A New Beginning for Clive Barker

March 9, 2024 5:27 AM

"Abarat IV and V are amongst the books at my feet. So is the Third and final book of The Art and the sequel to The Thief of Always. There are also return visits to characters and mythologies you may have thought I would never return to. I hope I am still able to surprise you in the decades ahead." Legendary horror author Clive Barker announces plans to end convention appearances, having decided it is time for him to direct his focus fully back to writing.
posted by cupcakeninja (28 comments total)

Original posting on the author's website.

2019 interview with Barker where he discusses the long-running health problems that were the cause of speculation for many years.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:36 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

I remember reading The Hellbound Heart and really enjoying it. Are all of his books worth reading? You know, since I enjoyed this one so much.
posted by NoMich at 6:32 AM on March 9

Books of Blood is one of the best collections of horror short stories by any author. it tends towards the grotesque and body horror but if that's your thing, then yl love it.

Weaveworld and The Damnation Game are amazing. i haven't read a lot of his more recent novels so any recommendations there, I'd love to hear them.
posted by kokaku at 6:44 AM on March 9 [11 favorites]

Opinions vary. If you liked The Hellbound Heart, you would likely enjoy The Books of Blood, his 1980s multivolume short story collection. In the UK this was published as 6 vols, and in the US, as The Books of Blood (first 3 vols), The Inhuman Condition, In the Flesh, and Cabal. I think Cabal, in particular, has some of the same feel, whereas his novel The Great And Secret Show, from a few years later takes that sort of story and expands it, ties it to a large occult-y mythology that feels not unlike The Hellhound Heart. In the 90s he shifted (arguably shifted back) toward more fantastical stuff that didn't feel as horror-ish as his dark/decadent 1980s stuff. I fell off after the 90s, and he went in a bunch of different directions thereafter -- not dissimilar, just doing diverse things and formats.

I will say, because of the explicit mention of Hellbound Heart... that The Scarlet Gospels was the sequel, 29 years later. I don't recommend starting there if you want to read more Barker and would instead try some of what I suggested above.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:53 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

He burned a lot of goodwill with the very, very bad (and possibly ghostwritten) Scarlet Gospels.
I wish him well though - some of his books (Imajica especially) are among the best horror/fantasy I've ever read.
I'd also like to get to see where The Book of the Art ends up (it's thirty years this year since the last one came out!).
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:53 AM on March 9 [5 favorites]

(Also, I dearly love The Damnation Game, which feels incipiently like some of the stuff that he was doing a few years later, but minus the baroque mythologies.)
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:55 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

Books of Blood

What’s black and white and red all over?
posted by Artw at 7:17 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

What’s black and white and red all over?

Basically that exact joke is on the first page of the collection:

"We're all books of blood. Wherever we're opened, we're red."
posted by The Manwich Horror at 7:26 AM on March 9 [5 favorites]

I am a huge Barker fan. His early work is bleak and spare. His later work is self-indulgent and baroque. It is all delightful in the right frame of mind.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 7:29 AM on March 9 [6 favorites]

Imajica and the first two books of The Art, The Great and Secret Show and Everville, are some of my favorite explorations of magic and fantasy existing in the “real” world. I’m very excited that he’s going to be finishing The Art after all these years.
posted by Revvy at 7:47 AM on March 9 [5 favorites]

Oh, I forgot to mention I really like the comic adaptations of his work. Nightbreed and Hellraiser are mostly non-Barker stories in those universes with widely ranging levels of quality, but I got the hardcover collection of the Great and Secret Show adaptation, and it is great.

(Also my autocorrect tried to turn my mistyping of 'Nightbreed' into 'Night beef'. And that pleases me.)
posted by The Manwich Horror at 7:52 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]

I read a ton of Hellraiser comics for some reason, not letting the fact that most of the stories were basically "Oh no, I am obsessed with _____ and it turns out to be a Lament Configuration! Aiiiee!!", with a different fill-in-the-blank each time stop me.
posted by Artw at 8:01 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

'Night beef'

What you are served in the dining car of the Midnight Meat Train.
posted by mittens at 8:32 AM on March 9 [7 favorites]

Clive Barker! Formative influence indeed.

