HarperCollins Audio Excerpt Online SACRAMENT Discussion! "Will Rabjohns" sketch by Clive Barker London Times Review Publishing News Review Advocate Review Publishers Weekly Review Kirkus Review

Savaged by a polar bear, eminent wildlife photographer Will Rabjohns is taken unconscious to hospital. Comatose, Will regresses to his childhood in rural Yorkshire where his firsthand experience with mysterious and terrible forces show him the frightening and unknown powers at the heart of nature.

Barker has written a fantasy tale as tight and compelling as any of his previous novels, blending temporal shifts and exotic (and ordinary) locations, as Will inexorably confronts elemental enigmas that have haunted him since boyhood. Represented by the deliciously wicked and slyly sexual Jacob Steep and Rosa Macghee, the dark forces threaten the very fabric of the Earth itself.

With well-sketched and likeable characters, a plot that encompasses rites of passage, themes of sexuality and ecology, Barker's latest novel will create plenty of converts and serves to consolidate his position at the forefront of his genre.

UK Publishing News, April 12, 1996