Book contains the following stories:
The Inhuman Condition
The Body Politic
Revelations
Down, Satan!
The Age of Desire

A master storyteller and unrivaled visionary, Clive Barker has mixed the real and unreal with the horrible and wonderful in more than twenty years of fantastic fiction. 

The Inhuman Condition

The Inhuman Condition is a masterwork of surrealistic terror, recounting tragedy with pragmatism, inspiring panic more than dread and evoking equal parts revulsion and delight.

The first story is about Pope who gets a shake down by some thugs and gets his money taken from him. Pope does manage to get away from the scene with a rope containing some knots and he is dying to see how to pick them apart.

Over the next four days the problem became an idee fixe, a hermetic obsession to which he would return at any available opportunity, picking at the knot with fingers that were increasingly numb with use. The puzzle enthralled him as little in his adult life ever had. Working at the knot he was deaf and blind to the outside world. Sitting in his lamp -lit room by night, or in the park by day, he could almost feel himself drawn into its snarled heart, his consciousness focused so minutely it could go where light could not. But despite his persistence, the unraveling proved a slow business.

When the bad guys come to his house again in the middle of the night, Pope had nearly unravelled the knot and a surprise jumped at him from within and then went out and killed his enemies.

The string coiled itself around his hand, weaving its length between his fingers in an ecstasy of welcome. He raised his hand to watch its performance better. From its camouflage of leaves the waiting beast leaned down toward Karney and exhaled a single, chilly breath. It smelled of the river at low tide, of vegetation gone to rot.

Pope slowly realises that all the knots contained beasts and the string wanted to get stolen to enact a deadly revenge

All his life he had accepted that the world was rich with mysteries a mind of his limited grasp had no hope of understanding. That was the only genuine lesson his schooldays had taught: that he was ignorant.

The Body Politic

Slowly, cautiously it seems, Charlie’s hands creep up out of the warmth of the bed and into the open air. Their index fingers weave like nailed heads as they meet on his undulating abdomen. They clasp each other in greeting, like comrades -in -arms.

The sexual overtones here are amplified. Hands, symbols of many things sexual and even paternal, have lives of their own and try to overthrow their appendages (i.e. their human hosts). This territory has been treaded upon before, the hands becoming aware that they are stuck to bigger things that control them, and there is something super macabre about the body’s innate self-awareness.

The body politic is something every human can relate to, and when the hands chop off their partners and they both scatter away like roaches… invading everything, sticking like spiders to trees and buildings… well, that image is SOO NEAT!

A man resists with his hands. His hands will be in revolution against him

When Charlie’s hand escapes, he starts a revolution – touching other hands and telling them to escape their oppressors.

The hands were everywhere it seemed, hundreds of them, chattering away like a manual parliament as they debated their tactics. All shades and shapes, scampering up and down the swaying branches.

Charlie decides to jump to his death carrying the Messiah hand and all the other hands follow like lemmings jumping off a cliff. He survives but the next time he wakes in the hospital, his legs are gone, having decided they’d had enough too.

And did his eyes envy their liberty, he wondered, and was his tongue eager to be out of his mouth and away, and was every part of him, in its subtle way, preparing to forsake him? He was an alliance only held together by the most tenuous of truces. Now, with the precedent set, how long before the next uprising?

Revelations

The third story, Revelations, is a modern day ghost story with a small twist. An evangelist and his wife and assistant check into a motel where a murder had taken place several years in the past. The deceased couple are also there to recreate the murder or try and reconcile, who can tell. Witty and strange. Clive keeps us enthralled.

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth…” She instantly recognized the passage; its imagery
was unmistakable. “…and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.” The verse was from The Revelations of St. John the Divine. She knew the words that followed by heart.
He had declaimed them time after time at meetings.
“And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads

Down, Satan!

The fourth story, Down Satan, is rather short story about a man who wants to meet God – but finds that God seems to have abandoned him So he decides if he puts himself in danger from Satan, that God will come.

Almost despairing, he took it into his head that he could only win his way back into the arms of his Maker if he put his soul into the direst jeopardy. The notion had some merit. Suppose, he thought, I could contrive a meeting with Satan, the Archfiend. Seeing me in extremis, would not God be obliged to step in and deliver me back into the fold?

So he builds a Hell on earth to entice Satan.

In order to fuel his invention the great libraries of the world were scoured for descriptions of hells both secular and metaphysical. Museum vaults were ransacked for forbidden images of martyrdom. No stone was left unturned if it was suspected something perverse was concealed beneath

Bizare and dark, never really takes off as a full story. After he finishes building his hell, there are weird sounds in the night, in the lower pits. But every time he goes to check, there’s nothing there. His hell is empty. He slowly goes insane trying to catch the Devil at work that he decides it isn’t enough to have an empty hell, that he can become the Devil to ensure his Hell is actually working.

There was no sign of Satan, of course. There was only Gregorius. The master builder, finding no one to inhabit the house he had sweated over, had occupied it himself He had with him a few disciples whom he’d mustered over the years. They, like him, seemed unremarkable creatures. But there was not a torture device in the building they had not made thorough and merciless use of.

He does get arrested and dies in an insane asylum a few months later but his strong belief that God is missing and Satan is sleeping has left some religious cardinals wondering if that isn’t enough to create fallen angels on Earth.

The Age of Desire (TW Rape and Sadism)

The fifth story, The Age Of Desire, follows scientists involved in an experiment with love drugs that seem to go out of control. The subject of the experiment seems to become rather overcome with sexual desires – some very descriptive passages.

The songs told one seamless and obsessive story: of love lost and found, only to be lost again. The lyricists filled the airwaves with metaphor-much of it ludicrous, but no less potent for that. Of paradise, of hearts on fire; of birds, bells, journeys, sunsets; of passion as lunacy, as flight, as unimaginable treasure. The songs did not calm him with their fatuous sentiments. They flayed him, evoking, despite feeble rhyme and trite melody, a world bewitched by desire.
He began to tremble. His eyes, strained (or so he reasoned) by the unfamiliar spectacles, began to delude him. It seemed as though he could see traces of light in his skin, sparks flying from the ends of his fingers.

The experiment escapes and proceeds to rape and maul to death women, men and even the cops hunting for him. There’s no stopping his atrocious acts.

This is not a story for the faint of heart and it’s pretty much as explicit as they go, barring the sex scenes with the coat hanger from American Psycho * Bret Easton Ellis – 1991.

His pleas were silenced as he hit the opposite wall. The wild man was at his back in half a heartbeat, smearing Boyle’s face against the wallpaper. Birds and flowers, intertwined, filled his eyes. In desperation Boyle fought back, but the man’s passion lent him ungovernable strength. With one insolent hand holding the policeman’s head, he tore at Boyle’s trousers and underwear, leaving his buttocks exposed.
“God…” Boyle begged into the pattern of the wallpaper. “Please God, somebody help me But the prayers were no more fruitful than his struggles. He was pinned against the wall like a butterfly spread on cork, about to be pierced through. He closed his eyes, tears of frustration running down his cheeks.

Barker tells his stuff in elegant prose, using leitmotifs as cameos only (not taking stuff too literally), as sly touches to seriously-scary scenarios. It’s no wonder that the detective who seeks to capture the sexual deviant is, himself, a lush for a good cup of hot chocolate..