, and he spends most of his time living them out, rarely leaving the house. His fate is to die at the bottom of Jaffe’s cave when he goes down there with Tesla, Grillo, and Jim.

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Well I've news for you, I didn't particularly like this book; this is the kind of book that throws me into a slump.

To tell you what this book is about is a fairly complicated undertaking (best left to undertakers perhaps). It starts with one Randolph Jaffe’s quest for mastery of “The Art”, not just any old art but a craft or power that has the capability to tear a hole in the fabric of reality and create an opening to another dimension called Quiddity. Quiddity is a mystical dream sea, a sea of the mind that most people visit twice in their lives. “Once the first night you slept out of the womb. The second occasion the night you lay beside the person you loved.” That does not make much sense out of the context of the book so just imagine the weirdest goddamn sea you can and then pile on extra weirdness on top. The Quiddity sea changes you and is generally extremely bad for your complexion: Joyce McGuire: She already had a crush on Randy Krentzman before the cave incident, so her decision to pursue him for sex was an easy one. She gives birth to twins Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray, two major characters in the book. Jaffe is their surrogate father. She and her children continue to live together in Palamo Grove; she becomes devoutly religious and has contempt for Jaffe, hoping to never encounter him again. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-12-10 10:45:51 Boxid IA1998117 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The synopsis makes it seem like this is a book of good versus evil. I knew I was in a bit of trouble when Part 1 proved that the "good" character, Fletcher, was a suicidal drug addict who really doesn't give a shit about anyone, let alone saving the world. It is only out of guilt that he goes after the evil character, Jaffe. What a pal! There really ARE no good guys in this story. The woman Tesla comes in about halfway and out of nowhere she's supposed to be the main good character, after having a 2 minute conversation with Fletcher before he dies. Sorry, not buying it! And then it gets to the weird, horror part of the story, what with the impregnation and the children and the creepy love-at-first-sight. But even this is good, in a sense. Even this I can understand. Barker needs to provide the reader with more human characters—the story of the endless battle between the Jaff and Fletcher has grown thin. But as various humans become drawn into the conflict, the stakes increase. The bad guys become more real, and suddenly this becomes a battle for reality itself.The summer I read this book was the summer I changed my mind about the horror genre. Previously, I had read some subpar Stephen King and some even more subpar Dean Koontz. A friend recommended the Great and Secret Show to me, saying it was like King's The Stand, but better.

In his spare time, he plays badminton, watches Two Best Friends Play and puts on his DM hat, concocting fiendish dungeons for his friends to battle through. Trudi Katz: She seduces a gardener named Ralph Contreras at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church who will never tell of their affair. Fletcher is the surrogate father of her son, Howard. She and her infant son move to Chicago to get away from Palamo Grove; she will never return, but Howie will. In many ways, coming across a book that doesn’t interest one even though it’s a good book makes writing a review far more difficult than coming across a bad book. But if one truly reads widely—and it’s something I take pride in doing—then it will happen. So what then?Howard Katz: After his mother Trudi dies in Chicago, he decides to go to Palamo Grove to discover the mysteries of his birth. There, he meets Jo-Beth and immediately falls in love with her. Because their surrogate fathers are enemies, their relationship is problematic. An event near the beginning in which I won't go into any detail on, for fear of it becoming a spoiler, was called The League of Virgins. The League of Virgins!? Really, Clive? That's the best you got? Before Lynch showed us Twin Peaks: The Return, and the detonation of an atomic bomb signalling the death of innocence, Barker transported us to an endless time-loop in which the moment of detonation in 1945 is only ever one minute away. And in this moment of frozen “lost” time, terrible deeds occur. Before Jordan Peele showed us the cloned mole-people of his new cinematic masterpiece Us, Barker took us into a webway of tunnels beneath Palomo Grove, and the secrets that lived there. Fletcher realizes Jaffe’s evil intentions, which sets off an epic battle between the two of them, which is one long standoff of competing energies. They even spawn offspring when four young ladies decide to go skinny dipping above. Little did they know what is rippling in the water beneath them. Yes, ladies, you can get pregnant by some hellish entity just going for a swim. If that isn’t enough to put you off swimming in deep waters see Jaws. Fletcher and Jaffe know the battle will go beyond their life spans, and their hope is that their offspring will continue to wage the war for them.