This book never really took off for me. The idea and basis for the tale sound great, but Barker never really follows through with what his readers have come to expect from him, and the story just ends up moving very slowly. It was worth reading just for the idea and there were some good parts, but all in all I wouldn’t recommend it. ( )

Was a bit disappointed by this book. Not as good as other Clive Barker books I've read in the past. The book never really took off.

Incredibly disappointing. Read like someone writing in the style of Clive Barker. ( )

Rubbish ( )

Review by Lachlan Huddy.
Mister B. Gone is a striking exercise in unsympathetic but compelling protagonists. Despite the narrator’s cultured tongue and sly turns of phrase, you’ll rarely find yourself falling for his charm, thanks to the novel’s intriguing conceit: a medieval demon trapped in a book, directly addressing his reader. Jakabok Botch of the Ninth Circle is as unlovable as you’d expect a classic demon to be, but he’ll keep the pages turning even as he boils fair maidens alive, bathes in infants’ blood and whines about his abusive, schizophrenic friendship/unconsummated love affair with fellow demon Quitoon. The pacing gets jagged at times, by turns too fast or slow, but Mister B. Gone marks the return to horror of absurdly talented fantasy maestro Clive Barker—he of the Abarat and Hellraiser series—so there’s enough whip-smart invention to make up for it. Here Barker has crafted the perfect symbolic vehicle—a book that speaks to its reader—to explore the nature of words: how the encoding of knowledge is instrumental to the balance of power and thus a potent force for both good and evil, and how good and evil themselves are inextricably entangled. A devil of a read.