The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker

In the sprawling, vividly imagined sequel to Abarat, Clive Barker continues his ambitious journey into the archipelagic world of the Abarat, a place where every island represents a different hour of the day. Days of Magic, Nights of War is a work of dizzying invention, yet it is not invention for its own sake. Rather, Barker constructs a mythos whose deeper resonance echoes the archetypal conflicts that underpin much of Western fantasy — light against darkness, free will against tyranny, identity against oblivion.

At the heart of the novel lies Candy Quackenbush, a heroine whose evolution is notably more complex than in the first volume. Candy is not simply a chosen one swept along by fate; she is a site of internal and external conflict, a liminal figure torn between the ordinariness of Chickentown and the chaotic, magic-strewn landscapes of the Abarat. Barker layers her character with contradictions: she is both naive and wise beyond her years, passive yet dangerously impulsive. This duality, reinforced by her unsettling connection to Princess Boa, raises compelling questions about the nature of selfhood and memory. Is identity something we forge, or is it a palimpsest written and rewritten by history, circumstance, and hidden inheritance?

Structurally, Days of Magic, Nights of War is more ambitious — and more chaotic — than its predecessor. The narrative fractures and sprawls across multiple islands and storylines, often abandoning the traditional linear progression of the hero’s journey. Barker seems more concerned with world-building as a metaphysical exercise than with crafting a neatly satisfying plot. Each island, grotesque creature, and arcane artifact is rendered with the lushness of a fever dream, many of them accompanied by Barker’s own painterly illustrations. These paintings are not mere supplements but critical extensions of the text, collapsing the distance between literary and visual art in a way that few fantasy authors dare attempt.

Yet it is precisely this profusion of imagination that both enriches and encumbers the novel. The sheer density of invention occasionally threatens to suffocate the narrative momentum, leading to passages where the reader feels adrift, dazzled but unmoored. Still, this quality can be seen as an intentional aesthetic choice: Barker’s Abarat is a world where linearity, predictability, and logic have been subsumed by dream-logic and mythic time. In this sense, the novel resists the typical fantasy reader’s desire for order and instead demands a surrender to disorientation — a bold, even radical move for a writer working within the genre.

Thematically, Barker deepens his meditation on rebellion and autonomy. The villainous Christopher Carrion is given more psychological shading than in the first book, becoming less a monolithic embodiment of evil than a tortured soul trapped in a cycle of inherited cruelty. His own torments mirror Candy’s struggles in a distorted way, suggesting that freedom is not a simple matter of defeating external enemies but requires breaking internal cycles of fear and resentment.

The book’s title — Days of Magic, Nights of War — captures its fundamental tension. Magic here is not an escapist balm but an existential condition that brings both wonder and terror. War, likewise, is not portrayed with the romanticism typical of high fantasy but with a grim awareness of its costs, both to the world and to the soul.

In Days of Magic, Nights of War, Clive Barker transcends the limitations of the YA fantasy genre to create something that feels less like a sequel and more like an act of myth-making. It is a flawed but magnificent work, a chaotic symphony that rewards readers willing to embrace its strangeness and its darkness. Barker reminds us that in true fantasy, as in life, wonder and nightmare are often two faces of the same reality.