Galilee

People

A spellbinding treat...Galilee leaps through time and space to reveal an impressively majestic vision told in beautiful prose.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Sexier than King and more inventive than Rice...Full of intense emotions, enormous vitas, a...gusto for new beginnings, and a Californian flair for do-it-yourself theology.

Rocky Mountain News

A powerful work of fiction written by a master storyteller at the height of his skill.Galilee reads like a James Michener saga with Barker characters and love scenes.

Newark Star-Ledger

Part soap opera, part fantasy, part family saga, part historical novel, part secret history of America... [Galilee] reveals Barker as one of the most imaginative writers working today.

Atlanta Journal

Spellbinding.

L.A. Life

Barker's most ambitious work to date...Rapturously full of emotions.

Washington Post Book World

Rich in plot twists, byzantine intrigues and hidden secrets, Imajica is a Chinese puzzle box constructed on a universal scale...Barker has an unparalleled talent forenvisioning other worlds.

Publishers Weekly

A family saga isn't what we'd expect from Barker (Sacrament), the most ambitious dark fantasist of our time, but that's what he delivers in his most elegant, and most conventional, novel yet.

A Barker family saga is perforce unlike othersand so not only are two entwined families chronicled here but one, the Barbarossas, descends from voracious divinities, "two souls as old as heaven"; the other, the Gearys, are modeled roughly on the Kennedys. The story, an intricate mosaic of first-person and third, is narrated by the reclusive Maddox Barbarossa as a history he writes in the family manse hidden in the Virginia woods and designed long ago by Thomas Jefferson, one of his divine stepmother's countless lovers. Its canvas stretches from New York to Hawaii to the Middle East, from the "ancient day" when Maddox's half-brother, Galilee, was baptized through the American Civil Warduring which Galilee joins forces with the impoverished Southern founder of the Geary dynasty, whose cruelty and greed ensures the Gearys' immense wealth and power. Most of the story rests in the present, however, concentrating on the newest Geary, ne Rachel Pallenberg, who marries a callow Geary scion only to witness the outbreak of "war" between the Gearys and Barbarossas and to become the latest Geary woman to fall under the spell of the near-immortal, sexually mesmerizing Galilee.

The novel's scale is smaller than that of previous Barker effortsmissing are the titanic battles of form vs. chaos, good vs. evil, the riot of wonders and terrors. But it's less cluttered, too, despite abundant inspiration and invention and satisfying smatterings of Barker-brand sex, scatology and violence. Above all, there is a new richness of character, of its warpings and transfigurations by hatred and love, blood legacy and death.

Library Journal

The Barbarossas may be divinities, but their lives have been entangled with the all-too-human Gearys since the Civil War. It hasn't been a pretty collusion. Now, when it appears that both families are on the verge of splintering out of existence, Edward Barbarossa is enticed into writing the story of both clans, focusing on Galilee Barbarossa, the prodigal son. Unfortunately, while this book is closer to Barker's supernatural roots than was Sanctuary (LJ 7/96), it is also a meandering, self-indulgent novel that comes to no conclusions and never has a clear conflict. The reader is also denied a satisfying climax. Barker uses language eloquently, but his focus is earthy. Bodily functions of all sorts are detailed with reverence. However, fascinating and titillating descriptions don't make compelling reading over 600 pages. Buy where Barker's work is popular.
-- Jodi L. Israel, Norwood, MA

Library Journal

The Barbarossas may be divinities, but their lives have been entangled with the all-too-human Gearys since the Civil War. It hasn't been a pretty collusion. Now, when it appears that both families are on the verge of splintering out of existence, Edward Barbarossa is enticed into writing the story of both clans, focusing on Galilee Barbarossa, the prodigal son. Unfortunately, while this book is closer to Barker's supernatural roots than was Sanctuary (LJ 7/96), it is also a meandering, self-indulgent novel that comes to no conclusions and never has a clear conflict. The reader is also denied a satisfying climax. Barker uses language eloquently, but his focus is earthy. Bodily functions of all sorts are detailed with reverence. However, fascinating and titillating descriptions don't make compelling reading over 600 pages. Buy where Barker's work is popular.
-- Jodi L. Israel, Norwood, MA

Fantasy & Science Fiction

...[P]owerful, and meaningful....Barker's ever-expansive aesthetic and stylistic pursuits...[produce] his most controlled and widely appealing novel.

Boston Herald

Baker's work reads like a cross between Stephen King and South American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He creates a world where our biggest fears appear to be our own dreams.

New York Times Book Review

Mr. Barker is much mroe than a genre writer, and his extravagantly unconventional inventions are ingenious refractions of our common quest to experience and understand the mysterious world around us and the mysteries within ourselves.

Kirkus Reviews

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 be 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 nowand 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.