Abarat

Clive Barker's Abarat is set between two worlds: the mundane town of Chickentown, Minnesota, and the Abarat, a fantastical archipelago of 25 islands, each permanently fixed at a different hour of the day, surrounded by a sentient ocean called the Sea of Izabella.

The novel opens with three women braving a violent storm in a small red boat called The Lyre. Diamanda, their elderly leader clutching a box that contains a stolen soul; Joephi, a companion who steers the vessel; and Mespa, renowned for her resilience, carry the soul of a young woman whose life was cut short. After invoking moon-magic to survive, they reach the shore of the Hereafter, the Abaratian name for the ordinary human world, and head inland.

Candy Quackenbush, a teenage girl in Chickentown, struggles with a school project about her town's history. Her father, Bill Quackenbush, is unemployed and has an alcohol addiction, and her mother, Melissa, is worn down by the marriage. On Melissa's advice, Candy visits the Comfort Tree Hotel and learns from Norma Lipnik, the assistant manager, that the town was originally named Murkitt. Henry Murkitt, descendant of the founding family, died by suicide in Room Nineteen on Christmas Eve 1947 after his wife Diamanda left him and the town changed its name. He left behind a sextant, a navigational instrument, and a note about waiting for a ship.

Candy's teacher, Miss Schwartz, gives her an F on the paper, calling it morbid gossip. During the confrontation, Schwartz discovers that Candy has compulsively covered her workbook with wavy designs that Candy realizes represent the sea. Ordered to the principal's office, she walks out of school entirely, drawn by an inexplicable pull.

Beyond Chickentown, Candy finds seashells and sand mixed into the prairie soil. She encounters John Mischief, a fugitive from the Abarat with seven smaller brothers growing from antlers on his head. Mischief warns her that Mendelson Shape, a tall, spiderish agent of the Lord of Midnight carrying swords embedded in his back, is hunting them. He asks Candy to climb a nearby ruined lighthouse and light the lamp while the brothers distract Shape.

At the top, Candy finds an inverted pyramid with a cup and a turquoise-and-silver ball etched with the same design she drew in her workbook. She throws the ball into the cup just as Shape breaks through the door. The pyramid spins and emits brilliant light that summons the Sea of Izabella, which rolls across the prairie as foaming waves. Shape attacks Candy on the rotting balcony, but the platform collapses and she falls unconscious.

When she wakes, a jetty extends into the sea. Mischief fires his pistol at the cup to reverse the tide, then presses into Candy's hands a mysterious parcel he calls the Key: When she opens it, points of light sink into her mind. He begs her to tell no one. Refusing to return to Chickentown, Candy leaps with Mischief into the sea.

Waves separate them. Candy encounters four Sea-Skippers, half-human, half-fish creatures who carry her and Mischief to the Yebba Dim Day, an enormous stone head where it is always Eight in the Evening. During the voyage, Candy notices entirely unfamiliar constellations, confirming the Abarat exists under a different sky. Upon arrival, Mischief, a wanted criminal, dives into the water and disappears. Alone, Candy enters the city inside The Great Head and shelters with Izarith, a woman with sea-creature ancestry. A mechanical insect spy records Candy and stabs her hand; Izarith asks Candy to leave for her children's safety.

On Gorgossium, the island of Midnight, Shape reports his failures to Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight, a towering figure who breathes a fluid of flickering nightmares contained in a translucent collar around his head. Carrion dreams of extinguishing all light so that the Requiax, ancient creatures of terrible power in the sea's deepest trenches, will rise and devastate the islands, allowing him to rebuild the world. Using a surveillance device called the Universal Eye, obtained from Rojo Pixler, the owner of the powerful Commexo Company, Carrion locates Candy on screen, feels an unsettling recognition, and conjures a giant moth from mummified corpses to send Shape after her.

Candy meets Samuel Klepp, a publisher of Abaratian lore, who shows her old photographs of Hark's Harbor, a port that once connected the two worlds and was built around the very lighthouse near Chickentown. Shape arrives on the moth and snatches Candy, but a fleet of Pixler's hunting balloons shoots the moth down. Candy crashes into trees on Ninnyhammer, the island at Ten in the Evening. Pixler tries to recruit her for her knowledge of the Hereafter, but she refuses, disturbed by his ambitions to control the islands and eradicate magic, and escapes.

Candy reaches a domed house occupied by Kaspar Wolfswinkel, a deceitful wizard. Catlike creatures called tarrie-cats were trying to warn her away, she later realizes. Wolfswinkel imprisons Candy and extracts the Key from her mind. He beats Malingo, a geshrat (a creature native to the Abarat) with orange mottled skin whom Wolfswinkel has kept enslaved for 12 years. Candy, recognizing the dynamic from her own experience with her father, fights back. She seizes Wolfswinkel's staff; Malingo catches it and breaks it across his knee. When Wolfswinkel conjures a deadly creature, Candy knocks the hats from his head, draining the stolen power of five magicians he murdered. They flee with help from the tarrie-cats, and Malingo declares himself free. As Carrion's lieutenant Otto Houlihan approaches with stitchling soldiers—creatures sewn from skin and fabric—Malingo conjures a glyph, a flying machine made of spoken words, and they escape. Houlihan takes the Key from Wolfswinkel.

In a parallel subplot, Mischief joins a crew led by Geneva Peachtree, a warrior searching for Finnegan Hob, who lost Princess Boa to a dragon at their wedding and disappeared while hunting the dragon's kin. Carrion, too, is haunted by Boa: He once proposed to unite Night and Day, but she refused, and his grandmother Mater Motley once sewed his lips shut for using the word "love." A sea dragon attacks Geneva's ship, gravely wounding Mischief. The survivors reach the Nonce, where a monsoon triggers explosive plant growth that envelops Mischief in a seedpod and restores his consciousness.

The glyph pulls Candy and Malingo toward the Twenty-Fifth Hour, Odom's Spire, a place outside ordinary time. Inside, Candy hears her parents' voices from before her birth, young and loving. The three women from the prologue appear: Diamanda, Joephi, and Mespa, members of the Fantomaya, who protect the visions of this place. Diamanda reveals herself as Diamanda Murkitt, Henry's wife. They show Candy visions of past and future. Candy interprets their smiles and silence as confirmation that she belongs in the Abarat, though the women say they do not fully understand her purpose. They warn that the Requiax may be stirring.

Abraham Hollow, the Keeper of the Hour, discovers the intrusion and sends the Fugit Brothers, creatures with clown-white faces whose features rotate like clock hands, to catch Candy. She escapes through darkness onto a rocky shore where Malingo waits. The three sisters appear one last time to fill the sail of a small red boat that carries them to safety.

The novel closes with a survey of forces converging around Candy. Carrion wanders Gorgossium murmuring her name, wondering if she is fate's compensation for losing Boa. Mater Motley commands tens of thousands of stitchling soldiers assembled for war. Pixler watches the deep sea for signs of the Requiax. Candy falls asleep and dreams of Chickentown, a nightmare of her father's cruelty. She wakes, tells Malingo the Abarat feels like home, and sails on under alien stars, content to be alive and becoming someone new.