Magic Powers

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW

by Clive Barker

Harper & Row; 550 pages; $19.95

Just as one of the grand traditions in science fiction is to be antiscience, warning of the dangers of ambition, so fiction of the supernatural often tends to be subtly antimagic. The underlying message in each case is the inherent peril in man's playing God. The two genres are cunningly fused in the rich and absorbing new novel by Clive Barker, a horror writer (The Books of Blood, Weaveworld) and filmmaker (Hellraiser, Nightbreed) who is branching into fantasy. While The Great and Secret Show is populated by a DeMille-size cast of pubescent schoolgirls, suburban worthies, seedy entertainers and even a winsome apeman, its central antagonists are a mad genius straight from science fiction and a deranged postal clerk who dreams of magical powers.

The scientist tries to isolate the force inside each cell that triggers evolution; the postal clerk peruses dead letters by the carload in search of a secret code among the supernatural elect. They clash as men and then, having transcended mere morality through their discoveries, as ever more abstruse ! forms of energy. Like most fantasy novelists, Barker does not feel compelled to be logical or consistent: the dreamlike narrative has a kitchen-sink inclusiveness and cheats the rationalist in that characters turn out in mid- action to be someone else entirely, cunningly disguised. But the images are vivid, the asides incisive and the prose elegant in this joyride of a story.