[In the following review, Greenland compares Weaveworld to Ramsey Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother, finding Barker's novel lacking in substance.]

These two novels [Weaveworld and The Doll Who Ate His Mother] by horror writers from Liverpool both take that city for background. Each selects a derelict house on the edge of a demolition site as the portal for that intrusion of chaos into the mundane that is the principle of the genre. Ramsey Campbell's chaotic agency is the influence of John Strong, a necromancer twenty years dead, which still radiates from the Amberley Street cellar where he held his peculiar sabbats. Clive Barker's anomaly is fairyland itself, a tract of marvels and monstrosities that has, for nearly a century, been magically parcelled up in a shabby carpet.

Of the two books, The Doll Who Ate His Mother is the less explicitly supernatural. The psychotic killer who haunts the neighbourhood of Amberley Street, taking bites out of all his victims, human and animal, may have been ruined by nothing more occult than the righteous hatred of his grandmother, who is convinced her daughter gave her baby to the Devil. The protagonist of the novel, an unhappy young teacher called Clare Frayn, hardly considers John Strong to have been anything more than a bullying charlatan with grimy fantasies, while the man who leads her in the hunt for the psychopath, Edmund Hall, is only after copy for another in his best-selling series of slick black magic exposes, to be called Satan's Cannibal. Without pretending to any cynical, sensational inversion, Campbell simply presents a vampire hunter who is a less pleasant, less moral person than his prey.

It is Campbell's purpose, and his talent, thus to force the growth of his horror against the grain of the everyday. Normality for him is not inert but turbulent, a welter of inconveniences and dissatisfactions, misunderstandings and moods. Experienced through the clogged emotions of his characters, Liverpool itself wriggles and throbs expressionistically. “Down a side street, a drill chattered harshly in stone; next to her, the plastic cover of a hotdog stall folded open with a thick gasp of onion.” Too much of this is stifling; but Campbell's rhythmic plot and his firm way with characters steer us on through.

Clive Barker's scenery, Liverpudlian or elfin, is less energetic, which is perhaps a pity, since his purpose is to show us worlds within worlds. He has certainly given himself space to do so. After one earlier novel, several plays and plenty of short stories, Weaveworld, at seven hundred-odd pages, is an opus that is decidedly magnum. Barker's publishers have helped by generously insulating each short chapter with a great quantity of white paper (yet without charging any more for the luxury). They have also nominated the book an epic, though it is almost classically a romance, a heraldic adventure in which figures possessed by principles, of love or greed or despair, pursue one another headlong with spells or pistols through a vague locality full of numinous things that begin with capital letters: the Fugue, the Firmament, the Gyre, and so forth. The secret land inside the carpet is threatened by a rough association of villains, all of them, on first introduction, the most promising elements in the book. They are Shadwell, the salesman, inside whose magic jacket is stowed every heart's desire; Hobart, the brutal, crusading police inspector; a loathsome trinity of weird sisters; and a mad djinn that thinks it is the angel Uriel.

On further acquaintance all these characters prove less interesting. In fairyland, Shadwell, for example, becomes a mere demagogue and tyrant. The fairies themselves are rather disappointing, their magic no match for machine-guns, and their much-prized innocence no more than routine mob gullibility. Helped and hindered by them, our heroine and hero (both human) strive, suffer and surmount. Titanic events continually sweep them apart, then together again. The plot reeks with the pathos of loss and reunion, forgetting and remembering. Barker lays on the sentiment with a palette knife, and rounds each chapter with a plangent phrase (“‘Ah, the ladies’, said Shadwell; and Death flew in at the door”). All this, as he knows well, will endear him to the consumers of novels that are thick; but in substance it is thin, compared to the robustness of Ramsey Campbell, let alone the richness of John Crowley's Little, Big or Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, two rediscoveries of fairyland much more thorough and disconcerting.