Current Book Projects

The Abarat Series : Books Four and Five

Autumn 2002 brought with it Abarat; the first volume of a project that began as an intensely private series of paintings, then coalesced into an idea for 25 modestly illustrated tales collected as The Book Of Hours.
The Book Of Hours became Abarat and the proliferation of paintings, combined with the burgeoning storyline, caused Abarat to split into 4, then 5, separate books.
The first volume - called simply Abarat - arrived on UK & US shelves in October 2002 and then spread across the world in foreign language editions with additional text-only softback versions in the UK and US. The second volume - Abarat : Days of Magic, Nights of War - was published in September 2004.
Since then, Clive has worked on other projects but has continued to paint for Abarat and there's an astonishing volume of painted canvases (well over 500, now) stacked in Clive's studio, lending a comforting sense of momentum to the whole series.
Abarat: Absolute Midnight was published in September 2011, with paperback editions released in the UK (October 2012) and later in the US (planned for September 2013).
Although Absolute Midnight is inescapably dark in sentiment, more glorious days will follow - Clive continues to work on writing Book Four - The Price of Dreams - and a gold-covered Book Five has a new working title, Abarat : Until The End Of Time. April 2013 sees a new update from Clive (below) confirming that he is now working to a more extended timeframe for Book Four.
Candy's adventures promise to spawn a series of movies, and the possibility of other media too - Clive is already painting a series of Abaratian 'tarot' style cards...
Oh, and if the cover seems to have acquired some Harry Potter influence over the lettering of the title, consider it a sneak preview of Disney's original movie poster design and try standing on your head and looking again...

Click here for bibliographies for Abarat, Abarat II and Abarat III with Clive's commentary on Abarat, and on Abarat II and on Abarat III...

Also available is a "behind the scenes" companion book, Beneath The Surface of Clive Barker's Abarat - details here...!

"I think the idea of the illuminated picture, the illuminated story, is one that's very appealing, and I've been talking to a couple of people about that possibility. My problem is that, essentially, I'm a democrat, and I like the democracy of art. I like the paperback. I like the idea of getting these personal visions into the largest number of heads possible. I don't like, therefore, the notion of the rather rarefied, expensive edition. So what I've tried to balance off, constantly, is - how can I make a beautiful book which will be very decorated and very dense but would not be something which would seem like a piece of elitest art?"

Beyond Good And Evil

By Mordecai Watts, Axcess, Vol 3 No 5, 1995

"This project is closer to my heart than anything I've done before. In 15 years of publishing and movie making, nothing has excited me more."

Disney To Pay $8 Million For Fantasy Series

By Claudia Eller, Los Angeles Times, 15 April 2000

"It goes back to how this began - as a book which I never anticipated would have 100,000 words of text, you know? It has 101,000 words in the first volume and I think we're looking at the same for the second volume. When the quartet is done we will hopefully have a volume that will gather all this stuff together into a single volume...
"It's pretty closely plotted through to the final book because there are things that are happening in the first book that will not get paid off until the final book. I pretty much know exactly what's going to happen. You get a sense even from the first book that everything is sort of laid out and there are mysteries and puzzles which are enigmas which are going to be solved...
"The first one is going to be just 'Abarat'. The second one I am just playing around with titles right now. The third one will be called 'Absolute Midnight' and the fourth one I'm still playing with too."

Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)

"As the books progress, Candy assembles a circle of allies, uncovering a plot to blot out the Sun, Moon and Stars, and achieve a condition of permanent Midnight. Were this to happen, then a great number of creatures that would never dare to venture into the land in the light, would be free to emerge from the Sea of Izabella and would wreak havok on the islands.
"In order to prevent this disaster, Candy must find the courage to face the Lord of Midnight himself, Christopher Carrion, along with his monstrous grandmother, Mater Motley. And in confronting Carrion, she will come to understand who she really is: a revelation which will transform her own understanding of her place in the epic events of 'The Abarat Quartet'."

Clive Barker's Notes On Abarat

By Clive Barker, Australian Advance Reading Copy of Abarat, 2002

"I want to, before I shuffle off this world, create a world that can be revisited many times, filled with imaginative people, so I conceived of an archipelago made up of twenty four islands. Each island represents one hour of each day. If you go to that island there surrounded by red clouds, the Island of Midnight, Gorgossium, it is permanently midnight. Everything that is associated with Midnight is a consciousness of the species inhabiting that island. Everything that is associated with day is found on that green island there, colored in sunshine, which nicely balances off with Gorgossium, is the island of Yzil. That's where this lady in red behind me, [gesturing to a painting of a woman whose robes, garments, and hair are caught in a maelstrom which she herself exhales] the Princess Breath, who is the Great Creatrix of the island, she breathes out these creatures, these life forms."

Imagining New Worlds

By Robert Starner, Lambda Book Report, Vol.10, Issue 3, 1 October 2001

"I'm writing four novels and we don't yet know what kind of movies we're making... My job is to write the novel and paint the pictures.
"[Candy Quackenbush] begins as a 16 year-old. She ends as an 18-and-a-half year-old. And she discovers her sexuality. That's very much a piece of it...
"It wouldn't be my preference [to interchange the games, movies and novels out of order]. My preference is that you would read all four books in order. Are you familiar with C.S.Lewis and his book 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe'? The thing about those seven books is that you can read them in any order you like, but it helps to read them in the order that he intended. It will be the same with Abarat."

Barker Worse Than His Bite?

By [ ], PC Gameplay.co.uk, 19-23 February 2001

"I've never conceived of doing something this way - painting the pictures and then writing the books. It's a very strange way of doing it, but it's been great.
"Here I am saying it's a quartet. I think it's a quartet. It seemed to break down quite neatly into four parts. But I think L. Frank Baum thought he'd finished with Oz every now and then, you know? I think it's four books but it may turn out to be many more."

Stars In Hell

By Michael Giltz, The New York Post, 14 October 2001

"I wanted to create a place where I could play almost endlessly and never run out of room. In this world I can go anywhere. I can talk about family relations, I can talk about the place of the imagination in the human heart. I can talk about the nature of evil - and that is a central issue in these books, particularly how the knowledge of evil gets passed down from one generation to another...
"Christopher Carrion wasn't always a villain. Christopher Carrion is a villain because he has been horribly dealt with by his family. I try and trace the villainy in order to say to the reader, 'Look in your own lives to see if there aren't hurtful things that make you behave hurtfully'...
"I am being a little coy, because I am leaving the real villain of the book out of this discussion. There is a villain who stands behind these villains, whose nature I don't even want to talk about. He won't appear in the first book, he isn't painted on these walls, but of course there is a devil here in the islands. And there's an awful lot of good in this book, too. Just as night and day are in balance, and light and dark are in balance in the healthy human psyche, so evil and good will be pretty much balanced in the narrative."

The Relaunch of Clive Barker

By Jeff Zaleski, Publishers Weekly, 1 October 2001

"Candy will come to understand herself as a walker between worlds before the quartet of Abarat is over. But I think of the world that I bridge as being primarily worlds of darkness and of light. I want to move between good and evil, I want to move between extremes. I think of myself as somebody who is reporting from a world of dreams.
"I love Candy because she is a very tough, strong character in a very strange world. I also have a real fondness for Malingo, who turns out to be her sidekick in subsequent novels. And I have a real fondness for the villains, so I would have to say Christopher Carrion ranks highly in there too. Carrion will turn out to be a villain with a lot of sympathetic elements to him, and I've always felt the best villains are those you can comprehend...
"There is a huge story, which runs through the four books, which is about the ongoing battle between night and day. It is going to resolve itself in the space of this quartet. And it also has to do with why Candy feels she's been in this place before. So Candy's sense of herself is one of the things we're going to understand more. The intricate relationships between Mater Motley and Christopher Carrion, Carrion and Candy, and Candy and a bunch of other characters, will be explained in further books, too. But I don't want to give too much away."

Interview

By [ ], Barnes and Noble, Fall 2002.

"Does the text ever influence what I paint? - Yes, it does, it has started to because now that I've finished the second volume and I'm starting to think about the third volume, obviously there are many paintings made for the third volume, but I probably have another seventy paintings and I'm making them knowing what's going to happen in the third book, but not knowing in every detail. And so I'm painting these pictures in the expectation that history will repeat itself and interesting, strange characters and landscapes will come into my mind and into my mind's eye and appear on the canvas through the brush. There is something wilfully strange about this process - that you stand back at the end of a night's work and you look at something and you say, 'Where did that come from?' I mean, I'm not the only artist who does that - lots of artists do that, I know. And it's been wonderful because if I had created Abarat from words - if I'd written Abarat and then illustrated it, if you will, the way I did with Thief of Always, it would not be anything like as rich or as complex or as contradictory a world as it is. Because this is a world which has been created from dream visions - what I'm doing is finding stories that match the shape of my dreams."

Interview

Audio interview by Anthony DiBlasi (i) Abarat 2 promotional CD ROM sampler, Joanna Cotler Books, June 2004 (ii) online at www.harpercollins.com

"Every two years, we'll have a new Abarat [novel], and in the interval, we will have the soft-cover. It's a very rigorous schedule; on the other hand, I feel it's very important to know that every two years, everyone's going to get a new 100,000 words of Abarat, a new 100 paintings until the quartet is finished, at which point we will have this epic tale. I also think it's important that each of the books is contained within itself; there will always be a sense of completion within each narrative. Candy's confrontation with Kaspar Wolfswinkel, who's the great villain of the first book, is really completed within that book...
"The next six years, while I write and paint the next three Abarat books, [I will not be able to] take any time out to direct a movie. This is a time to devote to Abarat - and right now, at least, that's what I want to do."

Clive Barker, Author

By Gina McIntyre, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 October 2002

"I wrote the book [Book 2], finished the book in November, read the book and didn't like it and threw it all away, the whole thing, and began again - which I've never done before. So there's nothing in the second volume of Abarat as it now stands which faintly resembles that first version...
"It is a 600 page manuscript, the first book, and there's nothing - there's names in common, but the islands that are visited are different, everything is pretty different. And it came from a profound desire, on my part, not to... I realised the book was teasing people, my first version was teasing people too much. There wasn't enough delivery as I saw it and I wanted the second book to give you a genuine sense of fulfilment. After all, you will have been through almost a quarter of a million words and 250 illustrations. You should have a sense of... emotional payback. There should be a sense that some of the storylines have reached some genuine conclusion and I felt that the story wasn't taking the readers far enough, it wasn't giving us enough of a journey to enough of a conclusion to something big enough. And so I thought I don't think this is right or fair. I need to go back and I need to start again and I need to configure this. I want it to go to a much bigger place in terms of narrative, in terms of emotion and in terms of fulfilment of the narrative promises in the first book.
"I don't want this to be a three-book tease with a one-book pay-off, I want each of the books to pay off some of the narratives and present other strands which are going to grow in complexity and richness and obviously go on. But I think at the end of the second book, and this is certainly what I'm getting back from people who have read it, there's a real sense of, 'oh we went somewhere, we got somewhere, we were delivered somewhere, we got closure.' There are significant deaths in this book, there are significant changes in this book, there are significant revelations in this book. So... and I'm not saying that there wouldn't have been some of those in the first version, but they wouldn't have been as satisfying, I think. I'm much, much happier with the second book. And so, it was worth it! But that was the other reason why it's taken longer to get here and there have been certain times when I've regretted it... but now, having got there, I don't regret it at all - I think it was the right thing to do."

