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Romance and Fly Fishing

© Robert Powers

When the horror film Hellraiser came out in the mid-1980s, it demonstrated the nightmarish qualities of the genre in a shivering and creative fashion. The movie, based on the work of British writer Clive Barker, sparked several sequels, none of which matched the original.

One of my first reactions after seeing that film (which featured that demonic character known as "Pinhead," so named because his skull was peppered with hundreds of wicked pins) was to head for the bookstore to find Barker's print output.

Over the years, Barker has written eight novels and six collections of short stories. His publisher claims there are 10 million copies of Barker's books in print and his novels Everville and Imajica were major bestsellers. The occasion of a new novel from Barker is assurance of cash registers jingling in bookshops worldwide.

The new one is Galilee (HarperCollins, $26), which is subtitled, A Romance. With Barker's usual combination of weirdness and stark, terrifying imagery, the novel plows familiar ground while attempting to strike out along new paths. Barker seems to have wanted to prove to his fans that he's capable of more than stories that are intriguing but confusing, colorful but often plodding, and filled with harrowing scenes that will cause rumbles in delicate stomachs.

At this point, I have a confession to make. Although I have tried, I never have been able to finish a book by Clive Barker. I keep trying. I continue to fail. And thus it is with Galilee. For one thing, and it's no small thing, almost nothing happens in the book's first 60-plus pages, which are devoted to some sluggish setting up of a story line by the crippled Maddox, the 140-year-old son of parents who are not quite human. Well, one of them, at least.

In Barker's epic Imajica, which seemed to go on to unendurable length, the stylish whizbangs and rimshots made the journey relatively eventful, although at the halfway point, I lost interest.

With the new book, my interest began to drag even prior to the introduction of the novel's main characters, Galilee Barbarossa, whose family origins are beyond the normal, and Rachel Pallenberg, whose marriage to a man called America's most eligible bachelor and the memory of a rich and powerful family hiding, of course, dark secrets.

A clash of families leads to the main avenue of concentration for the novel, but Barker's lackluster writing - which comes as a major surprise, since previous books have been interesting for their innovative stylistic touches - keeps dragging down the reader's interest in continuing to turn pages.