THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW By Clive Barker

In THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW by Clive Barker, a slacker working at the U.S. Postal Service’s biggest dead letter office pieces together clues enabling him to tap a vast power beyond our world. His obsession with going even further–becoming, in a way, God–leads him into conflict with an equally powerful nemesis bent on stopping him.

Their good versus evil battle exhausts itself in a small California town, where it waits for the right conditions to be reignited. The battle, once reignited, may end the world.

Clive Barker delivers an intriguing urban fantasy of epic proportions, which continues on with a sequel, EVERVILLE. I didn’t find it particularly scary–it’s more an urban fantasy than horror in the vein of DOCTOR SLEEP (King) and NS4A2 (Hill). It’s also somewhat sprawling, with a lot of diversions, especially after the really tight, almost perfect first act where Harold Jaffe becomes The Jaffe. But its ideas and elements were extremely titillating and kept me turning pages.