If Barker indeed represents, as Stephen King and others have claimed, the future of horror fiction, he is nonetheless the inheritor of a long and distinguished tradition of the horrific in literature. Despite his sometimes radically different approaches to the medium, he certainly is anything but unwilling to acknowledge his debts.

His allusions to the classic works of horror literature are abundant in the Books of Blood — one of the stories, "New Murders in the Rue Morgue" (Volume II), is at once a retelling and grotesque extension of Poe's classic tale — and even where the debts are not explicitly acknowledged they are abundantly evident. Faustian and Promethean analogues are present in a number of the stories and appear to constitute a source of recurrent appeal to Barker's imagination. "The Last Illusion" (Volume VI) is, for instance, an obvious, if somewhat bizarre, rendition of the...