Search - Galilee

Those grand shapes moving overhead, like columns of smoke passing across the sun had all the gravity of a requiem; while the forms that moved close to me reeled and swaggered as though to a drunken polka.

When you read that sentence, do you see a picture? If you do you have to read this book. It is the story of 2 families that takes place over centuries of time. While reading this book I would sometimes forget where I was. I was so caught up in the story I did not want to put it down. I read all 637 pages in less than a week. I am just sorry that I forgot how great a writer Clive Barker is. I plan to read the books by Clive Barker I did not read and reread the ones I read years ago.

Clive Barker is at it again, he brings up a new series starting with this book. It gives us a new look at two families locked in a war of flesh and fantasy. Its a must read.....

Romance done at its best.

I gave up on this one at page 110 because I just couldn't face another 500 pages of this high class drivel. Had I been actually reading this instead of listening to it in my car, I wouldn't have made it past the first chapter. I expected a sci-fi thriller from Clive Barker not this Kennedy-esque family saga. In the first 100 pages, there was everything from rape, sodomy, gays, lesbians, fights, infidelity, a religious zealot-a fishermen turned prophet. Yet even so, it was boring as hell. I've never been on to read the papers and magazines featuring the overly rich and aimless. This book is like following John Kennedy around and noting his every move and breath. Just too boring for words.

I know I'm not the only one who quit where I did, since I was forced to rewind tape three in order to listen to it so someone else gave up in the same spot. I kept going hoping it was eventually going to get exciting or something (anything) was going to happen. Finally I just could't listen to that monotonous narrator for even one more word.

Amazon.com
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.

I liked this book up until the end where, for me, it just...ended. I wanted more and there was no more. I don't know if there is another book that compliments this one, but feel there almost should be. If there was (is) I would definately read it.