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    The Damnation Game
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    The Damnation Game
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    The Damnation Game
    Ebook611 pages10 hours

    The Damnation Game

    By Clive Barker

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Marty Strauss, a gambling addict recently released from prison, is hired to be the personal bodyguard of Joseph Whitehead, one of the wealthiest men in the world. The job proves more complicated and dangerous than he thought, however, as Marty soon gets caught up in a series of supernatural events involving Whitehead, his daughter (who is a heroin addict), and a devilish man named Mamoulian, with whom Whitehead made a Faustian bargain many years earlier, during World War II.

    As time passes, Mamoulian haunts Whitehead using his supernatural powers (such as the ability to raise the dead), urging him to complete his pact with him. Eventually Whitehead decides to escape his fate after a few encounters with Mamoulian and having his wife, former bodyguard, and now his daughter Carys taken away from him. With hope still left to save Carys, Marty Strauss, although reluctant to get involved in the old man Whiteheads deserved punishment, decides to get involved and attempt to save the innocent gifted addict from being another victim to the damnation game.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossroad Press
    Release dateJul 3, 2014
    ISBN9781311119209
    Unavailable
    The Damnation Game
    Author

    Clive Barker

    Clive Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952. His earlier books include ‘The Books of Blood’, ‘Cabal’, and ‘The Hellbound Heart’. In addition to his work as a novelist and playwright, he also iilustrates, writes, directs and produces for stage and screen. His films include ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Hellbound’, ‘Nightbreed’ and ‘Candyman’. Clive lives in Beverly Hills, California.

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    Reviews for The Damnation Game

    3.5/5

    534 ratings16 reviews

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    • 4/5

      Barker knows how to write creepy stuff. More importantly, his stories are not just attempts at seeing how high the gore-factor can be pumped; he finds a way to inject some morale truths and enough ambiguity to keep a reader thinking.

      Martin Strauss is prisoner released into the care of an eccentric millionaire. His job is to provide for the rich man's needs. Martin is mystified by the electric fencing and high powered lights that surround the mansion he is to serve in but his figures it's the kind of paranoia that comes being being obscenely wealthy. As the story unfolds, and Martin begins to peripherally see more of the dark nature to his new residence, it becomes clear that he's simple inhabiting a prison of a new kind, one with the grandest types of punishment and redemption.

      With the impending close of Border, I managed to score this copy for less than 2 bucks. Had the story been so-so or even something I couldn't finish, I knew I could consider it "no biggie" because of the cost, but that's not how it went with this tale.

      This ones worth whatever price you find it at.
    • 4/5
      Once I was able to get into the book it got interesting, but this took about a hundred pages. It was only then that the beginning of the book made any sense. Is it possible that the book could have been written better? Who knows but the horror scenes and descriptions are fantastic. I would recommend the book; however, if you're looking for a book that starts with a bang and a fast pace-- this isn't the book for you.
    • 3/5
      Not finished yet, but if anyone sees me reading this and decides to give it a shot, I would like to say to you: PLEASE, give it until page 200 or so. PLEASE. The book starts off slooooow. If it started off any slower, I would have burned my copy, rather than merely throwing it across the room in disgust.
      But!
      But, once Marty Strauss is settled in at Whitehead's place, the story picks up and gets GOOD! And I mean good in a scary, somewhat-gory way. So please! Keep reading!

