The Damnation Game

World Fantasy Award nominee 1986, Bram Stoker Award nominee 1987.

Here is the first novel by the man Stephen King named as his own successor.

In only three years Clive Barker has made an impressive entrance on the horror scene. Such diverse sources as Newsday, Omni, Publishers Weekly, Us, New York, Saturday Review, Women's Wear Daily and USA Today are united in their praise for Barker's short story collections, The Books of Blood. Now, with his first major novel, Clive Barker establishes himself as a talent to be reckoned with.

The Damnation Game takes place, appropriately, in hell, a hell that could spring only from Clive Barker's singular imagination; amid the gaming clubs and blasted back alleys of contemporary London; on vast country estates, fortresses armed against the invasion of an evil for which there is no human defense; in a nightworld where men and women make love with ghosts, and corpse-assassins walk among the living, stalking their prey even as they decompose.

Sprung from prison to serve as bodyguard to a world-renowned reclusive industrialist, Londoner Marty Strauss knows the job isn't going to be easy. But what he finds surpasses his wildest nightmares - someone is coming to collect the soul of his employer as payment for an old and terrible debt; someone who can animate the dead and co-opt the spirit of the young girl Marty has come to love; someone who counts off the years of his existence in centuries and the evils he has done in infinities; someone who will not rest until all the love and goodness have been banished from the world...

Radiating with the sensuality and eroticism that are Clive Barker's signature, ranging from unimaginable scenes of violence to touching moments of bittersweet romance, The Damnation Game all but defies description. Original in the highest sense of the word, this book is bound to catapult Clive Barker into the mainstream of contemporary horror novelists.