Everything you need to understand or teach The Damnation Game by Clive Barker.
Although portions of this novel are set in a prison and one of the major characters is a Howard Hughes-type billionaire recluse who controls a farflung economic empire, its focus is not upon larger social issues but rather, as is generally the case in Clive Barker's fiction, upon the struggles of individual people to achieve their own various forms of self-realization. Thus, the pattern of transformation through intense encounter with the horrific so prevalent in the Books of Blood (19841985) is also a central feature in this work's thematic framework, particularly insofar as it involves Marty and Carys, the characters who form, among other things, the love element in the novel. The other dominant thematic emphasis in the Books of Blood, that involving the symbiotic relationships between humanity as ordinarily defined and those who may be considered "others," is abundantly evident in The Damnation Game...