SOURCE: Morrison, Michael A. “Blood without End.” Fantasy Review 9, no. 6 (June 1985): 15.

In the following review, Morrison provides a generally favorable assessment of Barker's first three Books of Blood.

The publication of this massive collection of well-crafted, original, disturbing stories heralds the arrival of an important new voice in horror fiction. The reader new to Barker's fiction is struck immediately by the gleeful carnage, graphic violence, and explicit sex that abound in these tales: monsters devastate whole cities; demons caper through the night; the “violent dead” slaughter innocent and guilty alike, while the living maim, torture and kill one another by physical or psychic means. Barker's characters, living and dead, engage in a variety of sexual acts, from conventional—if loveless—heterosexual and homosexual couplings to the outer limits of perversion. All this carnality and mayhem is lovingly described in Barker's vivid, sensory cinematic style.

Yet Books of Blood...