What I love about books by Clive Barker is that they are usually character driven. It is a big, wonderfully sprawling dive into wonderland. The plot mentioned above doesn’t even begin to describe the plot for this book. It’s a difficult thing to create an epic myth from the ground up, but Barker does so in “The Great and Secret Show” with such skill and mastery that you know he has a gift. What Barker does here is create myth and he does so beautifully. Fletcher knows that he cannot allow Jaffe to gain access to the Art, to Quididdty otherwise, it could mean the end of the world, and dreams, as we know it… Jaffe and Fletcher have impregnated four women in hopes of producing offspring to continue the battle they began so many years ago. No one knows the truth, however, no matter how crazy the rumors. When the girls start talking of being raped in the river, gossip in the small town grows to an all time high. Four girls, dubbed The League of Virgins, become pregnant after swimming in a river that appeared on the edge of town. Not content to let the other live, (after all, good must always triumph over evil) Fletcher and Jaffe engage in a battle that brings them to Palamo Grove, a small town and an ideal place to hide and rest in the earth while regaining the energy to continue fighting.

It transforms Fletcher and then Jaffe into Demigods.

He knows that the drug is capable of transforming anyone into what ever they are most on the inside. What they don’t realize is that it will become their undoing.įletcher realizes that Jaffe is evil and attempts to stop his plans by destroying the Nuncio. Fletcher creates a transforming drug they call Nuncio, which uses the principals of the Art.

Taking a scientist named Fletcher under his wing to further his growing evil, Jaffe hopes to get one step closer to mastering the Art. Jaffe can think of nothing else except the Art and becoming a master of it. Quididdty is the dream see, the dreamscape, the magic that runs through all our fantasies. The Art are laws governing an alternate reality called Quididdty. Its secrets continue to elude Jaffe until he cracks part of the code. The Art begins to consume Jaffe, taking over his life. At first, the secret isn’t clear, just vague references to something called the Art. In the dead letter room in the middle of Omaha, Randolph Jaffe has stumbled upon a secret.

The great and secret show book