By CLIVE BARKER (Subterranean Press; 2015)

A McFarlane Toy line doesn’t exactly sound like a promising beginning for a novelette by Clive Barker, one of the premiere writers on the scene (for the one or two of you who don’t already know that), but what Barker turned out here is one of his most memorable books in some time.  It was initially presented in the form of single chapters, included with each of the six Tortured Souls figures–Barker’s first self-created toy line–in 2001, and collected in this 87 page illustrated hardcover in 2015 (a movie adaptation, FYI, has been in the works for some time, but as of mid-2018 doesn’t appear to have gained much traction).

The setting is Primordium, the world’s “first city.”  This place is inhabited by Zarles Krieger, a freelance assassin who really loves his job.  It’s through his trade that Krieger meets Lucidiques, the daughter of one of his highly-placed victims.  Lucidiques leads Krieger to Agonistes, a desert-dwelling “transformer of human flesh.”  This is to say that he transforms the bodies of revenge-obsessed “Supplicants” into horrific incarnations of their enemies’ worst fears.

Krieger becomes Lucidiques’ latest Supplicant.  He’s transformed into the “Scythemeister,” who quickly becomes the terror of Primordium.  The Scythemeister’s murderous handiwork also causes a political upheaval that results in the murder—and subsequent transformation at Agonistes’s hands—of Lucidique, as well as the creation of an entirely new monstrosity via the machinations of a mad doctor, and a most unexpected virgin birth.

This being a Clive Barker tale, you can be sure that it contains a healthy dose of unapologetic grotesquerie, along with the expected elegant prose and unpretentious storytelling wizardry.  One thing TORTURED SOULS isn’t is excessive.  In keeping with the sparseness of its page length, the descriptions, even the nasty ones (of which there are quite a few), are admirably honed and pointed.  This was likely due to the fact that the tale was initially meant as an accompaniment to a line of action figures, whose features were left to speak for themselves.  The book still works quite well, however, with an ambition that belies its sparseness.  An entire densely imagined universe is conjured up in these 87 pages, a universe that’s worthy of one of Barker’s more expansive epics.