SOURCE: Coven, Laurence. Review of In the Flesh, by Clive Barker. Los Angeles Times Book Review (14 June 1987): 15.

In the following review, Coven praises the stories of In the Flesh as grotesque, graphic, and disturbing.

The four tales of horror in Clive Barker's In the Flesh are not made for fireside reading. These are disturbing tales that emerge from a profound sense of despair and desolation.

Barker is a young English author, and In the Flesh is the fifth of a six-volume English collection, the Books of Blood. Indeed, blood oozes, splatters, drips and gushes from these stories in great abundance. In the title story, Barker describes the result of a fight between two prisoners. “The man had been ripped open, his eyes put out, his genitals torn off. Nayler, the only possible antagonist, had contrived to open up his own belly.”

The story concerns Cleve, a veteran prisoner...