SOURCE: Dziemianowicz, Stefan. “Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950-1998.” In Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet, edited by Neil Barron, pp. 199-344. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Dziemianowicz treats Barker's Books of Blood as a forerunner of the splatterpunk horror fiction movement in the late 1980s.

Clive Barker, Splatterpunk, and the New Decadence

What's going to come out of those people who think that Night of the Living Dead isn't enough?

—Robert Bloch, Faces of Fear

In the 1970s and '80s, horror fiction flourished in an environment of permissiveness it had never known. The maturation of popular fiction content in general in the postwar years, coupled with the unofficial sanction of frank descriptions of adult situations and physical horror in the fiction of Stephen King, freed writers from the inhibitions that had limited creative expression...