I read the Books of Blood/Cabal/The Damnation Game/Weaveworld when I was probably about 12? My paperback copies of the Books of Blood were the ones that had those underlit horror masks on the cover. (I also had the collections In the Flesh and The Inhuman Condition too; I didn't realize that those were essentially also the Books of Blood until much later.) I had a habit as a teen of underlining and blocking out passages in books that I thought were some grand pronouncement of humanity. I really wish I had my original copies so I could see what kind of deep thoughts I thought I was discovering. (Uh, I can do this with my original paperback copies of Anne Rice's first three Vampire Chronicles books. I still have those.)

I still love the movie Nightbreed. I was convinced for years as a kid that Clive Barker really did know real life monsters but disguised his knowledge within stories. I moved onto The Great and Secret Show, and then--this is not a brag; this is a dumbass folly of youth--I shoplifted a hardcover copy of Imajica from the Waldenbooks in the mall. I loved that book too.

I don't when I stopped reading Clive in my life, but I did. A few years ago I found a copy of The Scarlet Gospels at a used bookstore in Montreal. I was thinking, "Perfect! Something to read on the bus ride home!"

It was dreadful. Just absolutely abysmal. I didn't even make through two chapters.

I am glad Clive is still here, even if my interest in his work has waned. I gotta say, I didn't recognize him at all in that linked article photo.
posted by Kitteh at 8:48 AM on March 9 [7 favorites]

nice! I am a huge fan of his earlier works, esp Imagica as mentioned above. so good. will look forward to seeing some new stuff!
posted by supermedusa at 8:48 AM on March 9

Nothing I’ve heard about The Scarlet Gospels has made me remotely want to read it, it must be said.
posted by Artw at 8:50 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

Years ago I picked up a copy of Mr. B Gone in a little free library. The book starts with the narrator running through a litany of "if you X, don't read this book!" that was so try-hard and Hot Topic in its 'edginess' that after three or four of them I said "okay, I'm not reading this book, then" and tossed it back in the next little library I found.

The Scarlet Gospels is bottom-five things I've ever read, no joke. It was awful, like fanfic written by somebody into straight-to-video horror and obsessed with 'lore' over character, plot or some sort of narrative sense.

And all of this was as somebody who had to hunt down the Books of Blood as a kid with a minister for a parent in small-town Ontario in the late '80s, real cloak-of-secrecy stuff involving friends going into multiple bookstores incognito and being shouted at for trying to special order filth. Read everything slavishly up to the Great and Secret Show, Imagica and Everville. He lost me at Sacrament and I kind of gave up after that except for the highly regrettable dip-ins above.

I wish him all the best but I really don't feel like we're going to see a return to form. I'd love to be wrong.
posted by Shepherd at 9:19 AM on March 9 [3 favorites]

you know, Sacrament is exactly where I noped out too. I figure we can love/enjoy the good works of our favorite authors and just ignore the trash (looking at you, Neal Stephenson!).
posted by supermedusa at 9:36 AM on March 9 [5 favorites]

I always thought he was better at stories than novels--I devoured everything through Imajica, but that one was such a slog to teen-me, that I never read anything after. Maybe it was because the short stories allowed him to really concentrate the experience of horror, hopelessness, grim twisted lust and nuclear-age angst, without having to have a plot? But some of the later slog may have been me growing into other sorts of books, or maybe Barker suffering from that young-genius syndrome writers sometimes have, where they use up all their good stuff in the beginning. But it was such good stuff!!! I've been trying lately to find the books of blood in ebook form, unsuccessfully, because I wonder how they would work on me today. At the time they were published, they were like a sick fever-dream, like reading on painkillers, and even as a huge fan of horror, I had never ever read anything like them.

