Books of Blood is a series of six horror fiction anthologies collecting original stories written by British author, playwright, and filmmaker Clive Barker in 1984 and 1985.
Known primarily for writing stage plays beforehand, Barker gained a wider audience and fanbase through this anthology series, leading to a successful career as a novelist.
The UK editions of Volume 6 close with a story, "On Jerusalem Street", that features a man who pursues the fake psychic in order to skin him and take his Book of Blood.
Barker has stated in Faces of Fear that an inspiration for the Books of Blood came when he read Dark Forces in the early 1980s and realised that a horror story anthology didn't need to have narrow themes, consistent tone or restrictions to be considered a proper collection.
After Kaufman kills Mahogany in self-defense, the train arrives at a secret station where ancient, withered humans board and consume the bodies.
Kaufman is later awakened by the conductor in a secret, pristine subway station and helped off the train as cleaning crews come on to cover up the previous night's events.
The film dramatically expands the book in many ways, most notably by introducing additional characters such as Maya, Leon's girlfriend, and further events outside the main plot.
He is having an affair with his leading lady, Diane Duvall, and hopes her soap opera fame will bring in a big audience but also considers her a poor actress.
In an isolated rural area of Yugoslavia, two entire cities, Popolac and Podujevo, create massive communal creatures by binding together the bodies of their citizens.
A line from this story, "stale incense, old sweat, and lies," appears in the song "Sin" on the album Pretty Hate Machine by the American industrial band Nine Inch Nails.
Steve becomes Quaid's next candidate for his experiments, held captive in a dark, silent room, forcing him to relive a childhood period of deafness that terrified him.
An athlete taking part in the event, Joel, realizes the actual stakes of the race when the other runners begin to fall, ravaged by some unseen beast.
Disturbed by his attempts at sedating her, and by his lack of sympathy and understanding of her condition, Jacqueline kills her therapist and then causes her husband's death by willing their bodies to tear apart or fold in on themselves.
Lewis learns Philippe, a notorious eccentric, raised the animal himself as a strange experiment based on the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".
Over the months following his death, a cancerous tumour in the convict's body gains sentience from the strong emotions of the cinema's audiences and comes to life.
During an unusually warm summer in rural Kent, the ancient monster Rawhead, a nine-foot tall malevolent humanoid, is accidentally awakened from his underground imprisonment.
After being chased by the animated shroud, the mob boss primarily responsible for Ronnie's ordeal runs into his home, only to find his wife cheating on him with his assistant, so he shoots both of them dead.
The story is written as a black comedy, revolving around the visual gag of a real ghost actually taking on the form of a floating bedsheet.
A yacht is stranded on the beach of a deserted island that is located at a point in the Atlantic Ocean where converging undersea currents bring all the human bodies of sailors drowned at sea.
A keen fan of puzzles, Karney undoes the knots that evening, not knowing that, in doing so, he is releasing a succession of demons who proceed to kill off his friends.
Right – against Charlie's own wishes – chops off Left, who scuttles away to summon other hands to do the same before returning to rescue Right, starting a violent revolution of human limbs.
However, the pool has some mysterious inhabitants in the form of nude teenage girls who flee should Jerry or his would-be financial backer encounter them.
While the businessman flees and mutilates himself in horror before falling into the Thames and drowning, Jerry stays and sleeps with one of the girls, returning home to wake up the following morning and discover he has been transformed into a woman.
A young woman named Vanessa Jape happens across a secluded compound in which a group of elderly scientists and scholars use their great minds to determine the outcome of major world events.
Billy's efforts to summon Tait's spirit cause Cleve to be haunted by dreams of a purgatory for murderers, where killers are obliged to spend some portion of their afterlife in a replica of the scene of their crime.
As her soul flees her body, Elaine feels a sick sort of glee when she realizes that Kavanagh is now the carrier of the plague she contracted in the tomb, and will spread it far and wide.
Several European mercenaries, led by a cold-hearted man named Locke, have bought land in the jungles of South America that is inhabited by a tribe of Amazonian natives.
The elder of the tribe puts a curse on the men which strikes them down one by one with a gruesome condition that makes their bodies incredibly delicate; a mote of dust can slice their skin open, the soles of their feet crack when they stand, etc.
Before his death, Swann gives his wife Dorothea a letter stating she must cremate his body immediately before enemies take action.
Believing there are unseen dangers at play, Dorothea hires Harry D'Amour to guard the body, having read in newspapers that the private investigator seemingly encountered supernatural forces during a case in Brooklyn.