“Imajica,” by Clive Barker

FM's ratings:

1. Premise 9
2. Prose 8
3. Plot 5
4. Characters 9
5. Overall 8

Comments (optional - but try to keep it under 3000 words!)

A massively overdeveloped plot – that’s why it had to be 824 pages of small print; the equivalent of about 1500 pages in a normal-size type. It’s not that it contains plot points that don’t add anything, or that it has too much back story (almost none!) or too much side story (very little). It just feels like, once the plot line was fully realized, it was stretched out to triple its length, albeit with meaningful additions that makes sense. It’s hard to argue against that … unless the flow of the story gets bogged down to tediousness. Almost everything else about this book is superb. The prose is mostly quite good, but there were far too many examples of ending sentences with prepositions. I think I normally don’t notice how often this happens in the writings of other authors, but for some reason what really stuck out in this story was the frequency it occurred with. I mean the frequency with which it occurred. Barker writes with real literary flair, seemingly careful not to get too flowery. Perhaps he simply doesn’t like how “stuffy” it sounds to use the “with which” phrase most commonly used to avoid that particular error. The main characters deserve a “10” but many of the secondary characters were rather underdeveloped. The contrasts between our reality and the other realities (dominions) described in the story were excellent; second to none. This novel deserves its stellar reputation among “horror/fantasy” enthusiasts. I just wish it hadn’t been marred by its tediousness.



Here’s the February line-up!

"The Right Attitude to Rain," by Alexander McCall Smith [2-3-18]
"The Ape Who Guards the Balance," by Elizabeth Peters [2-10-18]
"The Three Musketeers," by Alexandre Dumas [2-17-18]
"The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum," by Kirsten Weiss [2-24-18]