Though its ghoul and demon quotient is comparatively low, this
lavishly campy creeper has a legitimate claim to the title of
Weirdest Book Yet by the accomplished author of such genre classics
as The Books of Blood (1988) and The Damnation Game (1987). John
O'Hara, William Faulkner, and Barbara Cartland might have spent a
lost weekend collaborating on this feverish tale of two feuding
families whose destinies are catastrophically intertwined. Its
narrator - who will attempt a book about his blighted polyglot clan
- is Edmund Barbarossa, the crippled stepson of a mysteriously
ageless beautiful black woman, Cesaria (who has the power to "raise
stones" and "send her image wherever she wants to"), for whom a
smitten Thomas Jefferson built a magnificent mansion on the North
Carolina coast. Edmund's quest for information (which often takes
the forms of dreams and fantasies) uncovers a wildly melodramatic
history begun in presumably biblical times in the vicinity of the
Middle Eastern city of Samarkand; an old wrong that dates from the
Civil War and must of course he avenged; and a most unwise
misalliance between the Barbarossas ("something more than human
stock") and the Gearys, an agreeably malicious cross between the
Kennedys of Massachusetts and the Compsons of Yoknapatawpha County.
The Gearys are plagued by every sexual and conjugal problem known
to man and woman, but what really ticks them off is the
irresistible (to their women) animal magnetism of Cesaria's
Heathcliff-like son Galilee, a brooding sex machine whose services
to womankind are subsumed in - believe this or not - what appears
to be a Christ parallel. Barker's tongue pokes visibly out of his
cheek now and then, in a black comedy of miscegenation and its
discontents that has to be a sendup of both the Harlequin romance
and the American Southern Gothic novel. Overheated and
intermittently risible, but the thing is entertaining: the kind of
book for which hammocks were invented - not to mention double
boilermakers. (Kirkus Reviews)
A massive tale of secrets, corruption and magic between two feuding
families - the powerful Gearys and the shadowy Barbarossas. EVERY
FAMILY HAS A SECRET As rich as the Rockefellers, as glamorous as
the Kennedys, the Geary dynasty has held subtle sway over American
life since the Civil War, brilliantly concealing the depths of its
corruption. All that is about to change. For the Gearys are at war.
Their enemies are another dynasty - the Barbarossas - whose origins
lie not in history but in myth. When the prodigal prince of the
Barbarossa clan, Galilee, falls in love with Rachel Geary, the
pent-up loathing between the families erupts in a mutually
destructive frenzy. Adulteries are laid bare. Secrets creep out.
And insanity reigns. Galilee is a massive tale, mingling the sharp
realism of Barker's bestseller Sacrament with the dark invention
for which he's known worldwide, and surpassing both with an epic
tale which will surely rank as the crowning achievement of his
career.
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