Sacrament - Softcover

Barker, Clive

3.76

5,317 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007755236 ISBN 13: 9780007755233

Publisher: Harper, 1996

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A famous photographer lying in a coma holds the key to the salvation of the world. But first he must travel back into the traumatic events of his childhood. Will Rabjohns has everything. He's handsome, he's rich, and he's revered as the world's greatest wildlife photographer. He's also a haunted man, driven to risk his life for his art -- to capture the raw tragedy of the wild, the beauty of nature's violence. After a near fatal encounter with a polar bear, he lies in a coma. There he must relive a central childhood memory: a meeting with ancient and terrible forces which revealed to him the mystery at the heart of nature. And he realizes that if he awakes, he must confront the darkness of his past and wage a war, not only for his own soul, but for the soul of the planet and every animal that breathes upon it.

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Review:

A boy has an encounter with a man who causes extinctions of other species, so he grows up to be a man who documents (and thus appeals for a halt to) those extinctions. This dark fantasy tale is unlike Clive Barker's other recent ones: it is more tightly plotted, and more of this world. In a sequence of well-executed stories within stories (comparable to Russian dolls), Barker unfolds a compelling examination of what it means to be human, to be a man, and to be a gay man--on a planet where aging, disease, and death bring "the passing of things, of days and beasts and men he'd loved." A satisfying long novel packed with vivid images, memorable characters, and a melancholy mood that reaches for hope.

From the Publisher:

Sacrament is a novel unlike any that Clive Barker has written. Neither horror nor fantasy, though partaking of both, this masterful work plunges far deeper and soars even higher.

It is the story of Will Rabjohns, perhaps the most famous wildlife photographer in the world, who has made his reputation chronicling the fates of endangered species, including his own. For even as Will rises to the pinnacle of his career, he is witnessing his own world -- the close-knit San Francisco community that has nurtured and liberated him -- ravaged by AIDS.

Then an almost mystical encounter with a bear in the Arctic leaves Will all but dead. In the depths of his coma, he revisits the wildernesses of his youth in England and relives the terrifying encounter that created him, both as an artist and a man.

Befriended by a mysterious couple, Rosa McGee and Jacob Steep, the young Will is granted the love he has been denied by his own family. But with that love comes a grim education. For while Rosa shows him the cruelties of passion, Jacob teaches him the purities of death -- seducing him with the possibility that he might one day slaughter the last of a species and thus change the world forever.

When Will stirs from his long sleep, he realizes that this dark dream, which he thought he had put behind him is still very much a part of who he is. Haunted by its echoes and driven by the certainty that he must face Rosa and Jacob one final time, he sets out on a journey of self-discovery -- a journey that will lead him from the familiar streets of San Francisco, back to the Yorkshire moors and on to the stark beauty of Scotland's Western Isles. There he will penetrate the ultimate mystery -- The Domus Mundi -- and finally discover the secret that links his destiny to that of the innumerable creatures with whom we share our planet.

Sacrament is the book Clive Barker's millions of readers knew he had to write someday: the troubling and passionate masterwork from the pen of one of today's most acclaimed authors.

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