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

Yet Books of Blood cannot by dismissed as mere splatter fiction; the philosophical and thematic content of these visceral stories elevates them from this category. Indeed, Books of Blood bristles with ideas: feminism [“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament”], the interplay of fiction and reality [“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”], man's attitude towards violence [“Dead” and “Midnight Meat Train”], and a host of others.

With a single exception—the hysterically funny “The Yattering and Jack”—Barker's fiction reflects a bleak, nihilistic world view. His characters drift through grey, hopeless lives that are interrupted only by random encounters with the appallingly powerful evil that rules his cosmos.

The bleakness of this vision is alleviated solely by the strong current of manic wit that surges through most of these stories. His humor ranges from satire [“Rawhide Rex”] to slapstick [“The Yattering and Jack”], but its dominant mode is word play: puns, literal incarnations of slang expressions, etc.

Barker sometimes loses control of his material, the excessive blood and gore overwhelming story ideas. Also, many of his characters are so unsympathetic that we are hard pressed to care about or empathize with them. Perhaps because of these faults, Barker's stories are rarely terrifying—in the sense that, say, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House or parts of Stephen King's The Shining are terrifying. We devour Barker's feast of horror gripped not so much by fear as by stunned fascination, wondering what appalling grotesquerie awaits the turn of the page.

Although similar thematically to the stories of Ramsey Campbell, who contributes a laudatory introduction to these books, Barker's horrors are closest to the no-less-extreme films of David Cronenberg. Like Cronenberg, Barker forces us—by his craftsmanship and intelligence—to confront our deepest anxieties about the nature of man and life in the late 20th century. And, like Cronenberg's films, Barker's radical stories are sure to provoke controversy, even among aficionados. Highly recommended.