Weaveworld was published by Collins in 1987 and marked Barker’s transition from horror to dark fantasy. Cal Mooney, a pigeon fancier from Liverpool, and Suzanna Parrish, a young woman with a mysterious grandmother, discover that a carpet in a backyard auction contains an entire world — the Fugue, a land of magic, beauty, and strangeness that was woven into the carpet decades ago by the Seerkind, a race of magical beings who hid themselves from a humanity that had grown hostile to wonder.
The carpet is under threat from two directions: Immacolata, one of the Seerkind’s own who has gone mad and wants the Fugue destroyed; and Shadwell, a human salesman of supernatural ability who wants the Fugue’s treasures for himself. Cal and Suzanna must protect the carpet, enter the Fugue, and navigate a world of raptures and terrors that Barker describes with the same hallucinatory intensity he brought to the Books of Blood.
The novel is enormous — over 200,000 words — and its ambition is correspondingly vast. Barker is attempting to reinvent fantasy for adults: the Fugue is not Tolkien’s Middle-earth (ordered, hierarchical, essentially conservative) but a place of sensual excess, moral ambiguity, and constant transformation. The magic is not a system of rules but an expression of desire, and the novel’s central argument — that wonder is necessary, that a world without magic is diminished — is made with passionate conviction.
Collecting Weaveworld
First edition (Collins, London, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80
- US first (Poseidon, 1987): $40–$100
- Signed: $150–$400