Abarat

Lore & Background

Abarat focuses on Candy Quackenbush, a teenage girl frustrated with her life in Chickentown, Minnesota. After an argument with her teacher over a school project and the doodling Candy has done in her school workbook, Candy leaves the school and goes to the edge of town, where she sees the remains of a lighthouse. She finds this incredibly strange because Chickentown is thousands of miles from the ocean. She then encounters a master thief named John Mischief who looks human except for the antlers on his head. Mischief's seven brothers live on these horns as fully formed but tiny people. Because he is pursued by a sinister humanoid being named Mendelson Shape, Mischief sends Candy to light the lamp in the lighthouse, which summons an ocean known as the Sea of Iz

Reader's Guide

Abarat is significant as the first installment of Clive Barker's The Books of Abarat series, a fantasy aimed at young adults. The book is notable for its extensive original oil paintings by Barker, who had completed 300 paintings before starting the first book. The title image contains an ambigram, which may indicate derivation from the Russian word 'наоборот' meaning 'the other way around'. The American Library Association recognized it as one of its Best Books for Young Adults. Critical reception was mixed: Publishers Weekly noted Barker's wild imagination and striking imagery but felt the novel served as a setup for later books, leaving many plot strands unresolved. School Library Journal praised the immersive rendering of Abarat's locales and cultures, and found Candy a fine protagonist, though it noted the Chickentown chapters seemed less developed. Before publication, Disney bought full rights to the series for $8 million, intending to produce a film series to rival Warner Bros.' Harry Potter series, with preliminary plans for theme parks based on the Babilonium island. The book won the International Horror Guild Award in the Graphic Narrative category (2001) and placed second in the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book (2003).

Did You Know?

• The title image contains an ambigram, which may indicate it is derived from the Russian word 'наоборот' meaning 'the other way around'.
• Clive Barker had already completed 300 paintings before he started working on the first book.
• Disney bought full rights to the series for $8 million before the first book was published.
• The American Library Association picked Abarat as one of its Best Books for Young Adults.

Story and World-Building

Abarat opens in the most unglamorous of settings: Chickentown, Minnesota, where a restless teenager named Candy Quackenbush clashes with a teacher over a school project and the strange doodlings filling her workbook. Her escape from the classroom leads her to the edge of town, where she stumbles upon the crumbling remains of a lighthouse—an impossibility in a place thousands of miles from any coastline. There she meets John Mischief, a master thief marked by a pair of antlers from which the heads of his seven brothers peer out. Fleeing a menacing figure called Mendelson Shape, Mischief tasks Candy with lighting a lamp inside the lighthouse. The act summons the Sea of Izabella, a vast ocean bleeding in from a parallel dimension, and the two are swept across its waters to Abarat: an archipelago of twenty-five islands, each locked to a different hour of the day, once linked to Candy's own world before Abaratian authorities destroyed the connecting harbour. From that point, Candy uncovers the crises gripping the islands while confronting a trio of power-hungry antagonists—the sorcerer Christopher Carrion, his grandmother Mater Motley, and the industrialist Rojo Pixler—each bent on seizing control of the archipelago.

Artistic Vision and Visual Craft

Barker approached Abarat as much as a painter as a novelist, executing every illustration in oil paint with a boldness that reviewers likened to the late-period canvases of Vincent van Gogh. The visual layer is not mere decoration; it is woven into the narrative's very structure. The title image features an ambigram—a word that reads the same upside down—which may derive from the Russian word 'наоборот,' commonly meaning 'the other way around,' a fitting cipher for a story built on inverted pyramids, parallel oceans, and a world turned inside out. The scale of his preparatory work was staggering: before he began writing the first book, he had already completed three hundred paintings. This meant the novel arrived with a full-color visual vocabulary that grounds its surreal geography and character portraits in tactile, brushstroke-driven reality. For a young-adult audience accustomed to text-only fantasy, the experience of encountering a vivid oil-painted portrait or a sweeping seascape between chapters was genuinely unprecedented, setting Abarat apart from nearly every other novel in its category.

Critical Reception and Awards

Abarat collected a remarkable string of honors across multiple award bodies. In 2001 it took the International Horror Guild Award in the Graphic Narrative category, a recognition that underscored how the book's blend of text and painting defied easy genre classification. The following year it earned a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, and in 2003 it placed second for the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. The American Library Association also selected it for its list of Best Books for Young Adults, a stamp of institutional approval that helped anchor the novel firmly in the YA canon. Reviewers were broadly enthusiastic but candid about the book's structure. Publishers Weekly praised the wild imagination and striking imagery while noting that much of the 400-page narrative reads as a setup, leaving numerous plot threads deliberately unresolved. School Library Journal observed that Barker clearly felt more at home in Abarat's fantastical realms than in the mundane chapters set in Chickentown, yet commended Candy as a protagonist who balances strength and vulnerability without the forced bravado common in the genre.

Commercial Ambitions and Series Legacy

The commercial stakes surrounding Abarat were extraordinary even before its 2002 publication. Disney secured the full rights to the entire series for eight million dollars, with the explicit ambition of mounting a film franchise to rival Warner Bros.' Harry Potter adaptations. The studio's plans went beyond the screen: preliminary discussions included building theme parks modeled on Babilonium, one of the archipelago's islands, signaling how seriously the property was being treated as a multimedia franchise. On the literary side, Barker has acknowledged that he recognized early in the writing process that the story he wanted to tell simply could not be contained within a single volume, which is why Abarat was conceived as the opening installment of The Books of Abarat. The novel's 400-page length, its deliberately open-ended plot strands, and the introduction of a full cast of antagonists all point to a narrative architecture designed to unfold across multiple books. For a young-adult reader in 2002, opening Abarat meant stepping into the first chapter of what was intended to be a sprawling, multi-volume epic, with the Disney deal promising to carry that world into cinemas and theme parks.