The Books of Abarat
Yesterday I finished reading a lavishly illustrated hardcover copy of Clive Barker’s fantastical Abarat (2002), and by complete coincidence I also stumbled across a paperback version. Same purple cover, same text, completely different book.
It’s lucky I encountered the hardcover first, or I wouldn’t have given this series another glance. The paperback looked so sad and lacking when compared to the fully colored artistic renderings of the strange people and island settings of the magical world of the Abarat. Not only is Barker a great storyteller, making the weird and wonderful both appealing and appalling, he is a gifted artist as well. Nearly every second or third page, the original version has one of his color-saturated depictions of the characters and locales of the Abarat.
Granted, the hardcover is one of the heaviest volumes I’ve ever struggled to hold up while reading at night. The paper is clearly specially selected to properly hold up to the full color printing process. The Abarat first editions must have been prohibitively expensive to produce. Seeing the fruits of Barker’s vibrant imagination in full color is worth the expense.
A website devoted to the series (ultimately to extend to five books) gives a taste of the amazing 300+ oil paintings Barker originally spent four years producing as part of the process in defining this alternate universe. Believe it or not, it all starts in a place called Chickentown, USA. Everything gets much better from there.
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