Abarat: 2B (Or Not 2A)...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 22 July 2003 (note - full text here)

"I was very determined that the second book be more of a complete experience. Sort of finish, I don't want to give too much away obviously, but to finish off some more of the narratives. There are two more books to come, so there is much more to unfold. But I want the second book to be a more fulfilling experience as a narrative than the first one could be because, by it's very nature, I'm introducing a world, I'm introducing a lot of characters. It's a very complicated world with its own quite elaborate rules, and all that had to be set up. By the time I got to the second book, that was done, that is done. So now I can roll. And I can get to the stuff which is really fun, which is the plot stuff, and the character stuff, and the primal battles which is the heart of the story, and something apocalyptic as well, because I wanted to make sure that having set up this world, I could then do something pretty dramatic to it as early as the second book. There wouldn't be a sense that you had to wait for the fourth book before anything of great scale happened. I wanted something pretty big to happen in every book. And something huge happens, well actually two or three huge things happen in this book."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls)

"The fiction of the fantastic brims with metaphors for this condition [of flux]: tales of people whose cells are protean and souls migrant, people called by mysterious forces to a place they've visited in other lives or states; a place never understood - at least until the moment of crisis - as their real home."

V For Vice-Versa

Clive Barker's A - Z Of Horror, 1997

"The great thing with Joanna Cotler and my friends and supporters at HarperCollins, over a long period of time now - obviously primarily Jane Johnson, Joanna - they have bought into my vision of a quartet. And they know, even from the experience of selling Tolkien and C.S.Lewis, that these kinds of books earn their real place in people's hearts and on the bookshelves over tens of years... It's lovely to feel with Joanna and Jane that I've got two people there who are completely supportive of my long-term goals as a creator; as they're not locked into, 'What's the next thing going to be, Clive?' because that would make me crazy. I know I've got a third book of The Art and the second book of Galilee to write and two more Abarat books and it excites me that those things are there somewhere in the menu of things that I have to choose from as I continue my writing and painting career. It's lovely to feel that there's important (and I mean important in the sense of important to me) important stuff to do; stuff that really moves me. Characters to pick up and bring to a conclusion and stories to tell, stories that audiences, readers worldwide have got an interest in."

In Anticipation Of The Deluge: A Moment At The River's Edge

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 12 July 2004 (note - full text here)

"There will be about 600 [paintings] in the end... Not all of them will make it into the third or fourth books, but what I'm hoping we'll do is release a super-edition of Abarat when all four books are finished, and maybe we'll put all four books into the same book - a 2,000-page volume, with all of the paintings in."

The Clive Barker Interview

By Brett Alexander Savory, IROSF.com, Vol I No 8, 21 August 2004 (note - full text at www.irosf.com)

"The fourth book will probably be called The Eternal..."

There And Back Again: Touring The Abarat

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 30 November 2004 (note - full text here)

"I have plot outlines for part three and some notions for four, based on the 270 paintings that I haven't used so far, but I may develop some new paintings as well. Now that I'm into the third book and starting to think about the climax of this narrative, I have to take charge of it a little bit. It can't be the unruly stallion any longer. I've really got to break it, otherwise I'm not going to get the climax that my audience deserves.
"I want Book Three to build to something fairly dramatic, and Book Four to be on a whole new level of excitement, so I'm not quite as passive - in the sense that, with the first book I was letting the paintings tell me what was going on. The same was true to an extent with the second book, although I started to become more of a shaper of the world. The third one is very shaped, very predestined, because I pretty much know where this narrative is heading. At the end of four books there are going to be half-a-million words and 500 oil paintings, and I want that four-book world to read like one enormous, incredibly colourful, surrealistic journey."

Days Of Magic

By Joe Nazzaro, Fantasy Worlds, No 5, February 2005

"With my nose being so much to the grindstone, I'm writing the Hellraiser stuff during the day and at night I am painting Abarats 3 and 4, there isn't another minute during the day to think about anything else at all. My feeling is that if fate wants me to direct a movie it will pick up the phone to me at some point, but am I happy right now doing what I am doing? Blissfully! So you know, let it be what it will be."

The Hellbound Art : Memory, Fantasy And Filigree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 February 2005 (note - full text here)

"I am shaping up Abarat 3 and 4 while writing Scarlet Gospels during the day and polishing the script of The Midnight Meat Train which goes into production this year in New York along with a movie called The Plague... I'm actually putting words on a piece of paper and it's because I'm beginning to see, in a way that I didn't with Books 1 and 2 really, the shape, the feeling of what these books are going to be as they reach their apocalyptic and transformative end and you know the narrative is going to explode into a huge scale in the third book. I did a painting of the destruction of something well-known in the Abarat and David came in and was aghast, he said, 'You can't destroy that!' and I said 'I just did!' It will be destroyed in Book 3. Book 3, as the title Absolute Midnight suggests, is a pretty dark book but the darkest hours are not actually in Book 3, the darkest hours are in Book 4, so in a way that is new to me in this Abarat process I am feeling a sense of the shape of these things as I paint. And I'm making copious notes and writing paragraphs and literally have two files full of notes now. It will be interesting to see how much of it actually finds its way into the final books...
"I'm not quite so clear about what Book 4 will be yet because there are some things in play that I have to work through which are actually about the metaphysics of it all; actually they are about what happens when you get into the 25th hour and you know, given the fact that it is a time out of time, what revelations, what horrors, what wonders are you going to see when you meet yourself as a baby or as an old person or whatever, so there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there..."

The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 June 2005 (note: full text here)

"I had not realised that until this moment, but yes, I am, in a way [mentally combining Books Three and Four] - all the notes, for instance, and there are files of notes that I've kept for story elements, have 'Abarat Three and Four' written on them, on the front of them and that's in part because I haven't yet figured out where I'm going to take the break in the story and it's partly because there is a shit-load goes on in these books - there're going to be big books - and I also have a couple of ideas which I haven't yet had a chance to talk over with Joanna [Cotler] about - some radical things that we might do, painting-wise, which might be kinda fun, so I've really got a lot to deal with - in a good way - when I've finished this last picture for the cover of Heaven and Hell, because I really think that people when they finish Three will be eager for Four and a conclusion. And Four will bring the whole thing to an end and it will raise the stakes and make for a big, epic ending. And I sort of am, in a way, thinking of those two books as one huge run-up to a massive climax.
"I'm [writing the two books back-to-back]. That's what I'm absolutely going to do - obviously it won't mean that they'll get printed any faster, because my belief is that Book Four is going to be very, very fat, but yes, I mean I have a lot to resolve and a lot of secrets to spring on people!"

Heaven, Hell And The Dreaming Space Between

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 5 December 2005 (note: full text here)

"I had two weeks over Christmas where I sat down with myself and examined what I knew I wanted the narrative journey, the shamanistic journey, that Candy Quackenbush takes from being an errant schoolgirl in Chickentown to being what she will become at the end of what will now be the fifth and final book of the Abarat series. And I realised I couldn't get it in four books; I couldn't get the characters in four books! I mean I deliberately had a night of the long knives in the second book, killed off a bunch of people, thinking, 'Ah, that'll leave some room!' but, Jesus... This is the joy of not really, well, you've known from the beginning how much I've been in service to the energies of this book - how they have seemed from the beginning to have been pre-ordained - that's altogether too pretentious, but they seemed to be - the paintings came along when I didn't expect them - when I started to create a world round them, the world began to proliferate at a speed that I had never experienced in my life before. And I have grown to love this world, probably more than any other that I've created and I want to serve the rising scale of this drama and the conflict and the revelation of what Candy is, of what Abarat is, of what it is to us, as human beings, what we are to it. I want to serve that rising in a - I don't want to rush it. I've heard a lot of people say - and I'm not sure I actually share this belief but I've heard it said that people don't feel that the end of Phillip Pullman's brilliant trilogy really - it's all a little too quick for them - and I think that's a danger, I think sometimes there's an exhaustion factor that creeps in and the act of imagining starts to become overwhelming, you start to say, 'OK, I'm going to close the door on this.' And I don't feel as though I can or should do that with this - this is, in one sense, the closest thing I will do to my idol, Blake's, work in the sense that it's a marriage of my painting and my poetry and my writing and it's for all audiences and it's metaphysical and it's comical and it's demonic and it's of Heaven and Hell and all things in between and if I'm going to do that, Man, I've got to do that the best way I can and I'm not going to fuck it up. That was what the conclusion of that fourteen days was; it was, 'You know what, Barker? You can't do this in four books - own up...!'
"[It's] a huge step, a huge step, but you know what it did? It was like I had a toy train engine going and behind it in the dust, lost, was the engine of the Titanic. And, by simply saying, 'Five', the dust was blown away and this huge engine moved into motion, and I realised how the mechanism of the smaller engine that I'd been playing with served its place absolutely in the larger one. And that my subconcious had been at work in a very generous way, but it you're right, Phil, it's a moment when you say 'oh...' because you know what each of these books is...
"For the final book - it'll be a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty paintings and it'll be a year and a half of writing; it's a huge book. And yet, what am I going to do? I'm not going to undercut this thing which is so important to me...
"[It was] a huge relief, because I saw the bigger engine, and there must have been a part of me that knew the bigger engine was there all along. And when I talk about 'engine' I actually mean a narrative engine; I mean a huge narrative machine that was waiting in the shadows to fold it's great cogs and pick up this smaller machine I'd been dealing with and fold its mechanisms into the greater machine and plough forward and take Candy places I simply couldn't have got her in four books.
"I think I would have done something which would have been uglier, frankly, I would have shoved as much as I possibly could into three and four such that they become very ugly, aesthetically ugly, books. Now, when in seven, eight years' time we stand back and I will have sufficient distance on the five to be able to look at them, the obvious thing is, I now have a middle book - I have a wheel and I have a hub of a wheel... and God bless them - that's Joanna Cotler and her team - for embracing that."

Abarat. Abarat. Abarat. Abarat... Abarat!

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 13 and 20 March 2006 (note: full text here)

"One of the reasons I'm taking this journey [The Scarlet Gospels] and allowing it to be the scale that it will be is because I really want to be able to then free myself to take a really big bite of the three Abarat books that remain to be written. Now, whether that means that I write 3 and 4 and then break off to write a short piece just as a palate cleanser before I really dig into the last big, big, big book, or whether I just go helter-skelter through all three, I don't have an answer for Mark; it would be unfair for me to pop out some answer which may or may not be true. All I know for certain is that I have the material and it continues to gather and, while it continues to gather - I'm particularly thinking of material for Abarat 5 now - I'm sort of loathe to be too smart about this. Part of the point of this is to let my imagination percolate on this material and resolve the narrative in all its complexities - there's a lot of stories that need to be resolved at the end of these five books. I want to do that properly. I will never write about Abarat again after these five books, I think I can very certainly say that will be the case, so I really want to make sure that these five books really do the job. That may mean it's best for me to take a little break between 4 and 5."

You Called, He Came...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 and 3 June 2006 (note: full text here)

"I'll be writing the third and fourth books back-to-back; we'll really have this narrative on a roll and these paintings are getting made. As you know there's a lot of paintings now, certainly enough now to start my imagination going - and actually the painting part of it is the hardest part - so we have about 500 paintings that are part of that mythology which could form part of the narrative element for Books 3, 4 and 5."

Sowing The Seeds Of The Story Tree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 August and 4 September 2006 (note - full text here)

"You know by the time I got to this last year or two years of painting I was not painting blind anymore, I was painting with a very clear sense of where this narrative was going to go and it was while I was painting and looking in my mind's eye at the canvas and the narrative that I realised I couldn't shove all this into four books, it required a fifth to elegantly, I hope, bring all this material into a conclusion which is surprising and I hope very satisfying.
"So it's all grist to the mill, but it's nice when you put the notes together and you go, oh yeah, OK, between all these and while I've been breaking off and painting because an idea has occurred to me, now when I sit down at my desk and look at all those ideas, that's the novel, it's right there. That was very satisfying to me and it really felt like my methodology had proved itself finally. I mean the first book was, you know what it was; I was starting off from zero and I think a lot of people had dodgy expectations of what it was going to be and I think a lot of those people have been converted and if they haven't, I think the third book will do a lot to lay to rest the anxiety that somehow or other I am softening in my middle age and that Abarat is somehow me revisiting Narnia or Wonderland or whatever - it isn't, and it is never more clear than in Book Three where the narrative turns to the monstrous and the very, very dark."

