SOURCE: Zeigler, Robert. “Fantasy's Timeless Humor in Clive Barker's The Thief of Always.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 24, no. 5 (November 1994): 7-9.

In the following essay, Zeigler contends that The Thief of Always invokes a sense of fantasy and conveys a moral message.

What to grown-up readers may be evidence of transgression or insanity—the timelessness, indistinction, and auto-eroticism of childhood—are properties of the magic world of literary fantasy. Clive Barker opens to question the intended audience of his The Thief of Always (1992) by calling it a “fable” and thus implying a moral. Appealing to a child with an appetite for make-believe, the text compels the adult to evaluate its message. Consumption of a fiction, as Norman Holland comments, involves the “oral pleasure” of associating “reading with eating” (The Dynamics of Literary Response [NY: Oxford U. P.], 75), and the subsequent detachment of the critic or interpreter who, having assimilated...