This is an absolutely brilliant set of horror short stories! But then, that's pretty obvious - This is the debut set of short stories by a writer who is now accepted as one of the greatest and most prolific horror writers of all time. It would be a massive understatement to say that his reputation precedes him, but it's a reputation which, in my experience at least, doesn't do justice to this book.

Clive Barker is synonymous with the excesses of horror, particular sex and gore - Splatterpunk of a kind - And while this collection includes elements of this, especially in its first and last stories, it would be a sad disservice to the stories to reduce them to those elements. The first two stories, The Book of Blood and Midnight Meat Train, is a masterpiece of gore and unsettling horror, setting the stage for Barker's excess and drama, verging sometimes on melodrama. The Yattering and Jack, my personal favourite, is a comic horror focusing on the tribulations of a devil set to break an impenetrably dull victim in excellently-realised English suburbia. Pig Blood Blues lets Barker have fun in some properly unsettling, cultic territory. Sex, Death, and Starshine is a fantastic, oddly hopeful, and wonderfully melodramatic piece centred on the theatre, almost a reworking of Phantom of the Opera. Finally, In the Hills, The Cities realises one of the best horror high-concepts I have ever read brilliantly. The prose could occasionally use tightening up, but there is really very little for me to nitpick - This collection is great and Barker is underrated!