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Here is storytelling on a grand scale--the stuff of
which a classic is made.Weaveworld begins with a rug--a
wondrous, magnificent rug--into which a world has been woven. It is the world
of the Seerkind, a people more ancient than man, who possesses raptures--the
power to make magic. In the last century they were hunted down by an
unspeakable horror known as the Scourge, and, threatened with annihilation,
they worked their strongest raptures to weave themselves and their culture
into a rug for safekeeping. Since then, the rug has been guarded by
human caretakers.
The last of the caretakers has just died.
Vying for possession of the rug is a spectrum of
unforgettable characters: Suzanna, granddaughter of the last caretaker, who
feels the pull of the Weaveworld long before she knows the extent of her own
powers; Calhoun Mooney, a pigeon-raising clerk who finds the world he's
always dreamed of in a fleeting glimpse of the rug; Immacolata, an exiled
Seerkind witch intent ondestroying her race even if it means calling back the
Scourge; and her sidekick, Shadwell, the Salesman, who will sell the
Weaveworld to the highest bidder.
In the course of the novel the rug is unwoven, and we
travel deep into the glorious raptures of the Weaveworld before we witness
the final, cataclysmic struggle for its possession.
Barker takes us to places where we have seldom been in
fiction--places terrifying and miraculous, humorous, and profound. With keen
psychological insight and prodigious invention, his trademark graphic vision
balanced by a spirit of transcendent promise, Barker explores the darkness
and the light, the magical and the monstrous, and celebrates the triumph of
the imagination.
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