He joins forces with Suzanna Parrish, a sculptor who inherits the duty of protecting the Fugue from her grandmother. Finding it, he catches a glimpse of the Fugue, the world of magic which has been concealed inside a carpet. He sets off through Liverpool’s suburbs one day in search of a homing pigeon which has strayed. Our hero Cal Mooney lives with his dad and works in an insurance office. Weaveworld‘s pages are still thick with the smell of my cousin’s black cherry roll ups after twenty years.ĭespite my bad experience with the Cabal preview, Barker’s book entranced me from the start. I must have finished all the Stephen King on his shelves. One day I took my cousin’s copy of Weaveworld from his attic room. You don’t need to watch much of the dull Nightbreed game video below to realise how badly I was bewitched at this stage. Even Cabal I’d only read because I liked horror, and the video game of the movie was kind of awesome, to a preteen fan of video nasties. I didn’t give it much of a chance: magic carpets seemed silly to my pubescent self, even when they didn’t fly. I’d been reluctant to read it, based on a preview in the back of Barker’s Cabal (the novella filmed as Nightbreed).

It feels overlong, and probably isn’t the greatest fantasy novel of all time, but twenty years ago Barker’s novel blew me away. Researching this post, I couldn’t find many reviews of Weaveworld online. It’s timely: I’ve been writing about the borderland between adult and YA literature lately, and I read the book when I was just starting high school. I just finished rereading Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, the 1987 fantasy which sees a world of magic, concealed for a century in an enchanted carpet, unleashed on contemporary Britain.

Clive barker weaveworld review