Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War: The Abarat Trilogy, Book 2 (by Clive Barker)

The plot is simply told -- Candy Quackenbush, lately of our world, spends the entire book being hunted and chased around the islands of the Abarat by the Lord of Night, Christopher Carrion, who sees her as a mysterious impediment to his plans to rule all of the Abarat. Along the way she meets more fantastic creatures, travels through more fantastic places, and begins to discover fantastic powers within herself. The creatures include a mass of murderous insects called the Sacbrood; the Totemix, a tribe of creatures liberated from a totem pole; and an actual Abaratian freak show, which is really saying something. Places include an island where everything grows and decays in a matter of minutes, a cavern where the thread that joins all things begins, and another island that is actually a living creature.

What makes this book so mesmerizing is the sheer outrageous fecundity of the author's imagination, expressed both verbally and in the hundred-odd color paintings that adorn this gorgeous volume. Clive Barker, known primarily for horror, has harnessed that bizarre and grotesque imagination and turned it into something weirdly, perversely, but delightfully beautiful. Barker has tightened up his pacing considerably since the first book, and he culminates this volume with a thrilling epic battle across two worlds, involving (among much else) an army of stitched-together mud-creatures and a giant ship whose parts begin coming to life. The basic plot may be simple and familiar -- Alice crossed with Odysseus -- but no one has ever done anything quite like this.