Young Tait might look like fresh fish to his new fellow inmates, but his forebears are of stronger stuff: his grandfather, known as Saint Tait, hanged for murdering his family all of them, except his daughter, who would grow up to birth Tait the younger. The title story is an ironic rumination on sin - or, if you prefer, "sin" - within the walls and bars of a prison. My review could be double its length, such is my admiration for Barker and these tales! Invention, boldness, terror, eroticism, and yes, self-knowledge await. This is metaphor made flesh at its finest, most realized, most satisfying. As the volumes went on, Barker’s strengths as a writer grew the long stories here - the longest of any volume in Blood, each over 50 pages - allow some of his strongest, most evocative prose to shine and features some of his most thematically potent imaginings. Like its companion The Inhuman Condition, which was originally simply titled Books of Blood Volume IV in the UK, Volume V was retitled after one of its stories when published in the US in hardcover in 1986 and a Pocket Books paperback in 1988 it became In the Flesh (with cover art by Jim Warren).
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