Cal is a young man like every other. One day he is chasing his father's escaped pigeons, and when he accidentally falls off a wall while doing so, he sees a mysterious carpet, but not only this - a world has been woven into this carpet, and while he's falling through the air, he sees that world's enchanting beauty. Unable to forget this magic world, he sets out again to find it, and meets Suzanna, a young woman who is the granddaughter of the former custodian of the carpet and who also wants to claim it back. Meanwhile the evil enchantress Immacolata and her companion, a Salesmen, do their best to make Cal's & Suzanna's lives a misery. A chase between good and evil begins, building up to a climax in which the Seerkind, magicians of the Weave have to face ancient powers....

I got this book from the library because I ran out of ideas for stuff to read, and they only had two books by Barker, of whose stuff I've never read anything before. The descriptions of both sounded really weird, so in the end I took this one because it sounded less confusing ;) I still couldn't make anything of the description though. But parallel worlds are always good, I thought.

Once I was a few chapter into the book, I was really surprised at how much horror and fantasy there was. Turns out the entire book has some occasional very gross and disturbing stuff, but thankfully it didn't gross me out too much because I'm used to stuff like that.

Even though it's a long journey, the book is more or less suspenseful and doesn't get boring. It has some very interesting character developments. When I just read a summary about the book on the net, I realized that the main character of Cal reminds me a lot of Shadow, the main character in American Gods. I don't really know why though. Maybe I'm just imagining things.

Nice book, nice gore and stuff like that, though I didn't really like the religious turn it took towards the end. Magic and Fantasy Worlds don't match well with religious stuff (even if it's only metaphorical).

(This review was written on September 2nd, 2006 for a review blog I used to run back then).