Douglas E. Winter waited a long while to return with an anthology to match his excellent Prime Evil; so rather than retread old ground he creates a celebration of the coming Millenium. We are left with Millenium (or, "Revelations" in the US): a volume which brings together some of the best contemporary horror talent in a non-genre experiment to build an anthology novel covering the final century of our current Millenium. Its scope reaches even beyond this, with Clive Barker's tale of openings and closures which wraps about the tales of our century, taking up to the stirrings of the Millenia we currently inhabit.
As an anthology it is surpassed by few, and as a novel it is a work which renews important events of the previous century ready for the onset of the future Millenium. So it prises open a few graves; airs the woes of some of the centuries ghosts; takes us into the depths of many of our recent history's defining moments. Natural disasters and far more human ones, the full range of human emotion. Each author makes a decade live in the present for a while, and history phases past with the turning of each page. What can the future hold? Where better to look and draw inspiration from but the past.
Do the authors matter? In a work like this they should, but the individual voices merely combine to create a greater whole. Once Barker's unique vision of the past has receeded we move into the twentieth century, and a pair of devestating natural disasters wrought fresh by Joe Lansdale and David Morrell; storm and pestilance. Next F. Paul Wilson brings us face to face with one of the centuries greatest evil, and a man that can possibly avert it; or can he? Then to the Chinese Opera, and a secular world from which two young lovers escape - a collaboration between Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust. Charles L. Grant brings a unique vision of the man in black and Whitley Strieber takes us on a nuclear trip. Richard Christian Matheson takes the seventies and the charts by storm, with a band who downward spiral carries them to devestation. David J. Schow and Craig Spector bring down the Berlin wall, while the shades of old conflicts look on. It takes Ramsey Campbell's charting of this, our current decade, to bring an obscure author into the limelight with the greatest book ever written; barr none. So it's over. Yet it is merely the beginning, so Clive Barker again takes us on his encapsulating vision.
At the end of this enrapturing journey you have been shown where we have been and where we are going, that the darkest of literary visions is still conscious of the light. A forfilling meal you'll shelve for perusal again, and again - a book which will outlast the Millenia that spawned it.