SOURCE: Winter, Douglas E. “Clive Barker: Britain's New Master of Horror.” Washington Post Book World (24 August 1986): 6.

In the following review of the first three Books of Blood and The Inhuman Condition, Winter asserts that Barker is the most important horror fiction writer of the 1980s.

During a 1983 visit with Britain's leading writer of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell, I was presented with a mountainous manuscript of short stories by an unpublished Liverpool playright named Clive Barker. “You're about to read the most important new horror writer of this decade,” Campbell told me. After reading 50 of the thousand-plus pages, I was convinced that he was right.

The manuscript, divided into three volumes, was published in England in 1984 as Clive Barker's Books of Blood, and its author became horror fiction's hottest property since Stephen King. Barker soon captured a World Fantasy Award and several motion picture contracts; his first novel, The...