Reviews

The Inhuman Condition by Clive Barker

a_leo_reading's review against another edition

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5.0

Clive Barker will always be one of my favorite authors.
It was my first time readimg fhe anthology that put Clive Barker onto the main stream map.
The anthology was excelent.

saxonnefragile's review

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4.0

Barker n'a pas un style particulièrement impressionnant mais son talent réside dans sa capacité à inventer des histoires profondément dérangeante avec un petit côté body horror très sympathique.

something_sinister's review

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dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

dgatt321's review

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dark medium-paced

3.75

derhindemith's review against another edition

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3.0

The inhuman condition: Cute story. His Idee fixe of some mentally challenging task to keep the brain occupied while the subconscious unlocks something is nice, but the payoff wasn’t really worth it for me.
The body politic: a great conceit and I really liked how the story played out even if the end was a little unbelievable considering one of the fight scenes earlier in the story. Also, it’s the first story of his I’ve read with an explicitly black character, and while nice, seemed unnecessary. If you don’t explicitly an ethnicity, I can imagine the characters as whatever I want, and in this, case there was no need to tell me that one character was black, thereby implying that all of the others are not.
Revelations: a cute take on the motel noir setting
Down, satan: 500 words to say, “when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back”
The age of desire: didn’t finish because I don’t do rape. Not even chemically induced rape.

readandlisten's review against another edition

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4.0

Books of Blood IV.
Honing his craft for what later will be much more imaginative works.

mushababy's review

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slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

2.0

pywacket's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

tasharobinson's review

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4.0

This particular collection contains one of Clive Barker's weirdest stories, "The Body Politic" — in which everyone's hands decide they should be free to do whatever they want, and start hacking each other off human wrists and running around on their own "liberating" other hands — and one of his most grounded, "The Inhuman Condition," about a young hood who accidentally gets his hands on a little murderous magic, and gets obsessed with it. It's one of the stronger collections of the series, with the writing going back and forth between gothic and gritty, direct and expansive, and it showcases a bunch of Barker's different modes, from deeply weird horror-fantasy to something that's almost a police procedural. It's almost pointless to separate the Books Of Blood out as different from each other, since they all amount to one big showcase of Barker's short work, but given the scope here, I'd say this is one of the strongest of them when seen as an individual collection rather than part of the whole.

daverate's review

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2.0

Revelations was very good. The other four stories were okay. Unfortunately it ended on my least favourite story so left with a bitter taste.