Books of Blood were published by Sphere Books in three volumes in 1984, with three further volumes following in 1985. The collection — thirty stories in total — arrived in the horror genre like a bomb. Barker was twenty-seven, unknown, and working in experimental theater in London. The stories he produced were unlike anything the genre had seen: sexually explicit, philosophically ambitious, visually extravagant, and terrifying not because they deployed the familiar machinery of horror (vampires, ghosts, haunted houses) but because they invented new forms of dread.
The framing device is elegant: the “Books of Blood” are literally written on the body of a fraudulent medium — the dead use his skin as a page, inscribing their stories in his flesh. The conceit announces Barker’s central preoccupation: the body as a site of transformation, of pleasure and pain, of the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, human and inhuman.
Individual stories have become horror classics. “In the Hills, the Cities” imagines two Yugoslav towns whose populations literally assemble themselves into gigantic humanoid figures and fight to the death — a metaphor for nationalism rendered as body horror on an epic scale. “The Midnight Meat Train” follows a commuter into the depths of the New York subway system, where he discovers a serial killer serving an ancient purpose. “Rawhead Rex” unleashes a prehistoric demon on the English countryside. “The Forbidden” — later filmed as Candyman — creates one of horror’s great modern myths from the landscape of a British council estate.
Stephen King’s blurb — written for the American edition — made Barker famous overnight. The endorsement was accurate: Barker was the future of horror, at least the strand of horror that was literary, transgressive, and unafraid of the body.
Collecting Books of Blood
First editions (Sphere Books, London, 1984–85): Paperback originals, Volumes 1–3 (1984), Volumes 4–6 (1985).
Market values:
- Volume 1, first printing, fine: $200–$600
- Complete set, Volumes 1–6, fine: $500–$1,500
- US hardcover editions (Putnam/Poseidon, 1986, as The Inhuman Condition etc.): $50–$150 each
- Signed: Significant premium