A collection of horror and fantasy that’s by turns grim, nihilistic, poetic, pornographic, and mildly astonishing, all read by very good to great readers. Barker does seem to have difficulty with endings, which I can sympathize with, but before he gets there he’s capable of delivering imagery that paints quite a mind picture — “In The Hills, The Cities” closes this volume with a magnificent fantasy that does just that. Unfortunately, characters often get lost in these imaginative tales — few are worth caring about, honestly, so the inevitable sticky demises just whistle by. In “Sex, Death, And Starshine” I wanted to know more about the mysterious Mr. Lichfield, but instead got rather endless riffs on the sex part of the title. And so on. “The Midnight Meat Train” does have the benefit of being both horror and fantasy, but ultimately is just gruesome, the possibility of meditating on the nature of the city ignored.