Books of Blood, Volume I

The first of Clive Barker's six Books of Blood collections opens with its own frame story: a fake psychic named Simon McNeal is caught by genuine ghosts furious at being exploited, who carve their true stories directly into his skin, turning him into a living book. What follows are five stand-alone horror stories, among them a hunt through the London Underground and a small-town secret with a body count, unified less by setting than by Barker's insistence that horror can be beautiful, sexual and darkly funny at once. The collection that launched Barker's career and reshaped horror short fiction in the 1980s.