About book The Complete Clive Barker's The Great And Secret Show (2006)
In the dead letter room in the middle of Omaha, Randolph Jaffe has stumbled upon a secret. At first, the secret isn’t clear, just vague references to something called the Art. The Art begins to consume Jaffe, taking over his life. Its secrets continue to elude Jaffe until he cracks part of the code.The Art are laws governing an alternate reality called Quididdty. Quididdty is the dream see, the dreamscape, the magic that runs through all our fantasies. Jaffe can think of nothing else except the Art and becoming a master of it. Quididdty is his for the taking.Taking a scientist named Fletcher under his wing to further his growing evil, Jaffe hopes to get one step closer to mastering the Art. Fletcher creates a transforming drug they call Nuncio, which uses the principals of the Art. What they don’t realize is that it will become their undoing.Fletcher realizes that Jaffe is evil and attempts to stop his plans by destroying the Nuncio. He knows that the drug is capable of transforming anyone into what ever they are most on the inside. Good becomes great. Evil becomes more so. Except, the Nuncio has other plans. It transforms Fletcher and then Jaffe into Demigods. Not content to let the other live, (after all, good must always triumph over evil) Fletcher and Jaffe engage in a battle that brings them to Palamo Grove, a small town and an ideal place to hide and rest in the earth while regaining the energy to continue fighting.Years pass. Then something unthinkable happens. Four girls, dubbed The League of Virgins, become pregnant after swimming in a river that appeared on the edge of town. When the girls start talking of being raped in the river, gossip in the small town grows to an all time high. No one knows the truth, however, no matter how crazy the rumors.Jaffe and Fletcher have impregnated four women in hopes of producing offspring to continue the battle they began so many years ago. Fletcher knows that he cannot allow Jaffe to gain access to the Art, to Quididdty; otherwise, it could mean the end of the world, and dreams, as we know it…What Barker does here is create myth and he does so beautifully. It’s a difficult thing to create an epic myth from the ground up, but Barker does so in “The Great and Secret Show” with such skill and mastery that you know he has a gift. The plot mentioned above doesn’t even begin to describe the plot for this book. It is a big, wonderfully sprawling dive into wonderland.What I love about books by Clive Barker is that they are usually character driven. This is also the case here. While there is a lot of focus on myth and legend here, Barker also focuses on the people filling his tale. It’s a good thing he does – there is a cast of hundreds here and we get to know almost all of them through out “The Great and Secret Show”. What’s wonderful is that this is actually the first novel in a trilogy, The Books of Art.I devoured this book. Quididdty now floats through my dreams and haunts my waking hours. This is an amazing book. It’s a big one, but it’s worth it. An amazing piece of literature, a great beginning to an epic fantasy, any way you look at it, this is an amazing read.
CLIVE BARKER’S THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW, VOLUME 1 BY CHRIS RYALL AND GABRIEL RODRIGUEZ: It’s always interesting to see how graphic novel adaptations of complex and long books are going to turn out. Thankfully, Ryall’s and Rodriguez’s adaptation of Barker’s book is one that he is proud of, and will make fans happy. For a summary of the novel, see my review for The Great and Secret Show.The key here is that this is the first volume in an at least two-volume series, because the forty or fifty pages would not be able to cover the whole story. What’s so refreshing is the art. Clive Barker has a very vivid imagination and to see these crazy and complex images show in art form rich with color and detail is a truly enjoyable experience. Along with a brilliantly written script that manages to condense a six hundred page book, or three hundred in this case, into this slim graphic novel.Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show is perfect for the fan of the book looking to see it done in a whole new way, as well as those not sure if they want to tackle a long dense book, and looking for a Cliffnotes version. Of course, once they’ve read it, they will probably want to read the novel version, which of course, is highly recommended.For more book reviews, and author interviews, go to BookBanter.
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This was a decent adaptation of Barker's sprawling novel. The problem with adapting anything the size of THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW is that you can't include everything. Some of the cracks show pretty large, despite Ryall's best efforts. There are many places where you can see events have been compressed to stay within twelve issues. Perhaps an approach similar to what Marvel is taking with Stephen King's THE STAND would have been more appropriate. That being said, this adaptation captures the tone and feel of the source material, and Rodriguez's art is fantastic. Definitely worth picking up for Barker fans.
—Blu
This was fun enough, in a kinda Carlos Castaneda-meets-H.P. Lovecraft-with-some X-Files-thrown-in way. The artist is obsessed with boobies, though. I like 'em well enough, but in moderation. Some of the pages almost had big red arrows labelled "BOOBIES!!! printed on them. I guess it's comic-book thing: artist can draw women hot, can't really draw women normal or vaguely pretty or the countless other variations encountered in real life. Also: a major plot-point involves a sentient lake raping and impregnating some teenage girls. Yeurggh. This isn't a problem, per se, I guess. Zeus got up to that kind of stuff in Greek myths all the time, and I can imagine it could be handled in a subtle way. But it was just the leering quality of the artwork that made this so sleazy. Loved the festy little dude with the floating balloon head. That was genuinely creepy.
—Brian Yatman
