I first discovered Clive Barker in my senior year of high school. When I first cracked open the Books of Blood, I found something that rekindled a part of my being that I’d considered dead and gone. See, I started working in a library when I was sophomore. After two solid years of being surrounded by books for nineteen hours each week, I wanted nothing to do with them.

Looking back, I can see that I was just in a prolonged reading funk. These things happen. But being a teenager who never found his literary stride after being a voracious child-reader was difficult to manage. My brain thought I didn’t enjoy the activity anymore, much like my newfound aversions to my parents and sports. Luckily, I kept reading all this time. Even when I told my friends and teachers that I didn’t read in my spare time, I still had a novel on my bedside table that was swapped out fairly regularly. I still had to read to be able to fall asleep.

But I was bored. I didn’t like the adult novels I tried and I felt too disconnected from the teen horror novels I’d read up until that point. They were too predictable to deserve further analysis. And they were so tame.

The Books of Blood, though? There was something beautifully subversive about those stories. They were weird and perverse, filled with gore and sex and all of the adult things my brain wanted- all safely rooted in the genre I’d grown up enjoying most. What was more, I found a beautiful use of language that the books of my past lacked- metaphors, imagery, and sweet, sweet profanity.

Over the next year or two, I read everything Clive Barker wrote. I swore to everyone who would listen that his work wasn’t just horror- it was literary. He was head and shoulders above hacks like Stephen King and Dean Koontz (I’d never read either). And I stuck to my guns, even after I finished all of his work and had to branch out to new authors.

Until I met Jack Kerouac. When I finished reading On the Road, I drew a line in the literary sand, one that poor Clive would never be able to cross. I felt sad to have wasted all of that time on inferior books when Kerouac’s work had been available since the first time I drew breath.

There are two main characters in The Sorrow King, a father and a son. The father has mostly failed at life, but manages to happily manage a bookstore and maintains a relationship with his teenage son, who he doesn’t always understand. There is one touching scene in which the father reflects on his son’s reading choices, noting the switch from Cliver Barker to Jack Kerouac and how he’d made that same move himself.

And that’s very much what The Sorrow King is. It’s one of those transitional books. It’s not quite for adults and it’s not quite for young adults. I appreciated it because it didn’t speak clearly to me. As a rule, I don’t read horror. It’s a stupid rule, granted, but I tend to not like horror fiction. But this book seemed to have been written for me (either that or my past has been so sadly replicated by so many others that this reading transition is universal and I never knew about it). While reading it, I identified with the father and the son simultaneously. It was like watching two of my own developmental stages from an outside perspective. If that sounds kind of cool and creepy, it is. That those selves of mine were dropped into a fantastical fairy story only made things better. I was able to see what horror did for me as a teenager and why I outgrew it. It had to happen. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t go back to it and see it in another light.

I was wrong. When I dismissed Clive Barker as a waste of time after my first foray into literary fiction, I was, once again, demonstrating my own naivete. Nothing that moves you forward is a waste. Those tattered mass market paperbacks got me to where I am today.

Oh. You want to know about the book? It’s good. Really good. You should read it.