The Great and Secret Show: The First Book of the Art was published by Harper & Row in 1989. Randolph Jaffe is a clerk in the Dead Letter Office of the US Post Office in Omaha, who discovers, hidden in the uncollected mail, fragments of a secret knowledge called the Art — a discipline that allows access to Quiddity, the dream-sea that underlies all reality. Jaffe’s rival, Richard Fletcher (renamed “the Jaff” and “Fletcher” after their transformations), also gains access to the Art, and their conflict — which spans decades, generates supernatural offspring, and culminates in a battle in the small town of Palomo Grove, California — threatens to break down the barrier between Quiddity and the waking world.
Barker’s mythology is original and deeply strange. Quiddity is not heaven or hell but the ocean of the unconscious — the place where dreams are made, where the dead go, and where creatures called the Iad Uroboros wait for the barrier between worlds to weaken so they can invade reality. The Art is the discipline of navigating between these worlds, and its practitioners are neither good nor evil but transformed, human beings who have gained power at the cost of their humanity.
The novel is the first part of a planned trilogy (the second volume, Everville, appeared in 1994; the third has never been completed), and its scope is appropriately cosmic. Barker is building a mythology to rival Tolkien’s, but where Tolkien’s world is orderly and moral, Barker’s is chaotic, erotic, and morally ambiguous.
Collecting The Great and Secret Show
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $15–$30
- UK first (Collins, 1989): $25–$60
- Signed: $80–$200