I first read Weaveworld in high school in 1988. I think it was the third Clive Barker book I read, with The Damnation Game being the first. At the time, a friend of mine volunteered at our local library and wanted to impress me, so he snagged an audio copy of The Damnation Game. I think I still have the cassettes somewhere. I used to listen to that book over and over, and it deepened my understanding of how scary stories should be told. Clive Barker is best known for his horror fiction, and while there are horrific scenes in Weaveworld, this novel is more in tune with portal fantasy. A hidden world of magical people who have to hide to keep themselves safe because of their differences spoke volumes to me as a teenager of mixed ethnicity growing up in rural Pennsylvania. It still speaks to me today for those same reasons. When I graduated from my MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University, an old friend sent me a signed copy to celebrate my achievement. I’ve been meaning to read the book again for quite some time, because I was curious how it would stand up after all these years. It’s still a great story with magical people and places, scary villains, and ordinary heroes who become extraordinary and give us hope. Of course, there are some parts that are problematic but overall, it’s still an excellent book. I still have my original copy of the book, which I read for this discussion even though my signed copy is the re-release with the beautiful cover you see below.
Weaveworld (1988)
Written by: Clive Barker
Genre: Dark Fantasy/Horror
Publisher: Pocket Books
Pages: 704 (Paperback)
The Premise:
Here is storytelling on a grand scale — the stuff of which a classic is made. Weaveworld begins with a rug — a wondrous, magnificent rug — into which a world has been woven. It is the world of the Seerkind, a people more ancient than man, who possesses raptures — the power to make magic. In the last century they were hunted down by an unspeakable horror known as the Scourge, and, threatened with annihilation, they worked their strongest raptures to weave themselves and their culture into a rug for safekeeping. Since then, the rug has been guarded by human caretakers.
The last of the caretakers has just died.
Vying for possession of the rug is a spectrum of unforgettable characters: Suzanna, granddaughter of the last caretaker, who feels the pull of the Weaveworld long before she knows the extent of her own powers; Calhoun Mooney, a pigeon-raising clerk who finds the world he’s always dreamed of in a fleeting glimpse of the rug; Immacolata, an exiled Seerkind witch intent on destroying her race even if it means calling back the Scourge; and her sidekick, Shadwell, the Salesman, who will sell the Weaveworld to the highest bidder.
In the course of the novel the rug is unwoven, and we travel deep into the glorious raptures of the Weaveworld before we witness the final, cataclysmic struggle for its possession.
Barker takes us to places where we have seldom been in fiction — places terrifying and miraculous, humorous, and profound. With keen psychological insight and prodigious invention, his trademark graphic vision balanced by a spirit of transcendent promise, Barker explores the darkness and the light, the magical and the monstrous, and celebrates the triumph of the imagination.
As this is a book club discussion, there will be spoilers ahead.
Discussion
If you’ve read any of my critiques of other people’s fiction, you know that I tend to focus on questions about identity politics — race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and their intersectionalities. I read Weaveworld through the same lens. As a black feminist writer, I couldn’t help but compare certain characters and events taking place in the novel published in the late 1980s to some of the current political and social events taking place in 2020. Oppression based on physical differences like the color of people’s skin isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality. And the Seerkind, the magical people who inhabit the hidden world in this novel, have experienced persecution at the hands of Humankind for centuries. Fear can easily transform into hatred, especially if that fear and hatred benefits one group of people over another. So, my choice to reread one of my favorite novels seems rather timely in this historical moment when non-white people are awakening to the realities of life under the constant threat and oppression of White Supremacy.
