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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'.
When Clive Barker's Weaveworld was first published in 1987, it was quite understandably consigned to the genre of fantasy/horror, and the book is undoubtedly a remarkable and thrilling example. However, when read from a different perspective, the tale transcends the immediate limitations of its genre to provide a thought-provoking and
shirked. Barker, I submit, is simply too formidable a realist writer to justify this unfailing resort to non-realist plot premises. The problem is at its most exquisite in the string of novel-length secondary-world fantasies: Weaveworld , Imajica , The Great and Secret Show , Everville , and Abarat (of which latter series three volumes have been published to date). In
1 Clive Barker, ‘Cenobite’, 1986. In one of his more in-depth television interviews, while promoting his newly published novel Weaveworld in 1987 , Clive Barker was introduced by host John
Barker's own version of a Judeo-Christian underworld city in The Scarlet Gospels . It is interesting to note the varied but consistent theme of the infernal pact within each tale, all ripe with tell-tale gothic signifiers. In Weaveworld (1987), for example, its most cruel Faustian bargain hinges upon raw emotional manipulation, traced through grief and isolation. Shadwell, the
From Weaveworld 's Jerichau St Louis to Everville 's Joe Flicker to Galilee 's eponymous protagonist 1 to Abarat 's Finnegan Hobb, Clive Barker's black male characters slip into the interstitial realms between culture and metaphysics and return to the quotidian to share their stories with their respective tribes
Nightbreed in 1990. Having extended his shorter horror fiction into grander epic novels like Weaveworld (1987) and The Great and Secret Show (1989), Barker conceived Nightbreed as a visual expansion of his 1988 novella Cabal . Barker explained: ‘I'm not interested in just telling a story. I want to explore the theme of monstrousness, to create a