      UPDATE

      Finally finished. Good story. Creepy. Gory. Evil. Don't know if it's one of the best horror stories of all-time (I got this book from a list of top 50 or 100 best horror novels) but I did enjoy. Like I said...Don't give up on it!
    • 4/5
      This book is a great continuation of Faust and his legend.
    • 4/5
      there's a complexity yet human quality to the characters: pity, loathing, and even like for some of them but it's not simply a tale but a deeper truth into human nature.
    • 1/5
      Barker bores the crap out of me...
    • 5/5
      “Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned. In an earlier age Pandemonium - the first city of Hell - stood on a lava mountain while lighting tore the clouds above it and beacons burned on its walls to summon the fallen angels. Now, such spectacle belongs to Hollywood. Hell stands transposed. No lightning, no pits of fire."- from Clive Barkers’ “The Damnation Game"Clive Barker’s first full-length novel is magnificent. It’s dark, intense and mostly unrelenting in it’s steady construction of supernatural horror. While full of gut wrenching visuals and causing a limitation of my ability to fall asleep, this novel beats with a heart of literature under it’s skin of genre horror.Barker builds his story and characters layer by layer. Some might feel the early going is a bit slow but I would argue that the greatest of meals are those that take longer to make.I’ve only recently discovered how pervasive is H.P. Lovecraft’s influence in modern horror. Not sure how this stayed off my radar for so long, but let’s just be glad that I finally figured out. “Damnation Game” in imbued with the spirit of Lovecraft. Just take a glimpse at a couple of passages from Barker, and his Lovecraftian storytelling of an otherworldly evil that lives just beyond site of the visible world and just on the edge of the great Void.“It was, for a moment, not her who started out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him - he knew this to his marrow - with hatred in its bowels."“He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality."If there’s anything to downgrade my rating it’s Barker’s awkwardly rapid transition of the budding affair of our two protagonists from tentative emotional exploration to full on can’t-live-without-you intensity. I either missed a paragraph or two, or Marty and Carys fell hard and fast after the first time they ‘hooked up’.It’s a relatively small complaint, however. The story is terrific; the plot solid; the finish satisfying. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Early Barker. Lively and pretentious. The Story is unnerving and bold. He has a real way with personalities especially when they are twisted.
    • 1/5
      Pulpy horror thriller with some of Barker's vilest touches but none of the magic. Much prefer his short horrors or long fantasies.
    • 3/5
      Having only read Barker's short stories and novellas, The Damnation Game paled in comparison. One can certainly tell that this is his first novel- as other reviewers have noted, the pace is slow and even stagnant in places, and there is seemingly endless exposition. However, the elements of the story itself are quite imaginative and there is potential for real horror throughout. The mysterious Whitehead estate, Mamoulian and the Razor-Eater, and the countless corpses that continue with a parody of life all hint at deeper terrors, and offer some of the more visceral horror of the novel.Overall, it seems unbalanced though. Barker spends too much time developing shadow worlds that only appear once, offering rich descriptions of places only glimpsed by characters. Yet he fails to flesh out those very same characters. Marty Strauss and Carys Whitehead have a relationship that is confusing at best. For most of the novel, they use each other physically and emotionally, and their willingness to try and save each other makes no sense within the context of the entire novel.Barker's first novel is not his best, but it is a must read for anyone interested in the novelist, or the journey of horror fiction in the past 3 decades.
    • 5/5
      This book did not give me nightmares, but made an indelible impression nonetheless.
    • 3/5
      The Damnation Game centers around Marty Strauss, a man convicted of armed robbery to pay off his gambling debts. He gets out of jail early to act as a bodyguard for a reclusive, eccentric millionaire named Whitehead who made his fortune selling dangerous pharmaceuticals, but started out as a thief and a gambler as well. A lifetime ago, Whitehead met a strange/enchanting/horrifying man named Mamoulian, or the Last European, a man who never lost at cards and claimed his debts in blood. Mamoulian may have been a devil or a sorcerer, but after years as Whitehead's advisor he was turned away, and now he's back for revenge, with all the demonic powers in his possession - including the reanimated corpse of a serial killer and a bizarre fog filled with trapped and tortured spirits. Marty is caught in the middle of it all because he's fallen in love with Whitehead's heroine-addicted, sometimes-telepathic daughter, Carys. This is an interesting read, although I feel like something was lost on me, since I didn't really get the visceral horror reaction I wanted from it. Partly, none of the characters were very sympathetic - heroine addicts, gamblers, cheaters, businessmen and pimps, I was perfectly fine with their grisly deaths. The pace is