Although Clive Barker is an author who seems to be more concerned with constructing stories which center upon the problems of individual relationships and self-awareness than those which embody wide-sweeping social statements, it is inevitable that in a collection comprising some thirty stories there will be certain instances where the treatment of social issues is of primary importance. Thus, for instance, the story "Dread" (Volume II), which features the attempts of a psycho-sadist to understand the nature of secret terror by fashioning a series of horrifying clinical experiments utilizing innocent subjects, would clearly seem, on one level at least, to be an indictment of scientific experimentation utilizing human, or possibly even animal, subjects. Sentiments of a similar nature are apparent in "The Age of Desire" (Volume IV), a narrative of the type commonly referred to as "technohorror," in which scientists accidentally discover a powerful aphrodisiac, rush...