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This book explores the diverse literary, film and visionary creations of the polymathic and influential British artist Clive Barker. It presents groundbreaking essays that critically reevaluate Barker's oeuvre. These include in-depth analyses of his celebrated and lesser known novels, short stories, theme park designs, screen and comic book adaptations, film direction and production, sketches and book illustrations, as well as responses to his material from critics and fan communities. The book examines Barker's earlier fiction and its place within British horror fiction and socio-cultural contexts. Selected tales from the Books of Blood are exemplary in their response to the frustrations and political radicalism of the 1980s British cultural anxieties. Aiming to rally those who stand defiant of Thatcher's polarising vision of neoliberal British conservatism, Weaveworld is revealed to be a savage indictment of 1980s British politics. The book explores Barker's transition from author to filmmaker, and how his vision was translated, captured, and occasionally compromised in its adaptation from page to the screen. Barker's work contains features which can be potentially read as feminine and queer, positioning them within traditions of the Gothic, the melodrama and the fantastic. The book examines Barker's works, especially Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions, through the critical lenses of queer culture, desire, and brand recognition. It considers Barker's complex and multi-layered marks in the field, exploring and re-evaluating his works, focusing on Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone's new myths of the flesh'.
, his fascination with the body is something that still pervades his work and which he has never repudiated. 2 In the later fiction, particularly the novella Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium , which accompanied a series of six action figures distributed by McFarlane in 2001, and in his widely publicised return to horror with Mister B. Gone ( 2007 ), this has
) final edit of The Scarlet Gospels to finish the short novel Mister B. Gone in time for a Halloween release in 2007 . It is evident from the novel's epigraph that Barker is mired in a cycle of creation and destruction – ‘Burn this book’, its opening pages instructs the reader. It is reasonable to imagine that the act of continually rewriting and editing The Scarlet Gospels inspired the
2007's egregious Mister B. Gone with its endless appeals to the reader to stop reading).We will likely never know what Barker might have achieved had he renounced the juju, even once, and turned his hand to realist fiction. To speculate further would be idle. There are however two actually existing Barker works whose non-realist temper can be said to be fully vindicated on