Pinhead's Progress

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 15 and 22 December 2006 (note - full text here)

"I am painting like a fool here - I'm actually having a great time - I'm way ahead of the words, right now - you guys know more than anybody how much further I am, there are more paintings than I could possibly use in the two books that will be left after the third is taken care of - to which you may reply oh, why the fuck are you still painting? And the answer is two-fold, actually three-fold... The first one is just that I'm crazy, and I'm enjoying it, but the real reason is that as long as there are images of Abarat in my mind, I want to download them onto canvas, because I don't know exactly - I have a vague idea - but I don't have a clear idea of the processes of books four and five I think it's my duty to the narrative to keep providing visual options, to keep them coming. Nothing will be wasted! Because it's my hope that we will eventually use every single one of these paintings maybe in an expanded form of a kind of guide to the Islands, maybe an expanded form of the Almanac? So everything that I've painted for Abarat will eventually be printed as an Abarat image, it's just a question of whether they appear in the series of five books or appear in some other form but I really am enjoying the darker aspects, having had the relatively light touches involved in the first two books..."

A Spiritual Retreat

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 26 March 2007 (note - full text here)

"Abarat is in 42 languages and there are people in 42 countries saying, 'Where's the next one?'... The Abarat books are probably going to get a little bit larger as they go on through the series. It's just the nature of telling those stories. The epic narrative is only just unrolling, and certainly the paintings have become bigger - not physically larger, but in their subject matter. They've become more ambitious and broader.
"I've always been inspired by the pictures. They always come first. I know from the paintings that this narrative is going to huge places. So Abarat will definitely have to be next in order to keep that story rolling, and we'll see where we go from there. I can't look too far ahead; otherwise it just gets overwhelming."

Gone And Back Again

By Carnell, Fangoria, No 268, November 2007

"We are in 42 languages with these books and I've painted all the pictures for the third book and many for the fourth and fifth. I am into the final draft and having a wonderful, wonderful time and I'll go straight on to writing book four."

The Wildclaw Clive Barker Interview

By Charlie Athanas, Wildclaw Theatre.com, 4 March 2008 (note: full text online at www.wildclawtheater.com)

"I do have the title for number four, which nobody knows. So, I don't know if you want to let that out? You know, the thing is, titles change all the time, titles change and change and change and eventually you get to one which seems like the final one and then, you know, it changes again! But I think this is the final one, just because everyone's response to it has been so positive. What tends to happen is the other titles then become part-titles - that classically happens... I'm thinking 'The Eternal' is either going to be a part-title or the title of Five, but I'm not really sure. Then, this is definitely going to end up being a part-title, 'All Things, Out Of Time'... The title of Book Four is The Dynasty of Dreamers.
"It really excites me just in terms of what we have, what you have, in terms of things to pull out when Book Five comes along. I mean, when Book Five comes along to be able to put online this incredibly comprehensive 'making-of feature.' It's going to be another four years before the book comes along and is finished. That's very exciting, we're going to have something like a decade of conversations, you know? And I think that's one of a kind, I think that's awesome, I really do."

We Are All Imaginary Animals...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 11 & 12 October 2008 (note - full text here)

"Bringing Abarat to a close involves a lot of painting, so I think the reason that I am pushing to close the Abarat narrative is because when it is done I can then separate painting and writing again - but I have a deal to do five of them and, right now, there are only two! I just had my editor Joanna Cotler, from Cotler books, going through about four hundred paintings for Abarat 3 and, right after that, I will be moving onto Abarat 4.
"It really is non-stop but I have always said that these five books should be viewed as one long narrative; just in separate, self-contained parts."

Still Raising Hell

By Calum Waddell, Judge Dredd Megazine, No 286, 21 July 2009

"I'm just going to go on. As soon as I've delivered Grail, I'm off on to Abarat 4, and the largest pile of papers around me is Abarat 4, which is my various notes I've been collecting up from around the boxes and so on - but actually Abarat 5 as well because I think, in a way, it's impossible to think about the fourth book without also thinking about that too because they are one system...
"I don't think there's going to be a lot edited out [of Book 3], frankly, I don't know. All I know is the book is damn good!! And that what we'll have in Four and Five is bursting to come out of me! So I'm just going to get on with it."

Now And In Time To Be

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 4 January 2010 (note - full text here)

"It's way too hot to sleep, so I have started the next, penultimate Abarat book. Writing in the sweaty, silent night reminds me of writing Galilee on the island of Kaua'i'. The only thing that's missing is the soft gather and break of the night tide.I loved that island but I'm afraid its memories are more bitter now; so much has changed."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 26 September 2010

"Wouldn't it be neat to have a book where firstly we had someone who knew what they were doing when they came to a world, as opposed to wandering around not knowing, because that kind of gets old after a while, and it's actually something that plays out lots of times in those kinds of stories. And secondly, to actually give that person, whoever it's going to be - and I didn't know whether it would be a boy or a girl at that point - give that person a method and a purpose that was vast, potentially huge, potentially epic. Potentially.
"This is a sort of nature / nurture thing and it's going to remain a nature / nurture thing - does Candy find her way to a destiny which was pre-destined for her, or pre-asserted for her - right? - or does she invent that by the very nature of her being? Which is the point at which, I would argue, the book becomes a universal book. Because then it's about all of us, right? And I want it to be a book about all of us, I didn't want it to be Harry Potter - Harry Potter is about a very special boy, I didn't want this to be about a very special girl, I wanted it to be about a girl who could be anyone and even though, yeah, she seems to have some elements of uncertainty in her nature, we're going to discover that we all have those uncertainties in our nature, at least to some extent, and then the question is how do we deal with them?"

More Candy: Sweetness And Night

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 24 and 27 August 2011 (note - full text here)

"I've spent the day threading all the plot-lines of the last two Abarat books into a map of Who, Where and When. I have a lot of paintings that illuminate these creatures and events already finished, but I think there's another hundred paintings still to be created. The story has taken off into epic territory I had not dreamed of when I painted the first images of what would become Kaspar Wolfswinkel, the Mischief brothers and Princess Breath. Several hundred paintings later and I still need more. There's a lot of stories to conjure up in paint and words, but I'm alive to tell the tale.
"That idea - being alive to tell the tale-never meant more than it does now, on the threshold of two huge books that almost lost their author. Maybe there are thousands of tales out there that lost their authors before they could be written down. Desperate to remember themselves. Like us."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 19 February 2012

"Forty Six chapters into ABARAT IV, and I sense that this penultimate volume is going to be... heavy."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 11 May 2012

"Today - meaning the writing day that began sixteen hours ago - is a difficult day. Somebody in ABARAT IV : THE PRICE OF DREAMS must die. Yes, the title's new..."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 13 July 2012

"The good news? I've just writing my 71st chapter of ABARAT IV. Being confined to my house has me writing night and day."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 28 July 2012

"I'm writing ABARAT IV 12 hours of every day.Then straight on to the final ABARAT book,and then onto The 3rd book of The Art."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 10 August 2012

"The next novel will be ABARAT IV, which is the most epic story yet, setting the stage for a massive final book. I've had the idea for ABARAT V: Until The End Of Time since I first asked myself the question 'Why am I alive?' "

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 2 September 2012

"Time plays such a significant part in my novels, short stories and poems, that the five volumes of ABARAT, being made of time may well contain a pattern that will draw all my work into a dance first heard at the most wind-blown threshold of Odom's Spire. But the Spire has only a single door, some will protest. Why would you speak as if there were many?
"Why indeed."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 29 November 2012

"I love the fact that Terry [Blas]'s interpretation of the Mischief brothers gives them a dashing quality which is almost prophetic. I can't share the epic story evolving in ABARAT IV: THE PRICE OF DREAMS but it affects all the characters in different ways. They have a very serious role to play as will not perhaps become apparent until the fifth and final book..."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 12 December 2012

"I am very optimistic that we will have news about an Abarat Movie at some point in the future. But my Irish-Italian ancestry makes me a superstitious son of a bitch, and I don't want to spoil our chances [to] make something come to fruition by getting too cocky or certain about any future possibilities. Let me say this; if there is any project of mine which seems to holler, 'Film me! Film me!' it would be the Abarat books. There as you all probably know FIVE in total. The scale of the story expands exponentially as we move towards the cosmic climax of those five books. It's going to be an incredible challenge for the filmmakers who take on the project to create the mystical visions and transfigurations that the whole journey of the Abarat books is taking us towards."

Facebook Q&A

Replies to questions at a live Facebook Q&A session, 15 December 2012

"True magic, we will learn, is called Kry. So when,in ABARAT IV, a certain character seeks sanctuary to study Kry at its root place, the noonish island of Yzil, it will perform the miracles of transformation like a butterfly sealed itself away until the Bell rings Creation's Code. The clues are all there. KRY YZIL IS. A chrysalis."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 11 January 2013

"The guardian of Kry is a wounded Golden Man called Hathnot. I painted him a decade ago and he's been waiting in the shadows for his moment."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 19 January 2013

"I want to make clear to EVERYBODY where my priorities lie. Eleven months ago I came out of hospital after the strokes and coma and, contrary to all instruction, went straight back to work. Hospital had given me lots of time to thank the powers that be for letting me survive what should have killed me and preparing my head for the huge job ahead. Since coming home I've left the house five times. I am here in my writing room all the time, driven as I have not been driven since Imajica to give every waking thought to this now enormous tale, which has allowed me to offer readers poems and paintings, as you know. Please have no fear as to where my obsessive nature suckles these many days and nights. In Abarat."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 19 January 2013

"I am working very hard on Abarat IV at the moment. Every day is dedicated to the book, which is going to be the largest of the series thus far.
"There will be a total of five Abarat books in the series, so this is the penultimate volume. I plan to go directly on from finishing Volume IV to writing Volume V. There will be somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and twenty oil paintings in each book.
"I spend about fourteen hours a day writing or painting. I hand-write everything. If I can finish the day having written about 1,500 words and brought a painting closer to completion, I'm a happy man."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 17 March 2013

"I have never shared what I'm about to tell you with anyone. It was simply too emotionally raw a subject. But it's impossible to understand Christopher Carrion without knowing the reality in which he is rooted. Many years ago, at a dinner party in London, I listened, appalled, to a conversation between two doctors. Somehow the exchange had come to rest on the subject of those experiences which had driven from them all trust in a merciful god. One of the men, his manner very matter of fact, related his failure to save the life of an infant less than two weeks old, who'd been all but consumed by a domestic fire. The baby, beyond all hope of being healed, could not even cry. It had inhaled too much heat. I had nothing to contribute to this, of course, except to find a place to file this sadness. And then one day comes a character who is in some measure a figure who has a profound suffering which made sense in a world where infants were denied the freedom to cry until their breath gave out. Christopher Carrion was born that night."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 20 March 2013

"I've started one of my favourite parts of creating each of the ABARAT books.
"The structure of this book is now fixed. It's taken thirteen months, starting immediately after I came out of hospital and working every day since to finish this draft, but it's done.
"Now I'm about to re-draft the 130,000 [words] I've written in the last thirteen months, steadily polishing it, word by word, phrase by phrase, idea by idea.
"And as I go I get to have fun designing the various beasts and beings, skies, cities and magical sights that did not yet already exist in the oil paintings I have painted for use in these last two books.
"It would be much more convenient, of course, if my imagination had been prophetic enough to provide me with exactly what I needed, without redundancies. But it never works that way. Often a design I painted with a certain character in mind simply fails to fit the tale I am now telling. So I have to create something new.
"It's not the end of the world. Ha! No, it truly isn't.
"It's the continuing construction of a new one, in words and paint.
"I still have two more drafts and forty oil paintings to go before the fourth book of ABARAT is delivered.
"But I promise you I will keep a diary of entries like this as I go, so that henceforth you can follow the road I'm taking to bring ABARAT IV: THE PRICE OF DREAMS, home."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 25 AprilMay 2013

"Abarat IV: The Price of Dreams is almost finished."

