SOURCE: Greenland, Colin. “The Figures in the Carpet.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4428 (12-18 February 1988): 172.

In the following review, Greenland compares Weaveworld to Ramsey Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother, finding Barker's novel lacking in substance.

These two novels [Weaveworld and The Doll Who Ate His Mother] by horror writers from Liverpool both take that city for background. Each selects a derelict house on the edge of a demolition site as the portal for that intrusion of chaos into the mundane that is the principle of the genre. Ramsey Campbell's chaotic agency is the influence of John Strong, a necromancer twenty years dead, which still radiates from the Amberley Street cellar where he held his peculiar sabbats. Clive Barker's anomaly is fairyland itself, a tract of marvels and monstrosities that has, for nearly a century, been magically parcelled up in a shabby carpet.

Of the two books, The...