My first attempt to read Imajica was in 1991. At the time I was still pretty hot for Clive Barker's body... of work, that is. But my enthusiasm for it was starting to wane, big time.
While I had been wowed by the Books of Blood and blown away by Hellraiser, I struggled to make it through both The Damnation Game and Weaveworld. Then there was Cabal and whatever the hell its film adaptation Nightbreed was supposed to be.
The Great and Secret Show, the book that preceded Imajica, felt like a return to form, but I was also noticing a distressing sameness to Barker's storytelling. In that he would create this vibrant 'other' world that was connected with, yet separated from, our 'real' world. His protagonist(s) would invariably be messianic figures that were destined, for better or worse, to bridge or connect or, in the case of Imajica, reconcile said worlds.
Going from Weaveworld to Cabal to The Great and Secret Show felt, to me, like reading the same story three times in a row. I was starting to wonder if Barker had anything else in him...
Which is where my mind was in 1991, when I cracked open Imajica for the very first time. I was also daunted by the massive scope and size of the book. It was around 800 pages long and, to be honest, I was favoring shorter, quicker reads at that time.
I made an indeterminate dent in the book before giving up on it. It seemed to me to be the same old stuff and I just was not in the mood for that. So, I shelved Imajica and moved on to other books.
There were only two other Barker works that I read after I bounced off of Imajica. One was The Thief of Always, which is my favorite, and Everville. Everville is supposed to be the middle part of a trilogy, The Great and Secret Show being the first part, but there has yet to be a conclusion and it has been thirty years and Barker is not getting any younger...
Oops, I have digressed and must return to Imajica and its five dominions.
Back in June, my mother-in-law decided to treat her entire family to a vacation. Knowing that we would be out of town and living out of a suitcase for well over a week, I thought it advisable to put something hefty on my Kindle. Something I could spend an extended period of time losing myself in. Which is how and why I decided that a second attempt at Imajica might be in order.
Well, it took almost five months, but I managed to finish the damn thing this time around. Was it worth it? No... and yes.
Since I have not read anything by Barker for the last 30 or so years, reading Imajica felt somewhat fresh. Somewhat because I was surprised at how clear my recall of those first 200 or so pages I had read, way back in 1991, was.
Once I got past those 200 or so pages, and started making my way through the next 200 or so pages, I began to notice a different kind of sameness to the work. It seemed that everybody the protagonists met or befriended did not seem all that long for this, or anything other, world. By the time I hit the halfway point I was conditioning myself to hold back my emotional investment with any of the supporting characters.
Also not helping was how several characters just... dropped out for what seemed like hundreds of pages, only to return for the briefest of moments, before being dispatched and tossed onto what was becoming an almost comically large pile of deceased tertiary characters.
I think that it was slowed down my reading zeal, more than anything. But I also wanted to finish the damn thing. To see if the dominions would be reconciled and what that would mean.
Well, I made it and, surprise of surprises, Barker's epic tale wore down my emotional defenses by the end. I closed Imajica with a smile on my face and a warm glow in my heart.
It is unlikely that I will every return to Imajica, but I am glad I managed to power through to its optimistic and joyful ending. I kind of needed it after the 800 or so pages that led up to it.
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