Facebook Updates

By Clive Barker, 2 May 2013

...other comments

Jane Johnson (HarperCollins): "Clive and I have discussed for the last six or seven years now how he might create a new world, a world in which he could set a fantastic epic to rival the worlds of Narnia, Middle-earth or Oz, an adventure that would speak to the heart of modern readers, readers of all ages. Arenas such as these offer writers and readers alike a unique opportunity to exercise their imaginations, to explore the magical, the heroic, the lost parts of our consciousness, rooted as they are in the bones of human literature, in myth and legend, in the stories humankind has told itself from the beginning of speech. That's why Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was voted in many polls as the public's favourite book of the 20th century. And it's why the Harry Potter books have been so universally popular.
"I've been watching the paintings for Abarat evolve over the last four years, and they are just amazing: vivid, kaleidoscopic, breath-taking, funny, bizarre, inspiring. 'Abarat' - in all its various forms - as book, movie, interactive experience - will be both magical and visually stunning. We all need some magic in our lives; and the combination of Barker and HarperCollins and Disney is going to be just perfect for delivering that magic."

First Major Hollywood Deal Inspired By Oil Paintings

HarperCollins press release, April 2000

Jeff Zaleski: "[Clive] ushers us into the varnishing room, where stacks of paintings await finishing, then down the hall that serves as an Abarat galley. We stop at one painting, not big, of an android warrior composed of liquid gold, with a great wound disfiguring his body. Barker declares the painting 'Blakean' and tells us that a girl will talk to the warrior as he turns his terrible head slowly toward her."

The Relaunch of Clive Barker

By Jeff Zaleski, Publishers Weekly, 1 October 2001

Jane Friedman (CEO HarperCollins): "I met him two and a half years ago. He came into my office to show me some of the drawings that were going to become Abarat. I was completely blown away by him. This is a man whose world is like a Russian doll. You open it and open it and open it and open it and you don't know what's going to come out, but you know it's going to be special."

The Relaunch of Clive Barker

By Jeff Zaleski, Publishers Weekly, 1 October 2001

Douglas Winter : "Really only through a sense of introversion and personal strife did he retreat for a time into artwork, painting some very moving canvases that were done simply for his own therapeutic benefit. They were a way of pouring a lot of emotions, some of them negative, into a kind of work that could exorcise some of those feelings or otherwise take some of the things in his imagination and give them a life of their own. In doing those canvases he began to see connections, and create the notion of a book which was then called The Book of Hours. What at the time he described to me as 25 oil canvases and a number of smaller illustrations that would go into one children's book, called The Book of Hours then expand it exponentially to 250 and now I think we're in the range of 400 oil canvases and any number of other drawings all related to the grand Abarat Quartet, which of course HarperCollins will be publishing but which has also been acquired for the cinema."

Clive Barker: Mythmaker and Nightmare-Shaper

By [ ], an interview with Douglas Winter at HarperCollins fireandwater.com, December 2001

The 'Erotic' Collection (formerly The Scarlet Gospels)

...Barker does Bataille (again)...? Calloway Editions (famed for Madonna's 'Sex' collection) was originally reported to be set to publish this compilation of erotic drawings, poems and prose vignettes (including 70 of Barker's photographs and paintings as well as 40 short pieces of writing) "in 1999". However, 2003 saw the inclusion of several 'Scarlet Gospels' pieces in David Armstrong's Rare Flesh and the news that 'Scarlet Gospels' would be snaffled as the title of an upcoming collection of both new and previously published but uncollected short stories (originally including a number of the Rare Flesh pieces). But as The Scarlet Gospels is now going to become solely the Pinhead/D'Amour story, the possibility of publication for both the Rare Flesh and the remaining erotic pieces is, for the moment, unclear...

"It's confessional and immense fun. I do it without self-censorship. I call it my spontaneous mode."

A Demon For Work

By Bob Graham, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 February 1999 - reporting the 'Tapping Your Creative Energy and Imagination' Learing Annex seminar in San Francisco, 20 February 1999

"This is cutting edge Clive Barker...What I would really like to do is something erotic and strongly and unapologetically erotic and comprehensively erotic. I wanted every conceivable element of the human erotic urge; gay, straight and then some. So what we are constructing is a book which will have about a hundred illustrations, painting, photographs and drawings. There will be perhaps forty pieces of fiction, some of them very short, some of them longer, all of them very sexy. The idea is that we will have a kind of compendium of erotica which is both imagistic and literary. I believe it will be laid out in a way which I think will be completely fresh and interesting. I'm very excited by the project because I believe it's going into new territories, not just for me, I'm speaking generally. There's not an awful lot of us that are around making paintings and writing. The chance to do something where you can pull those areas together and make a single statement, using painting, photography and writing and I want to thank Calloway for giving me the chance to do this. HarperCollins has bought the book from Calloway, so Calloway will create it and Harper will distribute it.
"My original editor had rejected it. He thought it was too strong for HarperCollins tastes. Since that time, it's nearly a year and a half since he said that, the feeling at Harper towards me and my work has changed incredibly for the better. I have a new editor, Paul McCarthy, who is marvelous. There are new people heading up HarperCollins; Cathy Hennings, who is a wonderful lady and really understands my vision completely and what I want to do. She understands the committment I have to make work which crosses boundaries. As soon as she heard this book was available, she said 'I want this.'
"This is going to be in many regards an extreme book. There are a lot of eye-popping images and ideas. I have delivered ten or eleven of the short stories and the response is really strong, which is great and what I want. So that's The Scarlet Gospels."

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Volume 2, No 1, April 1999

"I had an experience recently...I don't have many of my poems by heart, but I will give you this poem by heart. I was sitting in the bathroom, tired at the end of the day, and a line came into my head, and I thought, hmm, and I went - I keep notebooks all around, actually those clipboards, all around the house - and I sat with this line for a moment and then I went to... I've been putting poems together for the Scarlet Gospels project and I was thinking about Plato and Plato's ideas in The Symposium about the fact that love is in fact about discovering the other half. And the line I had in my head was: Brother Plato - right or wrong? And I went to write this down, and this so seldom happens to me:

Brother Plato - right or wrong?
Says the tribe where I belong,
Is a family of souls in two,
Me a half, another - you.
Let's stay together, one, tonight,
And prove our brother Plato right.

and I wrote it down in the speed it took to tell you that and I didn't change anything and it's a very eloquently argued poem...
"What was interesting about 'Brother Plato - right or wrong', which is one of those first lines which would be kind of intriguing, is that it wasn't emotional, neccessarily - it was an argued poem:

Brother Plato - right or wrong?
Says the tribe where I belong,
Is a family of souls in two, (Now we've got the word 'two' in...)
Me a half - another, you.
Let's stay together, one tonight, (So 'one' comes in...)
And prove our brother Plato right. (So everything swings round to brother Plato again.)"

Leitmotifs And Dark Beliefs

By Phil & Sarah Stokes, London, 24 September 1999 (note: full text here)

"I have a book called The Scarlet Gospel, which is a selection of erotic texts together with 100 illustrations...
"These explorations of mine are part of my creative health. The moment you do what's expected you're cheating your imagination and your readers. I want to do what's most exciting to me and if that's erotica then, damn it, I'm going to do erotica."

Renaissance Man

By [ ], The Scotsman, 21 September 1999

"It's real fun. I get up on a Monday morning and I write about fucking. Yeah, it's a difficult life."

Clive Barker

By Tim Teeman, Attitude, No 66, October 1999

"Scarlet Gospels [is] a collection of [fourteen] erotic pieces concerning homosexuality, S&M, etc. It will be accompanied by paintings and photographs by me. The goal of book is to collect all the ideas on the erotic and fantastic I could think of. It will probably be a rather unusual book."

Clive Barker

By Daniel Gouyette, Elegy, No 5, July / August 1999

"My love for the pornographic - or a Lucio Fulci film or a piece of frozen sculpture or something else that is roughly done - is me trying to build a relationship of trust with an aesthetic which is not my natural aesthetic. My natural aesthetic is to be piss-elegant, over-thinking, over-polished. Imajica is a book where I gave in to all those instincts, and I love that book as a consequence. But this love of the more crude - it's part of the energy of these things, these gouged things, these argumentative things...
"I put out The Scarlet Gospels stuff [at HarperCollins]. I showed them fifteen pictures, some images that I would build the stories around. They all backed off to the edges of the room. They were appalled. It was fascinating. You would think that something radioactive had just been put on the table. There are very stark things there. I'm very proud of them...
"This was not simply my deciding, along with HarperCollins, that the timing had to be changed. Eddie [Bell] was advising me to take the project off the table, which I did. I always respected his instincts."

Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic

By Douglas E. Winter, 2001

The 'English' Book

...A mere dot on the horizon, this one...

"I think [living here] I write more confidently about America. It's also made me feel more lovingly toward the world I left behind. My father recently passed away, and that very acutely made me aware of the passage of time. I think in another two or three years, there'll be another big book about the country that I left, and will certainly not return to."

The Essential Obsessions

By Cody Goodfellow, Lost Souls Newsletter, May 2000

The Art 3

Our exclusive image above (from an authorised plundering of Clive's study!) is just about the most exciting thing we can imagine on a single page...
Clive currently hopes to sit down to the Art 3 sometime after books 4 and 5 of the Abarat Series. It's apparently the huge metaphysical nature of the project (including "the unmaking of God") that's delaying the moment of commitment to settle down and write it - although it must surely be worth some effort to finally kill the standard "when is Book 3 of the Art coming?" question that appears whenever two or three are gathered in his name...

"The Great And Secret Show is, in one sense, the West Coast story. The second book will be the East Coast story, which is Harry's stomping ground, and the third book will happen all over America. It's fun. I've always wanted to do something with that kind of scale to it."

Clive Barker - Lord of the Breed

By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 91, April 1990

[On the gap between the books of The Art] "I don't mind. They were designed to be independent of each other. In a sense there will be narrative connections, but Lovecraft spent most of his life writing stories which were interconnected and interwoven but had large spaces between them in many cases. Basically, all I'm doing is plugging into a mythology again. If they make another Star Wars movie, I'll be there to pick up the threads of the narrative that was dropped some seven years ago, whatever it was. I don't worry too much about that.
"I think The Great And Secret Show works as a narrative entirety. Of course there was some hint that there was going to be further work, not least the fact that it says, 'The First Book of The Art' on the title page, and there will be a second and third book of The Art without a doubt. But at what point it comes? Think of Frank Herbert and the Dune books, which had large gaps between them.
"I've never felt so full of imaginative ideas and I want to be able to examine them in as many directions as possible, rather than feeling as though, 'Shit, I started this so I have to finish it now.' I'll finish it, absolutely. Steve has been going on with The Dark Tower stuff, ambling through that stuff, and it's going to take him a long time to finish that storyline. I think that's fine too."

Dread Speaks with Clive Barker

By [Michael Brown], Dread, No 3, December 1991

"There will be two more books [of The Art] down the line, but way down the line. I have a lot of ideas. And lots of time. I'm only 39. There's lots of time to do stuff. I don't feel that the years are ticking away. I feel I've got another 30 solid writing years in me. This stuff will happen in it's own time."

