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leading writer of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell, I was presented with a mountainous manuscript of short stories by an unpublished Liverpool playright named Clive Barker.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 Damnation Game, was nominated for England's prestigious Booker Prize; and a second trilogy of Books of Blood was commissioned. Along the way, Barker became something of a cause célèbre, championed in magazines as diverse as Fangoria, Omni, Publishers Weekly, and Andy Warhol's Interview.

There is little mystery about Clive Barker's sudden success. The Books of Blood offer a strikingly bold vision, and some of the most provocative tales of terror ever published. Barker's charismatic personality and boyish good looks have made him a darling of the interview set. The only real mystery is why his first American publisher delayed the release of the Books of Blood for nearly two years, and then issued them only in paperback editions with garish, downmarket covers.

The Books of Blood are patterned after Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, each story said to be etched into the skin of an unfortunate charlatan whose psychic shenanigans have offended the dead. Any resemblance to Bradbury's gentle fantasies (or, indeed, those of Stephen King) ends, however, with the series' first story, “Midnight Meat Train,” a harrowing sojourn that depicts the New York subway as a rolling abattoir. It is what the reader will come to recognize as quintessential Barker: graphic, grotesque, and yet compellingly readable. He is the literary equivalent of those special-effects geniuses who unleash convincing and blood-splattered monstrosities on the motion picture screen.

Never has horror fiction been as consistently explicit in its sex or violence or indeed, in its linking of the two. Barker's creations include “Rawhead Rex,” a babyeating monster of pure sexual appetite, and “Son of Celluloid,” a moviehouse cancer that spawns bloodthirsty replicas of classic film actors. On the face of it, the Books of Blood might seem just the thing to set the hearts of the Meese Commission aflutter. But Barker never panders; indeed, he seems intent on forging something that might well be called the antihorror story.

Conventional horror fiction progresses from the archetype of Pandora's Box: the tense conflict between pleasure and fear that is latent when we face the forbidden and the unknown. The Books of Blood are founded on the proposition that there are no taboos, no mysteries. Barker's eye is unblinking; he drags our terrors from the shadows and forces us to look upon them and despair or laugh with relief.

Conventional horror, particularly in film, has also always been rich with Puritan subtext: if there is a single certainty, it is that teenagers who have sex in cars or in the woods will die. Most horror stories offer a message as conservative as their morality: Conform. Their boogeymen are the hitmen of homogeneity. Don't do it, they tell us, or you will pay an awful price. Don't talk to strangers. Don't dare to be different. And the monsters (who, by definition, are different) are typically destroyed by proper behavior, whether symbolized by virginity, silver crucifixes, or, indeed, conformity.

For Barker, conformity is the ultimate horror; many of his characters are dimensionless by design. Only through the intrusion of horror, he tells us, may we see our world clearly, know both its dangers and its possibilities. Otherwise, like the citizens of his most memorable story, “In the Hills, the Cities,” who form into a giant and march off to battle, we are doomed:

“Popolac turned away into the hills, its legs taking strides half a mile long. Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city's thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.”

The Inhuman Condition begins a second cycle of Books of Blood (whose second and third installments, In the Flesh and The Life of Death, will appear early in 1987). Their packaging, in hardcover editions geared toward the broader readership that Barker deserves, is not the only change. These stories reflect a decided maturation of style and find Barker relying more often on craft than sheer explicitness of image to convey his horrors.

But the extremity of Barker's aesthetics has not flagged. In the collection's title story, a knotted string, symbolic of life's mysteries, brings violent death to its possessors as it is unraveled. “The Body Politic” imagines human hands tearing themselves from the wrists of their masters and crawling spiderlike to a bloody revolution. In “The Age of Desire,” a powerful aphrodisiac unleashes ghastly sexual urgings whose fulfillment can be found only in mating with death.

“There is no delight the equal of dread,” writes Barker, and it is precisely this enthusiasm for invoking terror that propels his fiction. His prose, particularly in the first three Books of Blood, is rough-edged (he has, among other things, a lamentable propensity for anarchic shifts of point of view), but its energy is unstoppable. Like Stephen King, with whom he must inevitably be compared, he is unashamed to confront the terrors of our daily lives, and to do so in a genre that is too often relegated to the ranks of tawdry-looking paperbacks. But while King, the avuncular storyteller, holds our hands as we face a darkening world, Barker thrusts us forward into the night: “I think it's very important that people accept, embrace, celebrate the capacity for the monstrous in the world,” he said in a recent interview. “That way, stories about fear may even teach one not to live in fear.”