The Books of Abarat are a series of young adult fantasy novels written and illustrated by English writer and visual artist Clive Barker.
The writer of Klepp's Almenak, the omnipresent traveller's guide to the Abarat, disagrees, claiming that "the tombs at Soma Plume are calm and curiously reassuring places" whereas the six pyramids at Xuxux are "sites of mystery and tragedy".
It was Pixler's dream (some have said folly) to build the biggest city in the archipelago on Pyon, its light so bright that the darkness of the Hour would be a grand irrelevance".
This is Commexo City, a Las Vegas-like tourists' paradise whose image Pixler seeks to impose on the entire archipelago, and whose site was formerly occupied by a mansion associated with the Carrion family.
Opinions vary as to how long it stood and why it fell, but what remains of the city – rows of pillars, archways, and frescoes – testifies to a site of elegance and learning".
Efreet is also home to five infamous monsters: the armoured, orange Waztrill; the Thrak, a purple beast with a small head and huge compound eyes; the serpentine Vexile; the shaggy, blue, lice-infested Sanguinius; and the bipedal Fever Gibe.
Some have called Obadiah the Elegiac's Garden, and suggested it may have been a laboratory in which the mythic Creators of Abarat, A'zo and Cha, experimented with [the evolution of life]".
At the western edge of the island stands the busy seaport of Tazmagor, where the food is good, the people happy, and the air filled with the din of extemporised songs".
Huffaker is a large island, peppered with huge rock formations resembling "natural cathedrals", the largest of which being Hap's Vault.
On the northeast side of the island is the wizard Kaspar Wolfswinkel's house, which some, upon seeing the glass observatory in the roof, have mistaken for a giant eye or temple.
Its dome is broken early on in the story, but the remnants retain the power of magnifying both the image of the viewer inside and the objects he sees outside.
This is a mostly barren island, on which the rock is fluid, fire is cold, water is like iron, and the air changes any spoken word into complete gibberish; hence the name.
He is generally known as the most evil person in all of the islands of the Abarat, though his cruelty is surpassed by that of his grandmother, Mater Motley, who in the third book replaces the fortress with a single tower of her own.
[1] The heroine of the series, she is a sixteen-year-old misfit (notably with heterochromia; her left eye is brown, while the right is blue) from Chickentown, a small township located in Minnesota.
Little is known about them, other than the implication that they have the power and will to aid Candy in her inadvertent quest to save the Abarat from Christopher Carrion and his grandmother and the statement that they constantly study and protect the history of the universe.
Diamanda is revealed eventually to have been an ordinary woman dwelling in Chickentown (then called "Murkitt" after her husband's ancestors), who left the human world and joined the sisterhood some time after her marriage.
She was set to marry Finnegan Hob but was murdered on her wedding day by a dragon sent by Christopher Carrion, whose offer of marriage she had earlier rejected.
His nightmares take physical shape as serpentine creatures residing in a fishbowl-like tank surrounding his neck and the lower half of his face.
As is revealed over the course of the first and second books, he possesses a deep self-loathing and remorse over the way his temper drives him to evil and reckless actions, and in Absolute Midnight resolves to become a better person after realizing Princess Boa's true nature as an arrogant and malevolent schemer.
The son of a Prince of Day and a witch from Speckle Frew, Finnegan was a young would-be hero engaged to marry Princess Boa, before she was killed at the altar by a dragon at Christopher Carrion's orders.
Malingo is a geshrat: an orange-skinned humanoid with prehensile feet, four small horns on the top of his head, yellow eyes, and fan-shaped ears.
Wearing these hats, he is able to perform several feats of psychokinesis, including manipulation of objects, ignition of fires, and the creation of artificial life.
He is frequently made to seem ridiculous, both in person and as the villain of a play lampooning his fights with Candy Quackenbush, whom he attempted to give as a prisoner to Christopher Carrion.
At the time of the story, Pixler has, with the aid of various magicians and scientists, created a commercial empire and near-monopoly of the Abaratian economy, making his megacorporation one of the Abarat's greatest political figures and causing some characters to believe him a threat to social diversity.
Having encountered Pixler the Requiax takes control of his body, establishing telepathic communication with him in the process, and attacks Mater Motley when she invades Commexo City.
He is described and portrayed as a human-sized, catlike creature with dark orange fur and luminous eyes, and an illustration shows him clad in a blue-green shirt.
Until the second book, wherein Ninnyhammer is overrun by Mater Motley, Jimothi and the other tarrie-cats prevent Kaspar Wolfswinkel from leaving the island and are therefore his constant source of frustration.
Otto Houlihan, called the "Criss-Cross Man", presumably on account of the checkered pattern marked on his cheek, is Christopher Carrion's bounty hunter.
He is said to have been jester to King Claus of Day until the death of Princess Boa and still lives in the Twilight Palace, where Candy encounters him after her escape from Otto Houlihan on the island of Babilonium.
This is the inherited name of the author of Klepp's Almenak, the travellers' guide to the Abarat published in Yebba Dim Day, Tazmagor, and two other cities.