Chiliad: A Meditation by Clive Barker
Chiliad: A Meditation by Clive Barker
1st Printing, 1st Edition Hardcover
Welcome to the world of Chiliad, an astonishing two-part
novella by the incomparable Clive Barker. A brilliantly composed
narrative filled with unforgettable images, this visionary meditation on
time, history, and human suffering is surely one of Barker’s most
distinctive—and distinguished—creations.
Chiliad consists of two interrelated stories, stories filtered
through the melancholy imagination of a narrator perched on the banks
of a river that flows backward and forward through time. The first
movement, “Men and Sin,” takes place in the millennial year of 1000 AD.
The second, “A Moment at the River’s Heart,” occurs exactly one thousand
years—the length of a “chiliad”—later, as the new millennium
approaches. At the heart of these stories are two savage, seemingly
inexplicable atrocities, each of which reaches across the centuries to
reflect and connect with the other. As the narratives unfold and time
becomes increasingly permeable, Barker creates a dark, sorrowful
portrait of the ancient human capacity for cruelty and destruction.
Writing always with lucidity and grace, he addresses a host of universal
concerns, among them the power of guilt and grief, and the need to find
signs of meaning in the chaos that surrounds us. In the process, he
examines the endless chain of consequences that inevitably proceed from a
single act of violence.