the great and secret show by clive barker

Over the next several months, one of the girls goes insane and is discovered to be barren, while the other three give birth to strange children. Each of them nearly drowns in the waters as Fletcher and the Jaff, as he has come to think of himself, pull them under. Soon, four girls encounter a body of water mysteriously arisen overnight, situated just above the caves. Jaffe breaks one open himself, and the two evolve into godlike beings who use physical manifestations of good and evil, nightmares and dreams, to battle on another over the course of the next several years, until they crash into the small California town of Palomo Grove, where they enter a series of caves and keep each other from escaping. Fearing his employers designs on the substance, Fletcher plans to destroy all of his work, but Jaffe stops him just in time to discover that Fletcher has accidentally broken open on the vials. He enlists the help of a Biologist named Fletcher, who uncovers the secret fluid responsible for evolution. Finding the old man repugnant and untrustworthy, Jaffe escapes him and resumes his quest in a new approach. Escaping unharmed and unpursued, he wanders the country aimlessly, until finally he wanders into the New Mexico desert and finds Kissoon, a shaman who offers to teach him about the Quiddity-the dream sea-in exchange for use of Jaffe's body. Jaffe kills Homer and sets fire to the sorting room. He gathers these letters to learn more about them, just as his boss, Homer, becomes suspicious of him and confronts Jaffe over his activities. He has always wanted great power and understanding, and discovers, in a mail sorting room in Omaha, that the occasional lost letter holds a profound secret about the world. Jaffe has recently become a postal worker, having, in thirty-seven years of life, never held a job for more than a year and a half.

'The Great and Secret Show: The First Book of the Art' is a novel about human desires an extremes, following two great men as they battle against one another for the future of humanity.

The great and secret show by clive barker