The plot and characters held up pretty well, with the exception of the fact that Barker uses extremely outdated terms to refer to non-white characters in the text — Black people are Negroes or Negresses, and Asian people are Orientals. Most people of the African Diaspora referred to themselves as being Black when this novel was published, and I’m pretty sure Asian people referred to themselves based on their specific ethnicity or country or origin. So, that slowed me down each time I encountered these essentially racist terms. What didn’t slow me down was the fact that one of the primary villains, Hobart, a police inspector, calls Black people niggers. In fact, his use of racist language didn’t even phase me. While the use of racist language made Hobart seem more authentic as a fascist upholding the Law above everything else, sometimes writers rely too heavily on racial slurs to depict someone as a racist and therefore evil. Racist = evil/villain. Stephen King does that a lot, and after reading several of King’s novels where he has a character use the word nigger to show us how terrible that character is, it just seems lazy. Maybe it’s even a trope among writers of a certain age. And, because there’s a spectrum of racism, many racists wouldn’t use that word because they don’t consider themselves racist. But that’s a discussion for another day.
One of the things that struck me while reading the novel again after more than 30 years is the fact that I remembered characters, but I couldn’t clearly remember events or how characters interacted with each other. So, in a lot of ways, reading Weaveworld this time was like reading a new novel. Perhaps one of the reasons I forgot so many things about the novel is the fact that not only is it a 704 page book, but there are a lot of characters. No, really, a lot.
The novel is divided into books and parts and smaller easier to digest pieces. In Book One, “In the Kingdom of the Cuckoo,” we meet Calhoun Mooney, or Cal, who is one of the main protagonists of the novel. The Kingdom of the Cuckoo is the non-magical world outside the Weaveworld, where Humankind live. Magical folks, Seerkind, live inside the carpet, with the exception of some Seerkind who were tasked with keeping the carpet hidden, and therefore safe. As is the case with most magical realms, in order to keep the magical folks safe from discovery, they need to hide from the non-magical world and its people. When Seerkind tried living among Humankind, they were hunted and persecuted because of their differences. So, in a sense, Humankind is a villain of sorts in the novel, much like Muggles in the world of Harry Potter.
The opening line of the book tells us:
Nothing ever begins. (pg. 4)
Which is an interesting way to start a story that obviously began before the specific moment in time when we first meet Cal. As Cal slowly gets drawn into his quest with a series of unusual events, like chasing down an escaped pet pigeon and falling headfirst off a wall and catching a glimpse of a hidden world that seems to be contained in an old carpet, we get the sense that he’s coming into the story somewhere in the middle and since we follow him for most of the novel, so are we. But, aren’t many fantasy novels like that? The protagonists might discover something that’s new to them, but that something or someplace usually has a much older origin story. Barker doesn’t tell us much right away. In fact the book has an extremely slow start and pace. Like Cal, we learn about the hidden world slowly, getting hung up on the lack of knowledge and very few details we catch glimpses of as we meet other people who are looking for the carpet as well. Through each new character, a bit more is revealed about the carpet and the world it is hiding. We know that magic exists, but the only magic we initially see is dark magic performed by the villains of the story.
Barker tells the story from multiple POVs, which allows us to see many perspectives on what’s happening in the novel and creates a rather diverse story. The two main characters, Cal and Suzanna, are the heroes of this epic tale. When they first meet in the nearly abandoned house that belongs to Suzanna’s grandmother, Mimi Laschenski, one of the Seerkind tasked with keeping the carpet safe, they seem destined to begin a romantic relationship. However, the circumstances of their combined quests don’t really allow for that to happen and these characters spend a lot of the narrative apart.
And, both of them have relationships with other people, which I found interesting because that doesn’t usually happen in speculative fiction. There are undercurrents of romance throughout the novel, but love takes on different meanings in this story — there’s love between friends, love between lovers, love of family and the responsibilities that come with that love, love of magic, love of power, and love of community and country. There is love between Cal and Suzanna, but we never really find out if they get their happily ever after. Which in most cases would be fine if there was a sequel in the works, but there isn’t. I don’t mind reading a book that leaves a lot up in the air at the end, even if there isn’t a sequel. Not all stories need to have a neat and tidy ending.
