Back in April 2000, horror writer Clive Barker inked a deal with Disney that spawned rapturous flurries of press releases: Abarat, the first book of a quartet, was to come out in 2001, with a new one to follow every nine months, and Disney would follow up with three Abarat movies, plus a flood of ancillary products ranging from toys to "an island at Disneyland." The reality has been significantly more modest. Abarat was eventually published in October 2002. Disney is reportedly still developing a script for a cinematic adaptation. And it took two years for Barker to follow Abarat with the sequel, Days Of Magic, Nights Of War.
The second book takes up where the first left off. Mildly rebellious, out-of-place teenager Candy Quackenbush, having been drawn out of boring Chickentown, Minnesota into a phantasmagorical world, continues to bounce rapidly between islands that embody hours of the day. At every pause, she meets new bizarre, Barkerian creatures that often threaten her life or freedom, either in the service of chaos, hunger, evil, or some mixture of the three. Triggered by the constant threats, a mysterious power begins to manifest in her. The plot is an old trope familiar to every fantasy reader, but Barker brings it to life with unusual color and brio. Like the first book, Days Of Magic is packed with samples of the hundreds of artworks Barker painted to illustrate the Abarat's denizens: The book's pages are a parade of distorted monsters and beneficent but outlandish humanoids, all of which contribute to a universe as crowded and variegated as that of George Lucas' Star Wars series.
But as with Star Wars, all the creativity tends to get steamrollered into the service of a shallow story that doesn't linger anywhere long enough to let the possibilities sink in. And the story often seems to be devoted to explaining the images, rather than the other way around. At nearly 500 pages, Days Of Magic is a hefty book, but it whizzes by in a blur of chases, sudden attacks and sudden escapes, and brief exchanges that fall into familiar patterns. Barker unleashes the same graphic grotesquerie that dominates his best-known books and films, such as the Hellraiser series, and his characters continue to share a gratifying adult complexity: The good guys are flawed, the bad guys are weak, troubled, and human, and even the monsters sometimes inspire sympathy. But even while it's darker in tone and content than the last book, it's disappointingly lighter in weight and affect. Like the predicted Disney-related Abarat phenomenon, the book seems far smaller than the grand promises foretold.