An Interview With Clive Barker

By Robert Errera, Hecate's Cauldron, Vol 1, Issue 3, 1992

"The final part of the Art Trilogy will be published before the end of the century, I promise! It's going to be a huge book, and with the large volumes of prose I have to warm up like a marathon runner before I set to work.
"The final book of the trilogy will be enormous, both in its narrative elaboration and in its metaphysical echoes. I know the story I have to tell and I'm excited at the prospect of telling it, but it's a big, big book."

AOL Appearance

Transcript of on-line appearance, 16 July 1996

"I know what it's going to be, and I think good narratives often happen in threes. Three acts in a play, in a movie, and the trilogy structure certainly works in something like the Lord of the Rings. Both the Great and Secret Show and Everville are preparations for one final massive novel."

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 3, [March] 1996

"The third book of The Art takes place in Quiddity, the Dream Sea. What The Art has been doing is moving toward a massive metaphysical resolution in another world....I think they're [The Art III & Galilee II] very, very different kinds of books. The way those narratives go - and are going to go - will see two totally different resolutions.
"In the case of the third book of The Art, I have been planning that for five years, and I have 500, maybe 600 pages of notes towards that novel. A week doesn't go by without my contributing something to that. So it's not as though I pick up the thing a few years on without having done anything in the interim. I keep a running tab on how I feel about the various material and whether I've got it to the critical mass that I need it to get to before [I write it]."

Lord of New Illusions

By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

"Buddenbaum's essentially a European decadent with an American edge. He has a European sensibility. He feels like old money. When he meets the pioneers at the beginning of the book, appearing among them with his fur collar and his silver cane, they recognize him as being completely different. That's one of the reasons why we think he is the devil. Later on I think his sexual response, the fact that he's a pursuing a younger kid whom he basically wants to make over, feels like an old-fashioned idea of homosexuality. I deliberately characterized him as a kind of old-fashioned gay who wants to exploit this kid.
"And Seth, the exploited kid, the kid who hears angels hammering on heaven from the other side, is going to turn in the third book of the series into a queer boy, a very modern and very volatile and very in-your-face queen. I wanted to create two gay characters in this forthcoming book, one of whom feels like he harkens back to the nineteenth century, the other of whom is going to push forward into the twenty-first. But in this book, what we see is Seth being changed. We see him realize that he is a gay man who wants sex with another man, and he doesn't realize it until he is kissed on the lips."

[Devil Doll]

By Brandon Judell, 10 Per Cent, March/April 1995

"The concept behind the individual symbols found on the medallion in The Great and Secret Show will appear in the 3rd Book of the Art. Each one does have a specific meaning, but you'll have to wait to find out."

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 7, April 1997

"I now have two mythologies, one being The Art books and the other obviously being Galilee - which are running concurrently. But I enjoy that - I like that. I find that very pleasurable in part because The Art books are very metaphysical, and sort of dense, and phantastical. And the third book will be extremely phantastical because we will be entering the other world of those books - the dream stage - in a major way."

Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique

By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com 1999

"The key thing for me is waiting for the moment when I have all the ideas in place. Because large narrative structures like that, if you begin without knowing where you are going, forget it. I've got Tesla, I've got Harry, I've got all these characters in play at the same time. And I have to resolve them all in one mammoth narrative line, which I have in my head... I need to be ready... and I can't really describe what this is because maybe I don't understand it myself... and even though you may intellectually have it, that's not all of what you really need. You also need the emotional sense that this is the moment... and it's eighteen months of my life. And when I sit down, I know it's going to consume me. And, I also know, this is not a rehearsal, I've got to get this right. By the time I deliver it, it will be probably ten years since I started the first book. And that mythology has grown and we sold millions of books. And I want to deliver the best damn story that I possibly can. And I want to make sure that all the narrative lines are... ...and, also, perhaps this is, in a sense more important to me than metaphysical life. The thing is, I need to feel that the metaphysical life of the piece is right, as well. I need to feel that whatever this book is saying is true. Well, you might say, this is fantasy so why does it matter whether or not it's true or not. By true, I mean metaphorically true. True to what I believe about the world. Tesla Bombeck has been released into this place about stories, this place where all stories happen with equal validity, in a way. So, the final book, to some extent is about what story is. And, it's a big subject for a storyteller. For a storyteller not to simply write, 'once upon a time', but to write about what 'once upon a time' means, is a big subject. And I want to make sure that when I tell it, I have the right answers."

Interview

By Amber Black and Tim Trautmann, Review(?), 1996

"I have a huge metaphysical book in my head... It will make Weaveworld look like Nancy Drew. A huge, huge, huge metaphysical book. I want to investigate the erotic at its most profound, in forms that I think we possibly begin to see in Burroughs, but which haven't been pursued as a consistent thesis. We're talking my Bible. I want to write the Bible."

Fuck The Canon

By Dennis Cooper, LA Weekly, Literary Supplement, 31 August - 6 September 2001

"The third book of The Art is a mother. I mean it's a huge book. It's a huge book in terms of the scale of its mythology and I think just in terms of its physical scale. And those books, you know, are like getting ready for a marathon race. You know I've been... I guess essentially this is my 19th book or something like that and the business of writing doesn't become any easier. I sort of have to prep myself. And certainly for a big book like the third book of The Art, which I think is going to be, in some ways, metaphysically more ambitious than Imajica, he said sort of biting his nails with anxiety. Part of it is just that there's a lot of threads to tie up. There's a lot that has been debated and offered up in the earlier books and that's gonna be fun. I mean there's a lot of really interesting characters and interesting places that have to be re-explored, so there's a lot that that book is up to.."

Clive Barker (Part Two)

By Spence D, IGN For Men, 20 December 1999

"Eventually when the third book of The Art is finished we'll do the master edition which will have the three books in one volume. You'll be able to read all three books in a single narrative. I think that what will be apparent is that the scale of the mythology is as big as it ever was in Imajica, but book by book it doesn't read as big."

Shades Of The Illusionist

By Geoff Sweeting, Ex Cathedra, No 4, May 1995

"Harry was always intended to be a character we could revisit. And, of course, he has a large place in the third book of The Art."

Lord of New Illusions

By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

"I owe to my readers a third book of that much delayed trilogy [of The Art]. I know what the book is going to be about, and that's why I've been slow to deliver it. It'll be enormous (and you know I mean enormous!). I'm a little anxious about the challenge of what needs to be done in the book; but it's going to be one helluva book. I'll start in a couple of years' time."

Horror In Books And Movies: Clive Barker

By [ ], USA Today Online Chat, The Nation Talks : Live, 31 October 2000 (Note - full text at usatoday.com)

"[Everville] begins... earlier than the first book of the trilogy (and I have a notion, though I'm not certain of this, that the third book may begin earlier still) and it travels much further than The Great and Secret Show, advancing and even contradicting the metaphysics of that book...
"The image [of the cross] is a kind of goad to me. My ambition for this trilogy - which will be completed when I write the Third Book of the Art - is clear whenever I look at the image: I want to put my readers, for a time, into that sacred [central] spot; to make them feel the flow of energies between states of being."

Introduction

By Clive Barker, Everville, 1999 HarperPerennial edition, 13 August 1999

"I'm going to spend the next two years on the four books of the Abarat, and then I will do two big books back-to-back: one will be the sequel to Galilee, which will be the end of that story; and the other will be the third book of The Art.
"At the back of my head I have another, enormous-sized book like Imajica which I also want to get under my belt within the next five or six years, but before I get to that I must finish the final book of The Art. It will be another enormous book; I know what it is, and sometimes I get intimidated by the scale of what I'm going to attempt. But it's a mythology I love and, fortunately, it's a mythology people are still interested in."

The Dark Backward

By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 200, March 2001

"I almost don't want to do the third book of The Art because I don't want to say goodbye to that. There's an inbuilt reluctance; once you say goodbye it's a kind of death and the world is dead to you - it's alive to the reader, but... There is something fun about books that contain an entire world - Imajica, Weaveworld - but there's something wonderful about the open-ended book, books which you're going to fill...
"It's interesting that there are hundreds of pages on the third book of the Art and hundreds of pages on Galilee too already written, hand-written drafts, just because [I've never left them]. Going back to your point about Tolkien never leaving Middle-Earth, I never actually left Maddox on the road and I certainly never left Quiddity, and so those remain open worlds in my head and that's kind of exciting in a way. In any day in my imagination I might totter along any given roads."

Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)

"I will go straight on to Abarat 3, knowing that two huge projects wait in the wings. The huger of the two being the third Book of the Art, which sort of itches at me to just get to. It's sort of interesting that in the time since The Great and Secret Show was written a lot of stuff has come along both in areas of fiction, like the Matrix, and in the area of physics and science which has given me fuel for thought for this debate which goes on in those books between the world of reality and the world of dreams. In a curious way the longer it actually takes me to reach that book, the more anxious for that book I become. And that's not a bad thing. I think it's going to be a big book...
"But they're both year and a half long books. They're big projects that are very strong in my head. I wish I could clone myself. It would be very useful."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls)

"I know I've got a third book of The Art and the second book of Galilee to write and two more Abarat books and it excites me that those things are there somewhere in the menu of things that I have to choose from as I continue my writing and painting career. It's lovely to feel that there's important (and I mean important in the sense of important to me) important stuff to do; stuff that really moves me. Characters to pick up and bring to a conclusion and stories to tell, stories that audiences, readers worldwide have got an interest in - as I found out when I got into Holland and a whole bunch of people were going, 'Where's the third book of The Art?' and I felt, 'Yeah, yeah, I gotta get on with these books!' "

In Anticipation Of The Deluge: A Moment At The River's Edge

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 12 July 2004 (note - full text here)

"I think, as a writer, you learn to take in information and find the moment when it's right to tell the story... Sometimes I find I need to allow myself to grow into the moment of writing the book. And, the mythology of The Art - as the title suggests - is a mythology incredibly close to my heart. I am an artist, so, of course, I want to write the book of The Art - the third and final book - with as much feeling as possible. It's going to be a big book when it comes, and I beg for patience, and promise that it will be well worth the wait. I think what the third book will concern itself with is what the very origins of Quiddity, what the connection between humanity's origin and the origin of the conscience - the dream consciousness - that is there in the Sea of Quiddity, what that connection is. I've always believed in the idea of a collective unconscious, and Quiddity is really that. It's the sea we enter, as the mythology goes, where we enter once on the night when we are born, once on the night when we first kiss, and fall in love with the world, and once at the time we die. At the most serious and profound moments in our lives, we are given a moment to enter this place of pure dreaming, and that's fascinating, my fascination with dreaming. My dreams are mirrors of my soul. I'm hoping that will all be reflected in the third and final book."

The Clive Barker Interview

By Brett Alexander Savory, IROSF.com, Vol I, No. 8, 21 August 2004

"The Art is an even more thorough-going metaphysic than the Abarat in that hopefully the third book will bring this whole Blakean image of what this is, what the nuncio is, what evolution is, what the connection between magic and Christianity is, a lot of big issues interplay."

The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 June 2005 (note: full text here)

"That only leaves one book - as yet untitled, as yet unwritten, but roiling around in my brain like ripe with violence, weird sex, and the kind of metaphysical theorizing that gives Christian fundamentalists ulcers and hemorrhoids - for Chris [Ryall] and Gabriel [Rodriguez] to recreate for their own medium. Should that happen, as I dearly hope it will, I believe that in Chris and Gabriel's reinvented telling, The Art Trilogy will stand as a benchmark of imaginative and aesthetic excellence."

