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This book is absolutely brilliant, it's as complex as they get, very very strange, wonderfully written and just goes to show that Cliver Barker is one of the greatest imaginers of our times.I'd say it's his best book, if you're into long books that are on a biblical scale and you have patience to see a complex story though - there's a good chance you'll love this book! ✅
I can't say Imajica was a book I particularly enjoyed reading, but I nonetheless admire and respect the hell out of it. The breadth of Barker's imagination is extrodinary, and his writing style is sublime. And he has a lot to say; it's just that his concepts are a little too flighty and mystical for my taste. This book is Barker's attempt to write the Great American Fantasy Novel, and he pulls out all the stops. The fundamental problem with it for me is that I don't really care for the character...
4.5 Stars, rounded down to 4 for the sheer length of it, not the quality of the writing.I still stand that this is very well written and enjoyable, it just took me SO long to finish it (it clocks in at over 1,000 pages!). Think I maybe could have benefitted from listening to an Audiobook version of this instead, which I very well might do in the future if I ever decide to revisit it one day.It helped me to enjoy Imajica even more by splitting it into three parts myself.I became a fan of Clive Ba...
I feel like this book kind of ruined my life, in that I know that nothing I ever read from here on out will ever be as good. Like an addict's first hit of their poison of choice, nothing will ever be this good again. That makes me sad, but knowing that now, I'd still read it. It was just. Wow. Thank you so much for ruining my life forever, Clive Barker, you're actually the best.I've been recommending it to everybody I encounter, from friends to strangers in my literature classes, but I can't exp...
WTF did I just read?I mean, I think I know . . . I’m pretty sure I know. Barker is good at bringing his full imagination to the page in a way that doesn’t lose his reader. Still, Imajica is a lot. The sort of book that requires multiple rereads. I know I didn’t catch everything. And that’s okay. I loved it.I don’t usually do fantasy, but I’m a fan of Barker’s because he mixes in likable (well, relatable anyway) characters and gore and lots of erotica. But this isn’t Books of Blood; don’t go in e...
“It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course -- thousands in fact -- but they could only ever be phantoms, a
This was a buddy-read with Dustin.Impressive in its scope and imagining, Clive Barker has created a marathon epic, with sprawling worlds, dozens of wonderfully strange and outlandish characters straight out of our nightmares, incredibly complex confrontations, deep philosophy, high adventure, and staggering tension, all thrown at the reader from the excellent beginning to the satisfying end.This is not a light read by any means, but the prose is fully developed. There are many unusual words in h...
I have to admit, I had tried Clive Barker's work once before this, and didn't like it. Then, I checked out The Great and Secret Show, and fell in love with it. I ended up getting Imajica from my public library, thinking it was a fifty-fifty chance that I could like it. When I first started reading it, I got bored in the first hundred pages and dropped it for a few weeks. Then, I didn't have anything else to read, and ended up picking it back up. I didn't put it back down. Imajica is a very beaut...
Though one of my all time favorite books, when I set out a little over a month ago to re-read Clive Barker‘s Imajica, for the eight or ninth time in the fifteen years I’ve owned my now slightly battered hardcover edition, I didn’t know if I’d include a write up about it in my blog. It’s not only difficult for me to sum this book up in a few words, it is a very lengthy volume at 824 pages, but it is extremely difficult to do so without giving way too much. Almost literally every aspect of the sto...
Well-written more often than over-written, Clive Barker's Imajica is a picaresque (the blurb from William S. Burroughs adorning the cover of my edition agrees) dark fantasy that seeks to dispel gender binary and then imagine the fluid, and frankly erotic, possibilities for human coexistence. If you are looking for a long read with gender-bending assassins, imprisoned goddesses, magic made out of breath and spit, brutal inter-dimensional ghouls, impossible but consensual sexual contortions, oddly...
Buddy Read with my brotha from anotha motha. The only good part about this book was reading it with a friend. I honestly can't write a review because I have no fucking clue what happened, to whom it happened to, nor what dimension I was in when it occurred. I'm thinking that in about 10 years when my brain has recovered I would like to pick up a physical copy of the book and give it a better try. I love audiobooks and especially ones that are long- Stephen King's It is over 44 hours and I've li...
I wish I were a college professor of gender studies. This would be an awesome text about One Artist's Perception of Gender Duality. What, you never got assigned 800-pg novels? Or maybe I could assign my hapless students to read it in opposition to His Dark Materials. At least those come in smaller packets. This is a big, epic book, with big crazy sex, and divinities familiar and alien. I find the central love story a little unconvincing, but the crazy details are richly ornamental. It's like a F...
We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else.Imajica ~~ Clive BarkerSelected by Spenky for March 2022 Big Book ReadBack in my youth, I worked at a New Age bookstore. Surprisingly, our biggest seller for nearly six months was Clive Barker’s Imajica ~~ in hardcover no less. I bought a copy and quickly forgot about it while I instead read the Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Gospel ~~ if you read my A Little Boy in...
It seems to be fashionable for modern horror writers to assume that, in order for a book to be edgy/scary, every detail must be depressing, disgusting, or some combination thereof, even when such detail borders on crass and does nothing for the plot. There is no need, for example, to include a scene where the main character watches television naked and picks the crumbs of his late-night snack out of his nether regions. No need. But "Imajica" is one long extraneous detail, an 800+ page behemoth t...
I truly love Clive Barker's work, but this is BY FAR his worst, most indulgent novel. It's confused, confusing, pompous, silly, boring, lumbering and just bad. The characters act in seemingly random fashion, the pacing is long stretches of nothing followed by some infodump and then an act of violence. It's just an incoherent mess with neither plot, character or language to keep it interesting. Barker relies too heavily on his world-building to sell the novel, but quite frankly, Imajica is much l...
The world is not quite what we always thought it was. But this is a Clive Barker book, so that goes without saying.The Imajica is the whole of creation, the true world, four-fifths of which we've never seen. Earth, the Fifth Dominion, has long been separate from the other four. How it got split away, held back from the other Reconciled Dominions by the horrible netherworld of the In Ovo, no one knows. But throughout history there have been Maestros, men of great and terrible power, who have trie...
WOW this book,what ever I say will not do it justice, an amazing story, epic in scale and characters that I will remember forever.In the late eighties early nineties,I was to busy reading king, Hebert, lumley that I never got around to Clive Barker,what a massive mistake that was. This was my first novel that I have read of Clive Barker, and I have been totally blown away by his imagination. At 1136 pages long the imajica is a big book but what a story, it had me gripped from the start, work and...
If you've read his Books of Blood, the Damnation Game, the Great and Secret Show, and Weaveworld but haven't gotten around to Imajica yet, turn off your computer right now and get out there and get it. This is Clive Barker's masterpiece. Earth is part of a dominion of five other worlds, and the only one unaware of the others. This novel is about the reuniting of Earth to the other four worlds. Again, this is horrific, beautiful, mind-expanding.An incredible feat of the imagination...this is one
Imajica is the best fantasy story written in the last 40 years. Any medium. Easily. When I was younger I considered it Barker's greatest work. Now after reading it again I consider it one of the greatest novels ever written.Let me explain.A lot of fantasy worlds are large. The writers spend enormous amounts of time creating very detailed descriptions of geography or family lineage. They create maps. They invent hundreds or thousands of characters to fill different nations, they create classes an...
Really more like 2.5. The only reason I finished this is because Simon Vance is a narrator genius. Seriously this guy can do voices like nobody else. There were a million characters and I was never once confused as to who was speaking. The overall story was interesting but it was too long and the main characters were flat. Some of the secondary characters were interesting and what made the book readable to me. Happy to be finished with this one.