Of all the authors I read, no one seems to better understand the ‘no boundaries’ rule of the horror genera better than Clive Barker.  Best known for the Hellraiser movies of which his story “The Hellbound Heart” was the inspiration, Clive Barker is a writer that holds nothing back when it comes to writing and doesn’t seem to worry about offending people, which, given the stories he has created, I can see happening on a regular basis.  Because of this one never knows what his stories will be like or where they will take us, the only guarantee being that it will probably be unique and at some point will spit in the face of mainstream religious and conservative beliefs.  It will also give us a great look into the interesting worlds of homosexuality, bdsm, S&M, fetish, and any other alternative sexual lifestyle or perversion that is out there, something which most people truly are curious about yet afraid to admit for fear of being branded with a giant P for ‘pervert’ (if I were ever branded I would ask them to put two Ps on me for ‘proud pervert’ - ha!).  Mister B. Gone is no exception.

The story is about a young demon named Jakabok Botch (Mister B.) who is trapped within the pages of the book.  While begging for the reader to burn the book that imprisons him Jakabok tells his tragic life story, one that begins with him living in the garbage heaps in the ninth circle of Hell, and then on Earth after he is caught by a group of medieval men who had lowered a net through a crack in the Earth with slabs of meat as the bait.  Having

Having escaped the men, who were disappointed at his size and the fact that he was just a minor demon (they had wanted a giant), he befriends another demon living on the earth named Quitoon.  Together the two cause mayhem and destruction all across the medieval landscape (in one particularly grisly scene Jakabok take a bath in a tube filled with the blood of infants, one which took a long time to fill given the size of the infants).  Eventually this path of destruction leads Jakabok and Quitoon to the home of Gutenberg (inventor of the printing press) where an epic battle between angel and demon is being waged, one which ends with an interesting look at both sides and who they really are and why they are fighting.  

A great read, yet somewhat repetitive when it comes to the narrator Jakabok begging for the book to be burned, Mister B. Gone is a nice story for someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to sit with a novel like Coldheart Canyon or The Great and Secret Show or Imajica, but still needs a Clive Barker fix.  That said, I think this story would have been more appropriate inside a collection of similar length tales like The Books of Blood, or Cabal, or The Inhuman Condition, one which offered up a few more tales for those of us that are used to large, five to six hundred page books, ones which have several different characters, all who lead very interesting and bizarre lives.