Introduction

By Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show, Part One, 24 August 2006

"I love Liverpool and I always will and I was thinking actually as I've been very tentatively looking at Art 3 and just beginning to focus my attentions there, knowing that in the next few years I'm going to tackle that - you know that Liverpool obviously has a significant part to play (well, not that significant) but has a part to play in Everville and has another part to play in the third book and it's interesting: I've got to be careful about this, I've got to make sure I'm describing a city which still exists, given this rapid transformation... and yet I also would like people to be able to go to Liverpool with Art 3 in their hands and be able to go to a given place, you see what I mean?
"I'd like to make sure that I get the geography right with Art 3 because you're right, Maeve has a mental construction of Liverpool, a dream Liverpool which is of course a Liverpool of the very remote past but Liverpool is sufficiently old a city and has been... careful with some of its older buildings that I'd like to think, as I say, that people would be able to have Art 3 under their arms and go to a given place and find it there and so I'm going to make myself familiar in the next few years as I back and forth to Liverpool.
"There's some very magical backwaters, particularly actually in central Liverpool; little alleyways which lead onto squares and I've always had, I think, a love of the secret side of cities... and the first city I was ever in thrall with was of course Liverpool and so I'd like to celebrate the city in Art 3 and yes, certainly I've got to take into account Maeve's dreaming of it but I'd just like to get the geography right."

Pinhead's Progress

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 15 and 22 December 2006 (note: full text here)

"I'm looking at my notes for Galilee 2 and I'm looking at my notes for Art 3, you know. I'm moving towards the end of the Abarat series and I'm looking forward to, literally looking forward in both senses to, you know, finishing the trilogy and finishing the second of the Galilee books and what I find, I didn't realise, I don't realise, because this is a repeated thing, until I come to these things just how much there is. You know in the case of The Art, you know those big folders I have, the sort of grey ones, well what are they, about four inches, five inches thick? There are four of those filled with notes on The Art. I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that... I mean I've never stopped juggling Art III, never."

We Are All Imaginary Animals...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 11 & 12 October 2008 (note - full text here)

"Once I get Abarat totally finished I am planning to make the third and final part of The Art - it will be every bit as dark and erotic as the other two."

Still Raising Hell

By Calum Waddell, Judge Dredd Megazine, No 286, 21 July 2009

"I'm writing ABARAT IV 12 hours of every day.Then straight on to the final ABARAT book,and then onto The 3rd book of The Art."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 10 August 2012

"The sequel to THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW, of course is EVERVILLE. And the third and final book in THE ART TRILOGY will be written straight after I finish the fifth and final book in the ABARAT series. It will be undoubtedly the most metaphysically radical book I have so far attempted."

Facebook Posts

By Clive Barker, 25 January 2013

"Let me offer some clarifications regarding the projects I will pursue after Abarat. First, the third book of the Art. Paul Currie asks what's left to tell? Vast amounts, Paul, believe me. Secrets within secrets, worlds within worlds... The order in which these books are finished and published is not reflected in this list, of course."

Facebook Posts

By Clive Barker, 19 March 2013

Black Is The Devil's Rainbow: Tales Of A Journeyman

These stories were originally intended to accompany the 'Pinhead vs. Harry' novella which grew into the full-size novel now known as The Scarlet Gospels. Originally planned a decade ago as providing a home for all the previously uncollected short stories together with a whole bunch of new pieces of short fiction, this has recently taken on a more important role in collecting Clive's Meditations, poems and selected shorter pieces. 'The Scarlet Gospels' was a title originally planned for a standalone collection of erotic poetry and prose, then (like other titles before it, including Everville and Saint Sinner) had the title recycled and was planned as the title-piece novella within the collection before it outgrew its place here.
Difficulties with publication mean that Clive's originally suggested 'late 2010 or Spring 2011' publication date has long past and, as HarperCollins' adult division - his publishing house since 1986 - has decided to part company with him, the project remains in limbo...

"There will be another book, eventually. The problem right now is getting my publishers to agree to let me do short fiction. It's a troubled market right now. Books are a troubled market. There will be more short stories, for sure. But, my next book is going to be a book of short stories and they said, 'Please don't do this. You will sell five times more if you write a novel.' It's really tough selling short stories.
"It frustrates the fuck out of me. I love short stories. I love writing short stories. It's immensely frustrating... my publisher will pay a lot for a Clive Barker book, no surprise there, and I feel a sense of responsibility to them that if I'm going to write a book, then they need to sell some copies. They pay me an immense amount of money. So, they tell me, look, we'll sell five times more copies of a novel than a collection of short stories, I feel I'm bound to listen to them. Now, having said that I've written a new novel [Sacrament], then all bets are off. They were troubled by the idea of having a gay hero in this novel and I told them that was what they were going to get, end of story. Having agreed to doing a novel, I'll do what the hell I like. But, there are real difficulties in the market place with short stories."

Interview

By Amber Black and Tim Trautmann, Review(?), 1996

"I'm also working on another collection of short stories for adults. This should be out after Galilee. You know, it's great fun! I'd forgotten what fun it is to do stories that you can finish in three weeks as opposed to 14 months. It's very gratifying to complete material in that time frame. What I'm trying to do in this collection is really trying to cross back and forth across the generic boundaries . You'll have some horror, some science fiction, fantasy, etc... It's really a reflection of the range of writing that I have been doing in the last few years. I'm also going to be revisiting some of my old mythologies, which will be big fun."

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998

"I had a hard time persuading my publisher to let me do a collection of short stories. But my approach was 'Well, I've done Everville, Sacrament, and now Galilee. And they're all huge novels.' So I said, 'Guys, give me a break. I've been a good soldier here, writing these big novels, and having a great time doing it. But I now have 20 really cool ideas for short stories, and I really need to write them. Otherwise I'll go crazy!' Finally they said, 'Go to it.'
"It's wonderful! I'm having the greatest fun doing it because I'm able to revisit characters that I haven't written about in a long time. One of the stories is a confrontation between Harry D'Amour, whom I've written about a number of times, and the character Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. And I'm having the best time writing that story, you know? [laughs] And there's going to be a couple of other places where I'll revisit past characters and update my approach to them. And there'll be a bunch of new stuff: new ideas ... and new worlds ... and new mythologies. So the book is going to be a very comprehensive cross section of 'the worlds of Clive Barker,' if you will."

Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique

By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com, 1999 (N.B. interview took place 1998)

"I'm doing a book of short stories now. A couple of pieces that are set in the not to distant future ... a somewhat fantasticated version of the internet. So, yes I am writing about [the internet].

Chats From The Past

Transcript of on-line Hollywood Spotlight appearance, 23 June 1998

"I will turn it in Spring of 1999. They have pencilled in, I emphasise pencilled in, late fall of next year for release. I would always like more time. I would like time to play and whatever. I'm always saying give me another month or so. I've done five of the Mercy and the Jackal stories [about a little girl, Mercy and a wrestler] and I have done a draft of a story called Coldheart Canyon, based in Los Angeles and is a very dark, very black movie star story. I have a draft of The Lazarus Requiem and a lot of shorter pieces which are autobiographical, so I have done quite a lot of the stuff...This book is going to be much, much bigger than any collection of short stories I have ever done before. We should have about seventeen or eighteen stories, plus the introductions for each, all under one cover. Now all I have to do is find a fucking title!"

Confessions

By Stephen Dressler, Lost Souls, Issue 12, January 1999

"At the end of the year I will also deliver to Harper Collins a collection of short stories which will collect up a bunch of stuff that has been floating around for a while, there's a Harry D'Amour story which had been published a long time ago [Lost Souls], which has not been collected... There is about 5 or 6 stories which are already around which have not been collected. There is also about 70 or 80 thousand words of new material, which will include, and most importantly actually, the novella, "The Scarlet Gospels," which is giving the title to the book... So I am delivering that the end of this year for autumn the following year."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls at www.clivebarker.com, 18 May 2001

"There's... a lot of stories that I created for Scarlet Gospels which are very erotic, complete and ready to rock and roll. There's a tale called Jehovah's Bitch, which is one of the most outrageous things I've ever written, and I hope to get into that [short story] collection"

Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)

"I have no reason to believe the short story collection will not precede Abarat III. I have one story left to do, which is the Hellraiser / D'Amour story which I'm writing right now - or actually stopped writing to go and do the final pass on the Tortured Souls script, but then will go back to. And my hope is that in the time between Universal receiving the Tortured Souls script and either saying yea or nay to it, I will finish the D'Amour / Pinhead story and it can go its merry way with the rest of the stories and the collection will be complete... I think it's perfect that it goes with a collection of fiction that either hasn't seen print yet (and including some of the stories that I had created for the Scarlet Gospels) or a few pieces which have never been put between covers before, but have been anthologised - loosely - like Lost Souls, the short story that I did all that time ago for Time Out, and things that need to be under a cover with Clive Barker's name on the front, for completeness' sake.
"I'm trying to get Pidgin and Theresa in there and, there's a bunch of little things. I'm even going to take a couple of the pieces from David's book, from Rare Flesh - not the poetry, but the things which have more narrative cohesion and I'm just going to put a couple of those in there too. So it will be a pretty authoritative collection, I think. Not super-long, but definitely interesting and diverse: some erotic stuff in there, some fantastical stuff in there, some horrific stuff in there...
"I'm backing and forthing about [the Tortured Souls pieces], because... I'm not sure I like them sufficiently, to be perfectly honest. I have mixed feelings about them, partly, I suppose, because they served another purpose - that they weren't there strictly as literature, if you will. So I suppose I have some questions about whether I like them sufficiently to put them in there, in a collection like this.
"Lost Souls and Coming To Grief will both definitely be in the collection. Amen's Shore will definitely be in the collection, The Departed will definitely be there, Pidgin and Theresa we spoke of, yes. Animal Life - definitely. You see, what I like about all these is that they really were intended as short stories, whereas to me, somewhere at the back of my head is the feeling that, however hard I try, the fiction from Tortured Souls is, you know, stuff that was written to go with some toys - and I'm not sure it really belongs in a collection, I really don't... Chiliad will be there - both parts. If you put all of those together, you actually find you've got a shitload of stuff - there's a lot of stuff there... once you add the very considerable size of the Hellraiser story, plus, obviously, the stuff from Scarlet Gospels - that's a lot of material. And I'm excited to be able to put all this stuff together. I think there's a very fun collection here, and a very diverse collection."

In Anticipation Of The Deluge: A Moment At The River's Edge

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 12 July 2004 (note - full text here)

"There is a huge enthusiasm to do the short stories and to print everything that's missing that isn't in print, plus of course a lot of the short stories that I've created that I haven't even published - and really I hate to say this, but it sort of is a marketing question. I'm concentrating on the bit that I can have control over, which is writing the book and we'll see what happens..."
"The collection is pretty disparate, including obviously the two stories that bookended Millenium/Revelations which is one of my favourite pieces of my own fiction and is much under-read, much under-found, much under-published."

The Hellbound Art : Memory, Fantasy And Filigree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 February 2005 (note - full text here)

"We will do the collection of short fiction at a later point, I have got a lot of short fiction, which we have not been published."

Clive Barker On The Phone

By [Thomas Hemmerich], That's Clive!, 29 March 2005 (note - full text online at www.clivebarker.de)

"Yes, the uncollected short stories will be put together into a single volume. I think it's most important right now, however, that I unleash this big thing [The Scarlet Gospels] and then Jane Johnson and I will talk about how we collect the short stories."

You Called, He Came...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 and 3 June 2006 (note: full text here)

"In the not too distant future I am looking forward to completing the second book of Galilee. But I also have plans for the Nightbreed mythology as well. I definitely want to take that further - so expect a sequel to Cabal at some point. But first up will be the new Abarat book and a new collection of short stories. Expect them both in 2009."

