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

Clive Barker is England's answer to Stephen King. Since he now lives in California, it is perhaps unsurprising that Sacrament moves with equally authentic sense of place between the gay bars of San Francisco and the Yorkshire Dales.

Will Rabjohns is a controversial wildlife photographer, not least because he specialises in portraits of rare animals in their death throes. When an attack by a polar bear in Alaska leaves him in a coma, he relives a sinister childhood encounter that changed his life: a meeting in the dark with an exotic couple whose lives and lusts far exceed normal humanity.

This is a dark, brooding book, rich with speculation about the death of diversity in nature, about extinction -- individual as well as that of entire species -- and about the dark side of sexuality. Its pivotal characters, Jacob Steep and Rosa McGhee, are metaphors in the grand Gothic tradition. Dickens would have seen in them the ghosts of Bill Sykes and Nancy, but doomed to walk the earth forever, as if in perpetual penitence for the crimes they keep committing.

Barker is deliberately skating on dangerously thin ice. His promiscuously homosexual hero migrates between a human world of friends and lovers dying of Aids-related illnesses and a natural world of even greater casual cruelty. In the midst of this stalks Steep with his ancient memories, his razor-sharp executioner's knife and the mystery of his and Rosa's dead babies.

Steep and Rosa carp at each other down the ages, tethered as if by an indivisible bond, infuriated at their inability to recall their origins or understand their purpose in life.

Will is what they both long for and fear, the force that brings them back to the knowledge of their roots in a pilgrimage to a remote Scottish island. Where Sacrament falls down is in its denouement, almost as if the author was unable to live up to his own definition of cruelty.

Nonetheless, this is a gripping book that weaves a compulsive spell almost to the final page. Vintage Barker.

Peter Millar The London Times, July 6, 1996