Just finished Everville (some thoughts)
I just finished my first-time read of Everville! Overall I thought it was good, but not great and not on par with his best, which lines up with how I felt about The Great and Secret Show. Both Books of the Art have a lot of excellent qualities: the mythology of the Metacosm, Quiddity, The Art, dream-magic and conjurations and thought-form creatures, the Iad Ouroboros... all of that is very cool. And both books have a lot of great characters, with Tesla and Grillo and of course Harry D'Amour being my favorites. And this does an excellent job of that thing that Clive Barker does so well, with the novel starting out as a bunch of disparate plot threads scattered around the country and time and space, which gradually pull together as though by fate and turn into one epic story at the climax. The tightening of the threads in this book was very good, and some of the reveals were excellent.
However, I think most of what this book does really well, Barker does better elsewhere, especially in Imajica and Weaveworld, and while I like this mythology and magic system, I don't think it's his best. I also think that both Books of the Art (this one less so - I think I think this is the better of the two) are pretty uneven, with some threads being great, and some... much less so. I also think this book allocates its time in some odd ways - I would have liked a bit more exploration of the Metacosm, and a bit less of some of the other threads. The weird, creepy pedophiliac relationship between Buddenbaum and Seth Lundy was very off-putting and got way too much time, and much like the supernatural rape of the League of Virgins in the first book, felt to me like Barker overindulging his more immature edgelord instincts in a way I didn't care for, which he certainly did a lot in The Books of Blood but by this point seemed to have largely grown out of. I also felt the book largely wasted the return of JoBeth and Howie in a pretty disappointing story that really didn't feel like it needed to be here at all.
We did not need The Deathboy to return, after his story got such a satisfying conclusion in the first book, and it felt like Barker really did the two young heroes of our last story dirty. All of that being a largely extraneous sideplot that would not have changed the novel at all by its absence felt borderline disrespectful to those characters who went through so much in the first book. For that matter, I also thought this installment largely wasted Grillo.
At least it very much did Tesla, Kissoon, and Raoul justice - their arcs were very compelling, and Tesla and Kissoon emerging as the ultimate hero and ultimate villain of the Books of the Art were great. And the new characters were largely excellent - Joe and Phoebe, Maeve and the other weird characters we meet in the Metacosm - I loved all that. Maeve very much reminded me of Yubaba from Spirted Away, and was a very interesting character.
And of course I loved how Harry D'Amour was a proper main character in this one! He's such a great character, and seeing him get to really shine in a larger and more epic story in this book was fantastic. Definitely a great companion piece to Lord of Illusions.
So yeah... some stuff I really liked, and stuff I really didn't, and I would say this is a good but not great, middle of the road Barker, not nearly as good as Imajica or Weaveworld or Sacrament or Cabal, but still very worthwhile, and I do hope we eventually get part 3.
Also, I was very afraid that this was going to end on a cliffhanger, since fans are notoriously sad that the trilogy of The Art thus far remains unfinished. But I was pleasantly surprised that, no, while this certainly leaves room where the story CAN go, this novel basically wraps up the story in a very satisfying way, and if this does end up being the last book, this is a very good place for it to end. The threads remaining from the first book have largely come full circle and been closed, this book's story is closed, there are no serious looming cliffhangers... there is certainly an open world of possibilities, of which the third book can run with, but there is nothing where, if the third novel never comes, we are frustratingly left hanging. I am more than happy with this as a conclusion to the Books of the Art, if that is what it ends up being.