Back Into Hell

By [ ], SFX, No 177, Christmas 2008

"We decided we'd call it Journeyman - you know, one up from an apprentice but not quite a master! And Chiliad will be in there, for instance: there will be a lot of new stuff people haven't seen, there will be a large selection of poetry, there will be a big, fairly provocative piece called the Book of Golgotha which is about the crucifixion and so what I'm doing right now is organising the contents page. The only things which I have yet to do are either the afterword or the foreword, whichever way I decide to do it, and the final draft of The Book of Golgotha...
"There will be a lot of surprises and it is by no means - you know every now and again Steve [King] collects up his short fiction, it's not like that at all. This book has more of a Borgesian feeling about it, a library within a library, different books, you know, It will be a book about Christ, a book of poetry, most of which you will never have seen before. I think we're looking at something like a 120,000 word book, so it's not going to be a slim little volume. I'm thinking of putting in the little pen portraits of the Nightbreed Chronicles because I think those are lovely and they don't need the photographs and they are witty little narratives...
"It will come through the regular HarperCollins. It is going to be a very diverse and rich book and it'll be nice to have in print something like On Amen's Shore. It will also be nice to have the recent more provocative pieces."

The Bleed Between The Apprentice And The Master

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 February and 7 March 2009 (note - full text here)

"Big day. At least for a writer: I changed a title! The collection of short fiction will be called 'Black Is The Devil's Rainbow'... One of those phrases that just appeared. I deliver the book at the cusp of summer. Out Halloween, 2010, maybe?"

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 6 July 2009

"I just rewrote the Nativity for a novella called 'Grail', to go in 'Black is the Devil's Rainbow'. Time for a darker take on that scene. Much. I think I just lost any hope of being invited to the Pope's place for a martini and dogma, shaken not stirred. Oh well. We make what we must make, and pay the price."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 18 July 2009

"Just delivered the last fifteen short stories to my typists for Black Is The Devil's Rainbow. I'm high on words right now. I'd forgotten what a blast it was to start and finish something in a few hours. I only wish the market was bigger. My short fiction sells half the number of copies that a novel will sell."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 9 December 2009

"I have got about twenty five new short tales finished. I am trying to create the shortest most intense, wicked stories I can. These are all for Black Is The Devil's Rainbow."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 12 December 2009

"I now admit to being obsessed with this new book of short fiction. I'm up until four or five, hating to sleep. Oh, I fucking LOVE making art. Even when it makes you crazy, it's still the best devourer of despair, affirmer of life, celebrant of being the shameless sinner!"

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 15 December 2009

"I am putting together all the stories for Black Is The Devil's Rainbow. I have been writing stories for collections of various kinds that never had a real title for a long time and so probably there's ten years' worth of stories here. And many of these stories are very short, you know, they're a page long. And then something like Grail, for instance, is probably going to come in at 140,000 words, so it's a real range. And then there's a lot of stuff which is not finished and the question is well, which ones do I want to finish? Which ones do I want to leave? Which ones are not working at all and should be screwed up and burned? And, let's see, there are one, two... six, seven... thirteen, fourteen.... fourteen piles of papers, the smallest of which is a foot tall! Which is all, this all, you know, stuff which has been clipped together over the years... We have assembled lots of poems...
"The whole idea of the book is to have something like a shelf of books, something that looks like a shelf of books, each of which is different, maybe comes in a different typeface, maybe even different paper, I would love that; I would love to feel that the book would be several books. And in which case I might divide the poems into two collections of poems - one of which would go towards the beginning, one towards the end, for instance... I mean it's a plan whether it will work or not - it's got to go through the money people - Rakesh, my editor and I have talked about that and I think it will be honestly really, really cool if we can do it.
"I obviously have Grail, I have Jehovah's Bitch, I have a collection of shorter short stories which I'd like to be able to finish for this collection if I can. I'm a little cautious about naming them but there's about twelve of those in two piles, what else do I have? Oh, The Scarlet Gospel stuff, which I forgot I'd written! And so on and so forth, it's everywhere. But that's a cross-section.
"I'm ready to deliver most of it now, I mean there's still some typing to be done, I have a little bit to do on Grail and a little bit to do on Jehovah's Bitch but the rest of the stuff's done. So it's really more a question of am I going to hand it in piecemeal or am I going to hand it in - you know, it's a big motherfucker! You know, you sent me that wonderful list of things that you thought should be in the book and I agreed with all of those - but that's a big book right there, you know?"

Now And In Time To Be

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 4 January 2010 (note - full text here)

"I am having so much fun. I have Pinhead facing off against a truly unexpected enemy on one of the French Penal colonies. My own Devil's Island, haunted by the ghosts of those who died in despair here. One of whom our anti-hero has reason to respect."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 26 January 2010

"A big day for me! The final entire text of Black Is The Devil's Rainbow has gone to my editor. The Hellraiser tale is called Heaven's Reply. I am very excited. It has been a huge challenge, but I think there's something in it for everyone. The Hellraiser story takes the Cenobite to The Devil's Island, the site of Papillon."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 15 May 2010

"Black Is The Devil's Rainbow is not only short stories but also poems. Most of the material is written, the problem is the order in which my publishers want to release books. And they feel strongly that I should deliver every part of the Abarat quintet before we move on to another project."

Facebook Q&A

Replies to questions at a live Facebook Q&A session, 15 December 2012

"The truth is that I will either take up offers already on the table to produce beautiful books, or else fund them myself. Black is the Devil's Rainbow is immensely important to me. Making movies is far beyond my means. I have so many ideas in my head for short stories, novels, painting, poems, all of which will be seen in precisely the form I intended. There is no such thing as a Creative Committee."

Facebook Posts

By Clive Barker, 18 April 2013

Cabal 2 and 3

Of course these are almost finished... Yeah, right. Despite William Collins signing a five year deal with Clive in 1989 to deliver Cabal 2 and 3 and The Art 2 and 3, more than twenty years have gone by with just one of those four contracted books finding their way onto the page. Not, of course, that they didn't get their money's worth from him in that period - and since - but priorities have clearly lain elsewhere. While Clive is unlikely now to be bringing the later adventures of the Breed into the promised short story collection, Black Is The Devil's Rainbow, we hear tell that there may well be a sighting of the Breed's further exploits elsewhere...

"My ideas for where Nightbreed II and III are going are so wild that I don't think comic books could do it. I'm very much watching over that and making sure that, while the Nightbreed characters can run riot on the pages of Epic for a while, the way they will run riot when I actually start to write about them again will be something completely different."

Boundless Imajination

By WC Stroby, (i) Fangoria, No 109, January 1992 (ii) Horror Zone, No1, August 1992 {Note : interview took place in August 1991}

"The movie Nightbreed will be out around the same time [as The Great And Secret Show] and then the sequel to Cabal will be the next thing on my desk, for publication probably in Spring 1990."

Clive Barker Comes To Comics

By [ ], Comic Buyer's Guide, 19 May 1989

"What I've got to avoid is making the books and films self-referential. I've got to keep them separate. I'll write the second Cabal book after I finish this picture, and as a sequel to the first book, not a sequel to the movie (of the book!). I don't want to keep the characters separate, but what you can't predict of course is how theatre audiences will react to different characters. Narcisse is a big hit in rushes, and maybe that will influence the way we view him in the movie. Maybe we'll bring him back in the movies if he goes down well. But I won't bring him back in the book, absolutely not. That's where there might be divergences."

Nightbreed

By Stefan Jaworzyn, Shock Express, Vol 3 No 1, Summer 1989

"There are three books of The Art and three books of Cabal, so now I've written the first book of two trilogies. I rather like the idea of splitting books like that, it's kind of fun."

Stalking The Night Fantastic

By Dave Hughes, GM, No 12, 1989

"Charles Haid, as Eigerman, gets killed at the end of the film [Nightbreed] but not in the book. This doesn't mean I can't bring him back, of course, as long as the movie does business! There will definitely be more Cabal books, though I envisage trouble keeping the book and film sequels separate. That's a worrying bridge to cross and there is a danger it will all become too self-referential, which I must avoid at all costs. I must look at the books as distinct from the movies. I start writing Cabal II after Nightbreed wraps."

Clive Barker's Nightbreed

By Alan Jones, Cinefantastique, Vol 20 Nos 1 & 2 (double-issue), November 1989

"I think that going and doing a sequel on the page to something that was so troubled in the filming is very difficult. It has also been about writing a piece of short fiction when I've been writing bigger... And the other thing is ideas back-up and you need to do the ones which are most pressing and most urgent.
"It was troubling to go back and think about writing a sequel to a thing which had been turned into a movie which had been the most painful creative experience of my life.
"I actually made a hit list of all the people who had fucked me over on Nightbreed thinking, 'When I actually write Cabal 2 they will all die.' But it was too long...
"[re Cabal 2 and 3] One of them will go in the collection of short stories - a novella in the collection of short stories."

Imagining the Horrific

Talk by Clive Barker / Interview by Kim Newman, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1st May 1995

"We get [letters] on them [the Nightbreed] all the time. Somebody just approached me to do some television on them, so even when I forget, somebody else remembers! A novella is how I would do it, I think. Certainly, there's another piece to be written about them. I've been toying with it appearing in this collection [of short stories - see 'Scarlet Gospels']."

Lord of New Illusions

By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

"I was thinking about Boone and the Nightbreed... I have not definitely abandoned this world. No world is ever abandoned, as long as there's a god of writing and the ideas keep coming and my hands work, I will hopefully get there one of these days. I have two more tales in note form about Boone and the Nightbreed, all of which will be about the same length as Cabal so, side-by-side, they'll make a nice big volume, but at the moment there's so much else going on..."

Sowing The Seeds Of The Story Tree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 August and 4 September 2006 (note - full text here)

The 'Enormous' Book

...Lining up behind Abarat 4 and 5, Scarlet Gospels, The Art 3 and Galilee 2 (phew!), don't hold your breath for this one yet...

"I'm going to spend the next two years on the four books of the Abarat, and then I will do two big books back-to-back: one will be the sequel to Galilee, which will be the end of that story; and the other will be the third book of The Art.
"At the back of my head I have another, enormous-sized book like Imajica which I also want to get under my belt within the next five or six years, but before I get to that I must finish the final book of The Art."

The Dark Backward

By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 200, March 2001

"Oh yeah, I have one huge fucking gigantic mythology which is sitting in my head, sort of a master mythology if you will, the mythology of mythologies. So yes, yes. It's something which is very big which I will probably get to in about eight or nine years, and that's not a joke...
"So that's where it's going to be, towards my 50's. I will do this. I already told Jane in England about this. Towards the end of my 50's I will begin this huge book, and she said, 'Great... good!' I think it's totally long term planning, very much as it will be a mythology, which will dwarf everything that I've done so far."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls)

The Candle In The Cloud

...Long-languishing in our 'Books that got away...' section, the Candle In The Cloud manuscript has now been resurrected for publication by Bad Moon Books.
Written in the Summer of 1971 between school and university, this was dedicated to Clive's closest friends. He submitted it to a publisher but lost interest in the revisions they suggested...

"I wrote a novel for children called The Candle In The Cloud. It was a fantasy book, set both in the here and now and in an invented world. I did send this book off to a few publishers and one of them was interested in it. However the publisher wanted some changes made and I was about to go to university, so I put off polishing the novel until the following summer vacation. When I went back to it almost a year later, the enthusiasm I had felt for the story had withered away."

Introduction to Clive Barker's Thief Of Always,

By Clive Barker, 3 August 2001

[On the revisions] "I was about to go into university and I just wasn't up for it."

Hydra Rising

By Douglas E. Winter, Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, 2001

"The first novel I wrote, which was called The Candle In The Cloud, I wrote when I was seventeen and it was a novel for young people and nobody would publish it, of course - and probably very good for my reputation that they didn't! - But I've always loved children's fiction..."