I think I mentioned in a recent thread, I re-read The Hellbound Heart not too long ago. There are some books where you say, "ah, a product of its time" kind of apologetically, but in this case it's more like a vintage, a real sense of a style and outlook that nobody in our current day could deploy.

I always do worry a little, though, when a writer whose day has passed, talks about all the irons they have on the fire. Is it vaporware? Probably? You just want to tell him, It's okay! You can stop there! You've done plenty!
posted by mittens at 9:53 AM on March 9 [1 favorite]

he discusses the long-running health problems

Hunh. I had no idea. I thought he kinda dropped out of sight because he was more interested in theater work than stories or novels. If he's back I'm more than willing to give new pieces a shot.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:34 AM on March 9

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking The Scarlet Gospels was terrible. It was disturbing to read a book by an author I respect and thinking I could've done a better job myself, and I write jokes about goblins for a living. What a goddamn shame for the sequel to Hellbound Heart and the only full-length Hellraiser novel to have been that... pile.
posted by rifflesby at 11:25 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]

Coldheart Canyon is a novel I remember enjoying reading, even if I don't remember a thing about it. That must mean it's time for me to reread it!

There's a lot of Barker that is quite good. If he feels like he can focus on writing at full intensity once again, then I say let him go for it!
posted by hippybear at 12:26 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

I have a degree of skepticism over whether a writer “putting too much effort into conventions” is a cause and not a symptom of something TBH.
posted by Artw at 12:30 PM on March 9

a cause and not a symptom of something

Barker caught Toxic Shock Syndrome from a bad root canal about 12 years ago, and it's possible that his convention work is a result of his illness keeping him from doing the writing work he would rather be doing. It has apparently been a very difficult road to recovery for him and he still doesn't feel completely well.
posted by hippybear at 12:33 PM on March 9 [4 favorites]

I had the pleasure of meeting him in person when I worked at a gay bookstore many many years ago. He was delightful to all the staff, signed everything we had of his, and was just so dang nice (especially compared to some of the diva [in a bad way] authors we had go through there. I wish him well.
posted by gingerbeer at 6:18 PM on March 9 [5 favorites]

I'm more a horror reader than a fantasy reader, so Barker's early work speaks to me most. But I understand why he branched out: after six volumes of Books of Blood (!), he had created a formula that he could probably have replicated in his sleep, but he just...didn't want to do that. The massive tomes of the '90s never grabbed me the way Weaveworld did, but I realized quickly this was a me thing.

I did read The Scarlet Gospels, a strangely action-oriented novel that felt less Barker than, like, a novelization of comics adaptation of the Hellraiser mythos, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what it was; it recycled ideas from the Hellraiser comic of the early 2010s, which I...think Barker may have co-plotted? Possibly? I don't know. Hellraiser is really a fine film, and somehow no amount of lesser derivative work seems capable of diminishing it.

Anyway, I hope he continues to have a good time and write and make art. But certainly he doesn't owe the world more!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:35 AM on March 10 [2 favorites]

Beyond the short stories and his first couple of novels, the thing I respect about Barker is that, at least back in the day, he was a consummate professional at book signings — nice to patrons but also mindful of keeping the line moving in a nice way, and he had the reputation of always signing for everyone, no matter how many people showed up. This sounds superficial, but it’s a skill a lot of writers can’t or won’t develop, and it’s so welcome to a bookseller when it happens.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:52 AM on March 10 [3 favorites]

GenjianProust, I second what you're saying. This thread made me pull out my autographed Thief of Always for a quick skim-reread, and wonderful memories of chatting with him after waiting in line for hours bubbled to the surface.

I remember almost walking away because it was getting on nigh 9pm and the bookstore was going to close, but am so thankful I stayed. Lovely man, I wish him an eventual full recovery -- or at least the ability to spend his remaining years doing whatever he likes.

If it happens to include writing more books, I'll happily buy and read them, of course!
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 7:01 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]