also much more relaxed then one might except in a horror novel as Barker takes time to set all of his characters and plots into motion - which is maybe not a bad thing, but I will be the first to admit that I am a horribly impatient reader and I found myself skimming parts. I enjoyed the character of Mamoulian, with his bizarrely puritanical obsessive elegance and despair and loneliness. His mysterious history is revealed towards the end of the book, and I was both pleased and surprised by this.Mamoulian's lackey, the rotting corpse of a reanimated serial killer, who doesn't even realize he is a walking corpse, is a very neat twist on the whole "zombie" concept. The Razor Eater is a pedophile/cannablist serial killer zombie-henchman and that we get to read passages from his point of view is surprising and interesting. One can't really have any sympathy for such a gross creature, but Barker writes him as a human being - severely disturbed, but still human. The Razor Eaters most horrible acts are alluded to rather than shown, but the idea of them is horrible enough.Mamoulian's power to give the dead back a little piece of life so that they don't even know they are dead is, in a way, more horrific than legions of mindless zombie hordes crowding at your door. "The couch was damp: large, sticky stains were spreading on it from the place where she always sat. She assumed it was something to do with her, but she couldn't work out how or why. Nor could she explain the flies that congregated all over her, in her hair, in her clothes, whining away. ... The rotting skin of her hands, the blood she left in the tub after bathing, the horrid look the mirror gave her - all inspired the same hypnotic inquiry: "Who is this?" (p. 154)But I didn't find the main characters, Marty the bodyguard and Carys the heroine-addict to be very compelling - I didn't particularly want to stick with them for 380 pages, and I didn't really care if they lived or died. I do plan on trying more of Barker's work, though since there were parts I really liked, and Barker's writing is elegant and - even when he is describing the bloody, gory horror bits - quite beautiful.
    • 3/5
      I didn't get quite what I wanted from this book. Its pace ended up being quite plodding, the story was light on explanations, and none of the characters were very compelling. I enjoyed the idea of a man given supernatural powers being exhausted with life, but we barely went into the history of the villain.The horror was graphic and rife with gore, but I will stick to short stories next time.
    • 1/5
      I gave this book 104 pages before I gave up. I have highly enjoyed other works by Clive Barker, but this one was taking too long to get into anything substantially... horrific. After 104 pages, I know there is a guy who owes an awful debt to a supernatural card player, and there is an ex-con working for him. That's about it, and there wasn't anything in those pages to make me care about either of them. Oh well, not my cup of tea.
    • 4/5
      Hard to say what's wrong with a book that really draws you into the moment of what's going on. Sadly, I can't say that I can give this a full five-stars worth of a read.The beginning didn't have too much of a hook for me. Sure, it had its creepy and interesting moments, but all in all it was about a thief/gambler looking for this illusive card-player that supposedly always won in a game. He wanted to test the person's skill. I wasn't too keen on that. However, the things that the thief had seen and heard in his search was intriguing enough, I suppose. A good beginning when it comes to reading through the entire book . . . but alone without insight on what had happened, not so much.The characters . . . well, they each had their own problems to deal with. In the end, I liked each one in their own twisted way. Except for the girl. An interesting gift she has as a sensitive, but other than that she did nothing for me. (And judging how the ending went, I wouldn't have kept her around.)How Clive Barker used colons and semicolons so much kind of threw me off toward the beginning, because I don't think I've ever read anyone with the style he has. I got used to it though and loved it. His descriptions and emotions in the writing was spot on as well.So despite it not having a five-star rating, it's definitely worth a read.
    • 5/5
      This is dark, horrifying, and smart. For fans of horror or Faustus-related legends and works, this novel is a must-read, but I'd recommend it also to readers who simply enjoy a thought-provoking read and can deal with the darker areas of the imagination. Barker's characters and plots are beautifully crafted, and it's easy to see him engaging with the horror genre and traditions of horror in a way that many writers don't do. Simply put, Barker has thought about the end-goal here, and he's carefully crafted this book in a way that makes it transcend horror literature and genre. Fans of Neil Gaiman will appreciate some of his moves here, but it's worth noting that while the book is an easy read, this book is a heavier read than any of Gaiman's texts. If you make yourself take the time to think through the ideas that Barker presents here, the book becomes richer with each page, as well as more horrifying. I don't have any doubt that this will become a classic of horror literature, but it's also an incredibly beautiful and smart read if you can take the rawness of it all. In other words, highly highly recommended.