Clive Barker was born in Liverpool. Moreover, he graduated from the school where John Lennon studied. This involuntarily provokes comparison and obliges us to do a lot. And if you are a writer, it’s not enough to just write a good book. It is absolutely necessary to write an extraordinary, exceptional book. So for the hero of the novel, the artist Gentle, who suddenly regained the memory of his forgotten past, it began to seem not enough for him to live eight normal lives as the famous magician Sartori. And I think that the author of “Imagika”, who became the laureate of the international literary award “Horror”, coped with his difficult task.

I won’t say that nothing like this was ever published in Russian, but this two-volume work, which appeared in 1995 -m, definitely became the most noticeable phenomenon in the “dark fantasy” genre for domestic readers for many years to come. In this regard, Barker can only be compared with Stephen King, whose frankly teenage “Eyes of the Dragon” next to “Imagica” looks rather dull, and “The Dark Tower” still belongs to a different subgenre of fantasy.