As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of horrific scenes in the novel, and there are characters who are sources of horror as well. There are at least three main villains in the novel, and each of them brings their own flavor of horror to the pages. The first villain we meet is Shadwell the Salesman and he keeps company with an Incantatrix (or sorceress), Immacolata, who possesses a power known as the Menstruum. Shadwell is a Cuckoo (human), but Immacolata, an outcast from the Weaveworld, has given him some magic to wield. He wears a special jacket, and when you gaze into the lining of this jacket, Shadwell is able to conjure your greatest desire. Or, at the very least, objects that mean a lot to the person gazing into the jacket. Shadwell uses this magic to manipulate and control people as he gets closer and closer to finding the carpet containing the hidden world. Shadwell wishes to sell the carpet to the highest bidder, and Immacolata wants vengeance on the Seerkind who cast her out. Her desire is genocide.
Immacolata is a powerful witch who has chosen to use her power in the service of darkness. She has two sisters, who she killed while they were all still in the womb. This fact doesn’t prevent her phantom sisters, The Magdalene and The Hag, from continuing to create terror in the lives of people who are unfortunate enough to encounter them. The Magdalene is the embodiment of rampant female sexuality, and she uses this sexuality as a weapon to terrorize her prey. After she rapes her victims in a way that makes rape even more horrific, she gives birth to monsters who have the faces of their traumatized fathers. This is probably one of the most horrific aspects of the novel, because first, she rapes her victims, Cuckoos and Seerkind alike, and then creates an army of her monstrous children known as the by-blows, who are also wielded as weapons. These three sisters are a bastardized version of the Maiden, Mother, and Crone aspects of the Triple Goddess. Immacolata remains a virgin (Maiden) and channels her power of chastity through the Menstruum, but there’s really nothing pure about her use of magic. She views sex as a defiling and the idea of it sickens her, so she leaves that aspect up to The Magdalene (Mother), and The Hag (Crone) acts as a midwife to birth the monsters her sister creates.
Shadwell describes Immacolata as “paradoxical,” (pg. 11) and it is his fear of her, not just her unusual beauty and power, that makes her sexually attractive to him. His unrequited desire for her is one of the ways she has of controlling him, as well as his fear of her magic and her terrifying sisters. At the beginning of the novel, she holds all the power in their relationship. A fact that changes dramatically when power shifts from her hands to his when he realizes the potential for ruling over Seerkind rather than annihilating them as she wishes to do. In many ways, Shadwell becomes the greatest threat in the novel as his power and his ego increases. He imagines himself the ruler of the Weaveworld, in which he plans to enslave the Seerkind for his own pleasure, and dreams of becoming a god once he harnesses the magic that created the Weaveworld, the Gyre.
At the beginning of the narrative, Shadwell and Immacolata track down the carpet using magic to hone in on its unique magical signature while Cal and Suzanna seek it to keep it out of the hands of Shadwell and Immacolata. When Suzanna’s grandmother is murdered after Immacolata tries to rip her secrets from her while she lies dying of old age in a hospital bed, and Cal is nearly killed by the by-blows while fighting Shadwell for possession of the carpet, Suzanna discovers that she’s more connected to Seerkind than she originally thought. She also has the menstruum inside her. This realization intrigues and frightens her at the same time, and like many a heroine in a fantasy novel discovering her power for the first time, she is in denial about it and doesn’t want to take on the new responsibility that comes along with powerful magic. But, as she encounters more and more magic, she becomes more confident and slowly accepts her own power.
Suzanna’s power attracts the unwanted attention of Hobart, the fascist police inspector, who believes that she and her Seerkind acquaintances are terrorists who are somehow able to create mass hallucinations when Humankind witness some unexplained phenomena and lose their shit, inciting a riot. When the blinders people wear are removed and the truth of things is revealed, people do tend to lose their shit. Much like White people being “woke” to the reality of how the political machinations of America’s forefathers lead to systemic/institutionalized racism and an economic system based on White Supremacy, Humankind is shook by the fact that magic exists. Hobart and his police force try to contain the hysteria by not only lying to the public about what they witnessed, but they also lie to themselves. They refuse to accept the truth of magic and prefer to criminalize the people who wield it. No matter how hard they try, though, magic/truth wins out over denial/lies.
