The Damnation Game
By Clive Barker
Ace/Putnam, 379 pages, $18.95
It took one story from Clive Barker`s collection ”The Books of Blood”
for me to think there might be a remarkable writer hiding behind the lurid paperback cover–two stories to make me a believer. Barker`s the best thing to happen to horror fiction in many full moons.
After five well-received books of short stories, the 35-year-old Liverpudlian has written his first novel, ”The Damnation Game,” a creepy tale set in a hellish present-day London.
In a first chapter nightmarishly evocative of bombed-out Warsaw after World War II, a thief and a gambler with frightening supernatural powers play cards amid the rubble. The stakes: Souls and power.
Forty years later, the thief, Joseph Whitehead, a reclusive and wealthy industrialist, lives in terror of paying off that long-ago debt. When the gambler, Mamoulian, comes to collect, the bloodbaths that ensue are vintage Barker.
A subplot revolves around the relationship between Marty Strauss, an ex-con hired by Whitehead to protect him from Mamoulian, and Carys, Whitehead`s drugged-out daughter. The two join forces against Mamoulian`s henchman, a putrifying ghoul who in life had been a child-molesting murderer.
Despite such charming characters, ”The Damnation Game” has its flaws:
too many unanswered questions and action that seems prolonged. But Barker never fails to deliver the compelling prose and relentless horror his readers expect. And his stomach-turning, grisly final conflict and its aftermath will test the mettle of even his most avid fans.
