Harvey's Personification Of Evil In 'The Thief Of Always'

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The Thief of Always, by Clive Barker, is a complex book with many different ideas and characters. It seeks to introduce the notion of time on a relative scale, and to show that wasting one’s moments can lead to one’s life passing by in an instant. In The Thief of Always, a theme has shown itself multiple times, that being Clive Barker developing evil. There are three main examples of the that topic, those being Hood’s personification of evil, Harvey’s potential for evil and Carna’s evil existence as well. Evil is one of the main themes throughout The Thief of Always. Hood, the house, is highly evil. He has two main characterizations that show how evil Hood actually is. The first way that Hood shows his evil is when it is revealed that he …show more content…

While Harvey is the one who destroyed Hood and saved the day, he has evil tendencies as well. The first main point of evil in Harvey is his prank with Wendell that nearly got out of hand. When Harvey is pranking Wendell, and Jive is edging Harvey on to eat Wendell, Harvey thinks, “Who [is] this ridiculous boy Wendell anyway... He was just a tasty morsel. Any vampire worth his wings would chew [him up] as soon as [they looked] at him. And yet... “ (98-99). The fact that Harvey was having those thoughts shows that he wanted to eat Wendell up. That is magnified especially by Harvey thinking, “[Wendell] was just a tasty morsel.” Although, when he thinks, “And yet..” it implies that Harvey was having doubts about doing the evil deed; that is probably Harvey’s goodness coming through. Another point that shows Harvey’s evil is his obsession with vampires. When Marr is molding Harvey to look like a vampire, right before he pranks Wendell, Harvey says, “Yeah, I want to have fangs, like a wolf, and a red throat, and white skin, like I’ve been dead for a thousand years.” (89). The fact that Harvey listed so many details shows that he knows a lot about vampires, because someone who didn’t know much about vampires would probably say just “Oh,

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