Look out Harry Potter, because someone sweeter is taking over fantasyland. Candy Quackenbush, Clive Barker’s heroine in Abarat, the first installment of four children’s chapter books, promises more adventure, more imagination, and more money—especially with Disney’s 8 million dollar check for the movie, theme park, and multimedia rights. If it wasn’t Barker, the mastermind behind Hellraiser and Nightbreed, you might fear the author was selling out. But the combination of Barker’s imagination and Disney bucks could equal the coolest thing to come out of the Magic Kingdom since Nightmare Before Christmas.

Don’t let “children’s book” turn you off. Barker lends the same edginess he used in his adult novels to Candy’s journey, but tones down the sex and violence. Yet there remains subtle sensuality and heart-stopping horror in this coming-of-age story. Barker understands the real terror is growing up, especially when you live in the “most boring town in the country,” Chickentown, U.S.A. Here, Candy deals with an alcoholic father, a bossy history teacher, and conceited classmates. But after meeting the eight-headed John Mischief in a Minnesota prairie field, these problems soon wash away in a mystical sea that carries Candy to the islands of Abarat and her true destiny.

Mesmerizing prints from Barker’s oil paintings of Chickentown and Abarat turn this book into an art lover’s piece, as well as a great piece of literature. The paintings only add to the creation of a complete world where Candy faces the amazing: techno bugs and squid goggles, giant magic moths and tiny murdering wizards, mud men and fish women. Most compelling are the bad guys: Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight, with a mask of embalming fluid filled with eels fused to his skeletal face, and his slave Mendelson Shape, with cruciform rods fused to the back of his spiderish anatomy. But as in all of Barker’s books, the evil mind hides a humanity that has been gently distorted into this new thing of beauty. Yes, the bad guy is as lovely as the princess, and in the end you will want to save them both. That’s what puts this book in a league above Potter, but don’t wait for the movie to find out.

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