Again 3.5 ish - Hidden Remains has brilliance, Rawhead Rex is a great monster story (I'm not a huge fan of that genre but I recognise quality) with a couple of wonderful moments Declan being baptised in piss and then getting killed at the end accidentally by being an annoying snitch, the others are fine but never really come together. Shroud is a pretty mundane revenge murder story, Celluloid has a kind of interesting concept it doesn't do much with, Scapegoats has a GREAT concept that it barely touches on until the very end. ( )

Maybe I'm getting reacclimated to Barker's style, or maybe the stories are just getting better as the series of books progresses, but I found myself enjoying the hell out of most of these stories. Rawhead Rex was a standout. ( )

Of the three I've read so far, this has been the most grim. I'm not a great fan of too much gritty material in my horror. That depressing feel that emanates from some stories just reminds me too much of the real world, and if I wanted to immerse myself all the more in that kind of world I'd simply put away my novels and dive right back into real life.

Of the five stories in this volume, the only one I can say I really, really enjoyed was Son of Celluloid which was helped by being less grim and gritty than the rest, and being set in a movie theater just helped push it to the top of the pile for me. Rawhead Rex was the real surprise for me in that I've seen it mentioned a few times around the net as being the stand-out story of the bunch, which simply wasn't the case for me.

Not as enjoyable as the first two then, but my dislike for the grim realism seen in a few of these stories may have turned me against it more than it would someone else.

I think this one's no more than a 3 star collection. ( )

Heisenberg bedsheet
big beastie loves gasoline
sheep basher gets his. ( )

I'm not a fan of splatterpunk. I have no problem with violence and gore (obviously they have their place in horror, and the graphic gross-out goes at least as far back as Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast"--and arguably even further, to Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"), but a subgenre devoted entirely to the depiction of physical trauma is incredibly restrictive from an artistic standpoint. Horror's decline into a limbo from which it is only now beginning to reemerge can be attributed, in part, to the preoccupation with splatterpunk in the '80s and early '90s. But there were writers who occasionally transcended the limitations of the subgenre and produced work of lasting value. Joe Lansdale was one (see his debut novel The Nightrunners), and Clive Barker was another. Volume three of Books of Blood is the best and most consistent entry in the series; it contains Barker's finest moment, "Human Remains," as well as a couple of story premises that remain interesting even when the violence reaches cartoonishly absurd levels ("Son of Celluloid," "Confessions of a Pornographer's Shroud").

Even if you don't feel inclined to read the entire book, check it out of the library and read "Human Remains". It's a great horror story by any standard. ( )