Book of the Art Books in Order

The Book of the Art series is Clive Barker’s grand meditation on magic, creativity, and the thin border between waking life and the worlds we dream. It currently consists of two big novels, The Great and Secret Show and Everville, with a long‑promised third volume still to come.

At the heart of the series is Quiddity, a vast dream sea that every human can glimpse only three times in a lifetime: the first sleep outside the womb, the first night beside a true love, and the last sleep before death. For most people that fleeting vision is enough. For others, especially those touched by the Art, it becomes an obsession that can bend lives and realities out of shape.

The story begins in The Great and Secret Show with Randolph Jaffe, a bitter postal clerk who discovers hints of a secret order called the Shoal. His pursuit of their power leads him to “the Art” and to a dangerous partnership with scientist Richard Fletcher. Their experiment with an evolutionary elixir, Nuncio, transforms them into near‑gods locked in a feud that spills into a small California town called Palomo Grove, warping the lives of everyone who lives there.

Decades later in Everville, Barker widens the canvas. A frontier town founded beside a mysterious “door” between the human world and Quiddity becomes the focal point for ancient beings, lost lovers, occult detectives, and ordinary townsfolk who are anything but ordinary once the boundaries break down. The book revisits figures from the first volume and folds them into a dense tapestry of new characters, creatures, and cities that exist half in our world and half in the dream sea.

Across both novels, Barker mixes horror with wonder: grotesque transformations sit next to tender love stories; cosmic forces jostle with small human tragedies. The Art itself is less a set of spells than a way of seeing—magic as the act of making and remaking reality, with all the responsibility that implies.

Readers should start with The Great and Secret Show and then move on to Everville. Together they form a single, sprawling narrative that also brushes against other corners of Barker’s mythos, including recurring characters like occult investigator Harry D’Amour. The promised third Book of the Art is still unwritten, but the existing volumes already feel like a complete, dizzying journey through the secret architecture of Barker’s universe.