⇒ Libro Absolute Midnight Books of Abarat Clive Barker 9780007100477 Books

Absolute Midnight Books of Abarat Clive Barker 9780007100477 Books

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Absolute Midnight Books of Abarat Clive Barker 9780007100477 Books

I would recommend this book only to someone who had read the first two and needed closure, but if you can be satisfied with the first one, or the first two, I'd suggest stopping there. I loved the first Abarat, but found the second to be entirely bogged down by endless descriptive passages. I don't take issue with description - it's a fantasy book! seeing fantastical things is at least half the point! - but these would sometimes go on far past their expiration, and I found myself wondering if things were going to happen already or not. Still, I got "into" it by about halfway through. Overall, I felt that it was under-edited in an unfortunate but still forgivable way.

Which brings us to Absolute Midnight, which apparently was edited not at all. My copy, the paperback no less, was riddled with glaring typos, including obvious grammatical errors, and, more confusingly, there was at least one set of dialogue where at least one of the parties must have said two of the lines in a row and the tags were mismatched. As for content, it is still a relative page-turner and easy read, but there were multiple confrontation scenes where the characters would banter and threaten, but never seemed to do much of anything. At some points it became outright laughable, like a parody of a bad horror movie where the bad guy says, "I'm gonna do it now! OK, I'm gonna do it! I mean it! Better get ready because it's coming! Any minute now!"

Minor spoilers ahoy:

The characters' journeys seemed haphazard at best. Boa wasn't just presented as evil, she is presented as always having been evil, like this isn't news to Candy or the reader or even many other characters. Not only that, but then she just sort of...goes away. She doesn't have a part to play in the finale, and it turns out to be unimportant that the person who has been living in our protagonist's head is secretly evil, which is a completely insane thing to be unimportant. It hardly matters that she played Carrion, and it doesn't matter at all that she tricked Finnegan.

Overall, quite a disappointing end to a series that started out very, very strong.


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Absolute Midnight Books of Abarat Clive Barker 9780007100477 Books Reviews

I started this series when I was young and decided to pick it up again as an adult for some escape from nonfiction. The world of Abarat is just as entertaining as I remember; however, this book besides lacking the unique illustrations also included too many plots with not nearly enough expansion. The ending felt terribly rushed, and worst of all it left a cliffhanger, alluding a 4th book. I will always cherish the first two books in this series as magical and enthralling, but it is clear that even the author is ready to depart from the world of Abarat.
This review of ABSOLUTE MIDNIGHT will serve double duty to review the Abarat series three books in a nine year time span.

First things first buy the Abarat books in hardback because they are the only editions containing Clive's paintings except for one early paperback printing long out of print; the 'revised' paperbacks have no illustrations either. The artwork is half the story, ugly as it, more intended for horror than fantasy. All the paintings are cartoony but Bosch-like and may frighten or put off children. Interested parties should source the first two hardbacks "Abarat" and "Days of Magic, Nights of War" if they want Barker's paintings. Those editions are now scarce, expensive, secondhand and seldom have dustjackets. No matter, all the pictures on the dustcovers are reproduced inside. The hardback editions weigh a ton because of the paper stock used for the paintings.

Heroine Candy Quackenbush's outlandish adventures are not YA the way Harry Potter is not YA, after the Goblet of Fire anyway. Barker's prose in the Abarat books is far above that sad benchmark of newspapers everywhere with verbiage is dumbed-down to an eighth grade level. Ultimately it's all for naught, a tempest in a teapot. Barker's talent for building worlds on paper is tangible, but his backdrops depict more imagination than his characters and the paces he puts them through. Each Abarat book finds Candy in new lands making new friends and enemies. ABSOLUTE MIDNIGHT is no different, barely advancing the saga of Miss Quackenbush and enlarging the number of viewpoints even more (not a plus).

I'd venture to say ABSOLUTE MIDNIGHT and its two prior companion volumes are more of a magnum opus than either "Imajica" or "Weaveworld." All of them have the same plot---oddball human characters enter an horrific Barker universe. It doesn't matter if it's the Fugue, the Five Dominions or the Islands of the Abarat, all of them are bizarre places teeming with bizarre people, creatures and customs; these warped netherworlds are Kafkaesque, part-Dali, part-Ditko, part-Jack Vance. Abaratic highpoints are the lighthouse sequence in the first book, the carnival island where it's always six in the evening in the second, and the seagoing scenes in ABSOLUTE MIDNIGHT and when Mater Motley 'reconstructs' the absolute midnight island. I must emphasize those highpoints comprise less than 100 of the 1537 pages published so far in hardback, with hundreds of other pages devoted to Barker's paintings.

The Abarat series is uneven, it could've been a contender, but isn't. I rank ABSOLUTE MIDNIGHT and the series as a whole only three stars because it's occasionally thought-provoking, though populated with characters I really don't care about. Barker has clearly run out of gas on this project. But what can you expect of the guy? From the start he's been a writer whose fiction contains uniformly strong beginnings with invariable weak endings. The jury is still out on Abarat because Barker has yet to finish it, there are supposed to be two more books in the series. In all honesty I doubt Clive Barker will ever get around to writing them. And I won't read them if he does.
I would recommend this book only to someone who had read the first two and needed closure, but if you can be satisfied with the first one, or the first two, I'd suggest stopping there. I loved the first Abarat, but found the second to be entirely bogged down by endless descriptive passages. I don't take issue with description - it's a fantasy book! seeing fantastical things is at least half the point! - but these would sometimes go on far past their expiration, and I found myself wondering if things were going to happen already or not. Still, I got "into" it by about halfway through. Overall, I felt that it was under-edited in an unfortunate but still forgivable way.

Which brings us to Absolute Midnight, which apparently was edited not at all. My copy, the paperback no less, was riddled with glaring typos, including obvious grammatical errors, and, more confusingly, there was at least one set of dialogue where at least one of the parties must have said two of the lines in a row and the tags were mismatched. As for content, it is still a relative page-turner and easy read, but there were multiple confrontation scenes where the characters would banter and threaten, but never seemed to do much of anything. At some points it became outright laughable, like a parody of a bad horror movie where the bad guy says, "I'm gonna do it now! OK, I'm gonna do it! I mean it! Better get ready because it's coming! Any minute now!"

Minor spoilers ahoy

The characters' journeys seemed haphazard at best. Boa wasn't just presented as evil, she is presented as always having been evil, like this isn't news to Candy or the reader or even many other characters. Not only that, but then she just sort of...goes away. She doesn't have a part to play in the finale, and it turns out to be unimportant that the person who has been living in our protagonist's head is secretly evil, which is a completely insane thing to be unimportant. It hardly matters that she played Carrion, and it doesn't matter at all that she tricked Finnegan.

Overall, quite a disappointing end to a series that started out very, very strong.