Clive Barker's SACRAMENT

Advocate Review

"To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep."
It's a description of a single day. But in the hands of Clive Barker, it's a metaphor for the journey of self-discovery taken by photojournalist Will Rabjohns, the 41-year-old gay protagonist of Barker's shimmering new novel, Sacrament.
Barker, the openly gay artist whose books (Imajica, Everville) and films (Hellraiser, Lord of Illusions) have earned him a worldwide reputation as a horror and sci-fi master, makes a terrific departure with Sacrament. Barker sets his story in the physical world of mankind, in the here and now, but summons at will his ability to conjure things both fearsome and magical. As astonishing as this work is, it'll strike you as perfectly, entirely possible.
Fans expecting a good tingle or a quick shock from Barker will not be disappointed. For those readers who don't warm easily to the concept of monsters from the great beyond, Barker has built a mind-bending tale that is undeniably and forcibly compelling.
Will is a cloyingly self-confident photojournalist whose nature pictures have brought him a big dose of fame and bigger doses of criticism. His eye gravitates to -- in fact, is obsessed by -- savagery. He doesn't take pictures of the Sierra Club type; he focuses on battle and brutality in the animal kingdom, on the bloody trappings of death, imminent and inevitable, especially of endangered species.
On assignment in the Yukon, Will is mauled horribly by a polar bear. Afterward, he floats in and out of a coma from which his past calls out, the present blurs, and the future fairly shrieks. There's a mystical purpose to all this time travel. In Will's disturbing dreams -- or are they memories? -- the imaginary Lord Fox, a cavorting animal dressed in a frock coat, stands up on his haunches and goads Will to harness his past and use it to save the future. But why? And from what?
Once Will is well enough to resume his life, Barker pulls us along on a death-defying journey to the very center of creation. Will's challenge, it turns out, is to fight to save humanity against powerful forces determine to return the world to its natural state -- which does not necessarily include humans.
This cosmic battle story is thread in with scenes from Will's present-day gay life in San Francisco, where the AIDS epidemic rages on, magnified by the battle his beloved ex-love Patrick wages against HIV. In Barker's smart and sexy prose, Patrick is a "big, broad, handsome man. In a suit, he looked like somebody's bodyguard; in drag at Mardi Gras, like a fundamentalist's nightmare; in leather, sublime." It's one of the book's most telling ironies -- the photojournalist who makes his living photographing dying animals watching helplessly as the man he loves is dying.
With the sheer power of his storytelling, Barker invites you to take the ride and dare to question your beliefs -- perhaps even the very existence of life as you define it. Barker refuses to lead either Will or his readers to an answer. But he leaves us with a hint of possibility, as witnessed in Will's ringing defiance of the ravages of AIDS: "We're spontaneous events. We just appear in the middle of families. And we'll keep appearing. Even if the plague killed every homosexual on the planet, it wouldn't be extinction, because there's queer babies being born every minute. It's like magic." That's the closest thing to queer nirvana you're likely to read anytime soon.
Mark Huisman The Advocate, July 23, 1996