When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Barker’s best fiction should be read in its entirety still, this generous collection offers seductive proof of the redoubtable imaginative power of one of our boldest inventors.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

Standouts include a riveting story, “The Forbidden,” which became the brilliant horror film Candyman several evocative scenes from Barker’s underrated visionary novel Sacrament (1996) and memorable passages from two masterpieces: Cabal (1988) and The Damnation Game (1987). “Doorways,” for example, presents entries into other worlds, in a florid (and lurid) passage from the play Paradise Street and a chilling snippet from the novel The Great and Secret Show (1990). “Private Legends,” Barker’s detailed introduction, offers interesting revelations about pivotal moments in his youth that influenced his development as writer, painter, and filmmaker it also firmly distances the author from the realistic tradition and sturdily defends what he rather grandly calls “the fantastique.” The book is arranged in 13 sections representing favorite themes. A mega-anthology of (mostly) excerpts from novels and plays by the popular and critically acclaimed horror writer whose increasingly ambitious work keeps pushing against genre boundaries.

The forbidden candyman book