Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker

These are the first two books in what Barker has said will be a series of four. I wrote a little about them when I was reading them, about how the first did not feel as though it was an entire book so I had to rush out and buy the second to feel like I had read a whole story, and I hold to that, having read them both. At the end of the second book I felt that it had ended enough to feel that I had read a full story but with enough left open to make me want to read more. So the first thing I would say is that I advise you read both of these together.
The books concern Candy Quackenbush, a young girl in Chickentown in USA, a boring town so named because of the chicken factory which supports it and which is the high point of any one's career expectations. Candy does not fit in. Her home life is quite miserable with a drunken and at times violent father and a mother who seems to have given up trying to cope with him.
Candy has visions of other lands and on one particularly nasty day she walks out of school, through the town and keeps on walking until she reaches the grassy plain on the outskirts of the town. Here she comes across the remains of a lighthouse (hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean) and meets a very strange man, or men rather, as John Mischief has antlers which carry seven other heads, each of which is one of his brothers - all variously called John and all extremely vocal.
As if this wasn't weird enough, this man is being chased by another strange-looking man, who is trying to kill him. Candy helps the brothers escape but ends up calling a mystical ocean which carries her and the Johns to the Abarat - an archipelago where each island is named after, and permanently sits in, a particular hour.
Candy is a fugitive in this land as the evil Lord of Midnight, Christopher Carrion, chases her to retrieve something which John Mischief hid with her. As Candy travels through the different lands it becomes apparent that she is more connected to the Abarat than she realises.
The stories are very inventive, with weird creatures and characters and the different lands' descriptions are fascinating. Six o'clock is a land called Babilonium, where there is a permanent fun fair, another is built into a giant statue. Candy meets different people along the way, making both enemies and friends, especially Malingo, whom she saves from a life of slavery and who becomes her travelling companion. The travel around the different lands is one of the main reasons the first book may not be enough on its own; I felt that not enough of the Abarat is explored in this book, but just hinted at and it is not enough.
The story is magical and light but this is still Clive Barker, and there is a dark undercurrent of malice throughout. For instance, the land of funfairs is all very nice unless you have the misfortune to be one of the freaks living a life of misery in the cages of the freakshow. There is a lot of evil in the Abarat as well as good, and blood is spilt in the fight against it which develops into full blown war during the second book. There are also some quite grotesque images, such as when Carrion's grandmother, the real villain of the story, appears.

'Two more creatures now came into view, to the left and right of the first. Each had a hand that bled darkness into the air, knotting itself into configurations from the beast in the centre. They were subtly connecting themselves... Their skulls seemed to lose rigidity, and they too issued filaments of shadow-stuff, which knitted themselves together. The three were becoming one, their bony heads congealing into a single being, its identity unmistakably human.'

The stories are a lot of fun and written well, although occasionally there seems to be the odd loose end or continuity error that suggests perhaps they were written a little too fast. For light reading, though, they are great and I am looking forward to the next two books.