About Arabat

Reading Arabat by Clive Barker. I think it’s his latest book. It’s a pretty thing, filled with colorful illustrations, oil paintings that Barker has done for the book. The art is fun. It’s of the character design variety – lots of single paintings of single characters who are strange and weird and interesting but who are just … there. A painting of John Mischief; a painting of Candy Quackenbush; not a painting of John Mischief as he meets Candy Quackenbush. Barker the writer often shows up Barker the illustrator. Scenes that he describes in detail with words look a bit perfunctory when rendered in paint. (The isle of Yabba Dim Day comes to mind.) Just as often though he brings to life a creature in art that he barely glanced at in prose. (The ladder legged creature who appears a few pages later.)