In Conclusion
I’m not going to give away more of the story, because it’s too great a story to spoil if you’ve never read it. What I will say is that in many ways, Weaveworld functions as an allegory for how humans treat other humans terribly because of their fear and hatred of differences. Now would be a good time to read Weaveworld if you haven’t already, and if you have, maybe it’s time to revisit this tale of magic versus non-magic. Reality versus fairy tales. And how love is possibly the strongest magic that exists. As I mentioned, not all stories need to have a neat and tidy ending. Clive Barker agrees. The final words of this epic fantasy novel full of horror, allegory, betrayal, greed, racism and romance, leave the ending up to us, the readers:
And this story, having no beginning, will have no end. (pg. 704)
Recommended Reading
If you’re looking for other portal fantasy novels with elements of horror that tackle heavy subjects like child predators and slavery, check out Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 and Octavia Butler’s Kindred.
NOS4A2 is one of my favorite Joe Hill books that employs the concept of “inscapes,” or hidden worlds within worlds. Vic McQueen has an uncanny ability to find things when she rides her bike across the Shorter Way Bridge, a portal that allows her to travel to where the lost objects can be found. In her travels she encounters and must fight a supernatural child murderer, Charles Manx, who, like Vic, has a portal that leads to a hidden place where he keeps the souls of his victims, Christmasland.
Octavia Butler’s Kindred is an excellent example of historical horror that incorporates the concepts of traditional slave narratives and time travel. A modern Black woman, Dana, is a newlywed living with her white husband in California. Somehow, she is transported back to the antebellum south and experiences the horrors of slavery as she tries to get back to her own time before she dies in the past.
Participation Poll
Loading ...September’s Book Club Selection: A Pale Light in the Black by K.B. Wagers, hosted by Ronya F. McCool on Friday, September 25th!
My reading time has not been my own the past few months, but this has been waiting patiently on my Kindle. Looking forward to it, and I appreciate your perspective! I think it’ll give an extra depth to the story, and I thank you for it!
I just finished it and you’re right that this is indeed a timely novel – despite it being written decades ago.
The things inside the book are often described as paradoxical, and for me in some ways the book itself was a bit like that from time to time. Sometimes I would find myself wondering when this story would end, and then that feeling would turn in its head as some other new (and sometimes horrifying) revelation would appear and I would get sucked right back in again. It’s strange that there are so many characters that pop up, and yet at the same time so few because of how many of them eventually died or – in some cases, we’re introduced to them and then they die a few pages later, which I thought was bizarre (why introduce them when they’re just going to die anyway?) and at the same time smart and sneaky (you think they’ll have a more functional place in the telling of the story and then, tee-hee, they don’t).
I found it fascinating how Shadwell went from pompous sidekick to ultimate villain (Scourge aside). He didn’t just go from 0-100 over the course of the novel, it was like he went from 0-110. Hobart was equally interesting in that the second he stepped on the page I thought, “Oh this guy is absolutely going to die a horrible death) and while that turned out to be true, he didn’t go down raging or fighting the way I thought. I thought perhaps *he* might become the big bad and not Shadwell as time went by, just as I thought Suzanna would be the major heroine of the story. Basically almost every character topsy-turvey’d my expectations, which was pretty great because otherwise it’s just the usual trope.
I loved the bits while Cal explores the Fugue because I love magic and weirdness, as well as when Shadwell is traversing the Rub al Khali and the place the Scourge lived because desolate landscapes fascinate me.
Quite the story and I wondered more than once if this ever became something that got transferred to the big screen, how would they visualize some of these elements – or could they?
Such sights. 😉
I first read this book in ’88 when, like you, I was a girl of mixed ethnicity growing up in rural PA. Aside from my mother, nobody I knew had read this book. Over the years I have read Weaveworld at least a half-dozen times and introduced two book groups to it. It is always a delight to discuss. Now, I have recommended it to a gaming friend (his dnd characters smack of Shadwell) and I am reading it again. Its interesting offering such a book to someone who does not desire trigger warnings…it allows him to read it knowing very little about it. Anyway, thank you for your review.
Hi Jesse,
Thank you for the feedback and for connecting. I hope your friend enjoys the book as well. Happy reading.
Michelle