Galilee

Galilee

"A spellbinding treat. . . . Galilee leaps through time and space to reveal an impressively majestic vision told in beautiful prose." — People A classic early work from master storyteller and New York Times bestselling author Clive Barker Rich and powerful, the Geary dynasty has reigned over American society for decades. But it is a family with dark, terrible secrets. For the Gearys are a family at war. Their adversaries are the Barbarossas, a clan whose timeless origins lie in myth, whose mystical influence is felt in intense, sensual exchanges of flesh and soul. Now their battle is about to escalate. When Galilee, prodigal prince of the Barbarossa clan, meets Rachel, the young bride of the Gearys' own scion Mitchell, they fall in love, consumed by a passion that unleashes long-simmering hatred. Old insanities arise, old adulteries are uncovered, and a seemingly invincible family will begin to wither, exposing its unholy roots. . . . Over many years and many books, Clive Barker has earned a reputation as the thinking person's horror writer. His novels have mixed fantasy, psychology, and sheer creepiness in almost equal quantities, and while the gore quotient remains relatively low, the tension always runs high. In Galilee , however, Barker soft-pedals the ghoulish in favor of the gothic. His novel (or as the author would have it, "romance") tells the tale of two warring families caught up in a disastrous web of corruption, illicit sexuality, and star-crossed love, with a soupçon of the supernatural thrown in as well. On one side are the wealthy Gearys--a fictional stand-in for the Kennedys--and on the other are the Barbarossas, a mysterious black clan that has been around since the time (quite literally) of Adam. Galilee chronicles the twisted course of this centuries-old family feud, which centers around the magical Barbarossa matriarch Cesaria and her son Galilee. Indeed, it's the latter figure--one part Heathcliff to one part Christ--whose relationship with the Geary women sets a match to the entire powder keg of hostility and resentment. Mixing standard clichés of romance with his own peculiarly deep-fried version of the Southern gothic, Baker has come up with an intelligent and shamelessly amusing potboiler. The Barbarossas may be divinities, but their lives have been entangled with the all-too-human Gearys since the Civil War. It hasn't been a pretty collusion. Now, when it appears that both families are on the verge of splintering out of existence, Edward Barbarossa is enticed into writing the story of both clans, focusing on Galilee Barbarossa, the prodigal son. Unfortunately, while this book is closer to Barker's supernatural roots than was Sanctuary (LJ 7/96), it is also a meandering, self-indulgent novel that comes to no conclusions and never has a clear conflict. The reader is also denied a satisfying climax. Barker uses language eloquently, but his focus is earthy. Bodily functions of all sorts are detailed with reverence. However, fascinating and titillating descriptions don't make compelling reading over 600 pages. Buy where Barker's work is popular. -A Jodi L. Israel, Norwood, MA Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Though its ghoul and demon quotient is comparatively low, this lavishly campy creeper has a legitimate claim to the title of Weirdest Book Yet by the accomplished author of such genre classics as The Books of Blood (1988) and The Damnation Game (1987). John O'Hara, William Faulkner, and Barbara Cartland might have spent a lost weekend collaborating on this feverish tale of two feuding families whose destinies are catastrophically intertwined. Its narrator--who will attempt a book about his blighted polyglot clanis Edmund Barbarossa, the crippled stepson of a mysteriously ageless beautiful black woman, Cesaria (who has the power to ``raise stones'' and ``send her image wherever she wants to''), for whom a smitten Thomas Jefferson built a magnificent mansion on the North Carolina coast. Edmund's quest for information (which often takes the forms of dreams and fantasies) uncovers a wildly melodramatic history begun in presumably biblical times in the vicinity of the Middle Eastern city of Samarkand; an old wrong that dates from the Civil War and must of course be avenged; and a most unwise misalliance between the Barbarossas (``something more than human stock'') and the Gearys, an agreeably malicious cross between the Kennedys of Massachusetts and the Compsons of Yoknapatawpha County. The Gearys are plagued by every sexual and conjugal problem known to man and woman, but what really ticks them off is the irresistible (to their women) animal magnetism of Cesaria's Heathcliff-like son Galilee, a brooding sex machine whose services to womankind are subsumed in--believe this or not--what appears to be a Christ parallel. Barker's tongue pokes visibly out of his cheek now and then, in a black comedy of miscegenation and its discontents that has to be a sendup of both t