Barnes and Noble Stage Presentation

By Brein Lopez, LA Festival of Books, 25 April 2004

"I wrote a novel called The Candle In the Cloud when I was seventeen... And I sent that off to a couple of publishers. I actually had one publisher who wanted to publish it but wanted changes made. I, at that time - by the time I'd started the novel, finished the novel, had it typed out, had it copied - which was all much more difficult back then, I actually paid my father's secretary the money to type out the novel - by the time I'd done all that and received the letter saying, 'Yes, we'll take the novel,' but they want to change it, I was about to go to university and it just was impossible to contemplate a university career and taking on the job of reworking the novel so I politely declined and said, 'Hopefully when my university career is over we'll talk again.' And by the time university was over The Candle In The Cloud felt so remote and I was so changed by the university experience, not necessarily for the better. I studied English and Philosophy and had drowned in words and my theatre company at that point, as you know, became a mime company - which tells you something. You know, I was just not interested in words; I'd just had too much of it. And the notion of going back again to the novel, or even starting a new one was unthinkable."

Sowing The Seeds Of The Story Tree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 August and 4 September 2006 (note - full text here)

"The Bacchus book looks beautiful: I've seen what you've seen which is Richard Kirk's gorgeous, gorgeous, obsessive illustrations - and he is also going to design and do the illustrations for the Roy Robbins edition of The Candle in the Cloud. And you are responsible for that! I would still be digging around in my boxes of old manuscripts for something that approached a decent copy were it not for you guys...
"Are you familiar with Fellini's Roma? You remember the scene where they go down into the catacombs and they find all the paintings on the walls and the wind comes in and the air and the images dissolve? That's what instantly came into my mind when you said that - the manuscript fading - that is one of the most poignant scenes, it's so beautifully, beautifully done; the touch of contemporary air peeling the magic of the past. What is nice about Bacchus and what will be nice about Candle in the Cloud is I have done nothing, I mean I have been very truthful to the impulses that first made me create these - yes, of course I've corrected grammatical errors and spellings and whatever but I have done nothing at all to the text itself."

The Bleed Between The Apprentice And The Master

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 February and 7 March 2009 (note - full text here)

The Scarlet Gospels

...Having long grown out of its 'short story' format, The Scarlet Gospels (the long-awaited Pinhead versus Harry D'Amour story) continued to expand to at least 230,000 words long.
Whilst our friend with the pins might think he has exacted some kind of influence over the publication date, knowing his fate is contained within its pages, he has perhaps not reckoned on his author teaming up with the fearsome writer and editor, Mark Miller...
Clive's taken an extended break before completing the final draft, during which time he has instead completed Mister B. Gone, the third book of the continuing Abarat series and the stories for Black is the Devil's Rainbow, but Mark's involvement now brings Scarlet Gospels much closer to a clear delivery date, as he explains below...
As we continue to follow the emergence of The Scarlet Gospels, Clive has passed on an epigram (paint splats and all!) which he is currently considering for the opening pages of the novel:

"I am doing another Books of Blood collection and I'm writing a sequel to the book on which Hellraiser was based - this will be Pinhead's first appearance on the page, because he isn't even named in the original."

Hellraiser

By Jay Stevenson, Imagi-Movies, Vol 1, No 2, Winter 1993/94

"There will be another book, eventually. The problem right now is getting my publishers to agree to let me do short fiction. It's a troubled market right now. Books are a troubled market. There will be more short stories, for sure. But, my next book is going to be a book of short stories and they said, 'Please don't do this. You will sell five times more if you write a novel.' It's really tough selling short stories.
"It frustrates the fuck out of me. I love short stories. I love writing short stories. It's immensely frustrating... my publisher will pay a lot for a Clive Barker book, no surprise there, and I feel a sense of responsibility to them that if I'm going to write a book, then they need to sell some copies. They pay me an immense amount of money. So, they tell me, look, we'll sell five times more copies of a novel than a collection of short stories, I feel I'm bound to listen to them. Now, having said that I've written a new novel [Sacrament], then all bets are off. They were troubled by the idea of having a gay hero in this novel and I told them that was what they were going to get, end of story. Having agreed to doing a novel, I'll do what the hell I like. But, there are real difficulties in the market place with short stories."

Interview

By Amber Black and Tim Trautmann, Review(?), 1996

"I have more mixed emotions about going back to the horror stuff than I thought I would, and it's really only the horror stuff. I went back and one of the things I'm doing, as a sort of fun thing is going back to a few of the monsters I've created and just writing a couple of short stories about them. And there's this guy with fucking pins in his head, and I thought I should just revisit this guy, to just see who he is these days - it's ten years since I wrote this guy, you know? - What does he sound like these days? How is he? How's he been? You know, is his mother well? All of that stuff, and what was interesting was turns of phrase about oozing viscera which would have just dropped from my pen so readily trouble me a lot more now. And I'm kind of intrigued by that! I don't know quite why that is; I used to be incredibly squeamish about blood and I'm not anymore, but I'm amazed to see how much more these things trouble me, upset me. And I think maybe it's good that they upset me. I think some of the images that have come out are perhaps more powerful this time round because my stomach is churning when I'm writing them. That is a function of age to some extent. I mean, it's a function of experience; I've sat by deathbeds in the last five years and held people's hands while they've passed - things that hadn't happened to me when I was 30, 31 when I wrote those first stories. I'm a different person - I'm not saying better or worse - I'm just different and some of the kind of mean-spirited viciousness of some of those early stories surprises me. I went back and I thought, 'My God!' - I was quite surprised at what I'd actually put on the page, and I want to get some of that in. And it was sort of fun; the Pinhead thing was kind of entertaining because I was sitting there and it was like, it was like an old friend, I did feel a little like Jim Henson and Kermit, you know, here was the sweet little guy, back again. Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead in the movies is one of my oldest friends, I've known him since I was fourteen or fifteen, he's obviously an extraordinarily fine actor... so now I start to write about him, literally this last two or three days, and it feels like I'm channelling Doug Bradley!"

LA Times Festival of Books

Transcript of an interview by Martin Smith at the LA Times Festival of Books, 25 April 1998

"I don't discount the possibility I will do more short stories after the Pinhead/Harry story which is a very important story for me in my mythology because it will be the last thing that I will ever write about Pinhead. Because after this there will be no more Pinhead stories. Because this story is the end of Pinhead. This story will mark his death.
"[Hellraiser Inferno] is just an abomination. I want to actively go on record as saying I warn people away from the movie. It's really terrible and it's shockingly bad, and should never have been made. So I want to give Pinhead a good send-off. I want to do it right. If we are going to get rid of the old guy, let's do it with some style. So my whole idea was if I do it with Harry I can bring in two characters at the same time and sort of weave their stories together.
"What it will do for me is kill him in my mythological range. Others may wish to pick the story up and do something else with him, but as far as I'm concerned once I've told the story, it's the last of the guy.
"What I'm trying to do is give the guy a decent dignified send-off. It's really important to me, and I think he's a great monster. I really hate the way he's been treated in this film. It depressed me."

Confessions

By [Craig Fohr], Lost Souls Newsletter, September / December 2000>

"I'm also working on another collection of short stories for adults. This should be out after Galilee. You know, it's great fun! I'd forgotten what fun it is to do stories that you can finish in three weeks as opposed to 14 months. It's very gratifying to complete material in that time frame. What I'm trying to do in this collection is really trying to cross back and forth across the generic boundaries . You'll have some horror, some science fiction, fantasy, etc... It's really a reflection of the range of writing that I have been doing in the last few years. I'm also going to be revisiting some of my old mythologies, which will be big fun."

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998

"Then I will do a collection of short stories which I talked about briefly. Which does have some D'Amour, and a Hellraiser story in it. I'm returning to these mythologies and it was kind of interesting because I thought I would do these things and I thought 'Geez I want to tell a story about the man with pins in his head. I haven't told about him for a long time.' I'm looking forward to that."

Explorer From The Far Reaches Of Experience

By Kim August, Pharr Out! 1998

[re time-lag between writing sequels] "It's kind of interesting, because I'm writing a Harry D'Amour vs. Pinhead short story right now, so the same question pertains. But it's tremendous fun. They walk onto the page and I think, 'Hey, man, it's good to see you!'"

Lord of New Illusions

By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

"I had a hard time persuading my publisher to let me do a collection of short stories. But my approach was 'Well, I've done Everville, Sacrament, and now Galilee. And they're all huge novels.' So I said, 'Guys, give me a break. I've been a good soldier here, writing these big novels, and having a great time doing it. But I now have 20 really cool ideas for short stories, and I really need to write them. Otherwise I'll go crazy!' Finally they said, 'Go to it.'
"It's wonderful! I'm having the greatest fun doing it because I'm able to revisit characters that I haven't written about in a long time. One of the stories is a confrontation between Harry D'Amour, whom I've written about a number of times, and the character Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. And I'm having the best time writing that story, you know? [laughs] And there's going to be a couple of other places where I'll revisit past characters and update my approach to them. And there'll be a bunch of new stuff: new ideas ... and new worlds ... and new mythologies. So the book is going to be a very comprehensive cross section of 'the worlds of Clive Barker,' if you will."

Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique

By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com, 1999 (note, interview took place 1998)

"One of the things I'm trying to do in the story with D'Amour and Pinhead is, I actually want to kind of make Pinhead feel fucked. I want people to make fools of him as he breathes his last and with no hope of resurrection. No sequels. I swear the way he's going - I have plotted this - the way he's going is so total, is so complete that the most optimistic film producer in Hollywood could never dream of resurrecting him! So I'm going to 'off' him, and I want the audience to say, 'Good'."

The Good, The Bad, And The Light In The Dark

By Phil Stokes, at the Write On! talk at Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, 11 November 1998

"I'm doing a book of short stories now. A couple of pieces that are set in the not to distant future ... a somewhat fantasticated version of the internet. So, yes I am writing about [the internet].

Chats From The Past

Transcript of on-line Hollywood Spotlight appearance, 23 June 1998

"I will turn it in Spring of 1999. They have pencilled in, I emphasise pencilled in, late fall of next year for release. I would always like more time. I would like time to play and whatever. I'm always saying give me another month or so. I've done five of the Mercy and the Jackal stories [about a little girl, Mercy and a wrestler] and I have done a draft of a story called Cold Hard Canyon, based in Los Angeles and is a very dark, very black movie star story. I have a draft of The Last Resrequiem and a lot of shorter pieces which are autobiographical, so I have done quite a lot of the stuff...This book is going to be much, much bigger than any collection of short stories I have ever done before. We should have about seventeen or eighteen stories, plus the introductions for each, all under one cover. Now all I have to do is find a fucking title!"

Confessions

By Stephen Dressler, Lost Souls, Issue 12, January 1999

"Now, I'm writing a story right now: Harry d'Amour, who's a character I've written about many times, finally does away with Pinhead. It is the end of Pinhead; there is no possibility of resurrection... No! And there is a profound satisfaction in that.
"I'm going to give it away - he commits suicide. And that's why he's gone - it's suicide.
"And one of the interesting things I'm playing with in this text is, I'm playing with a character that everybody's familiar with. Mostly people are familiar not from the words, and so I'm very aware when I bring this man on the page that he trails movies with him, that it's his movie reputation that he brings on stage, on the page with him."

Transcript of Platform Performance

Interviewed by Russell Manley, Jeffrey Hall, London, 23 September 1999

"I went to the Aberdeen islands, which are off the west coast of Scotland, with my mother and my husband, David, for a few days in the summer, and we had two-hour nights up there. You watch the sun go down at midnight and rise at 2 o'clock in the morning. I would get up and go to a Viking cemetery within walking distance. I would sit on these grave stones. Who knows who's buried there. The words have long-since been eroded by the sea air and lichen. The graveyard will appear in... in the next two years I'm doing one last Pinhead story. It is about the death of Pinhead. I'm finally killing off the fucker. It will appear in those stories."

Barker Worse Than His Bite?

By [ ], PC Gameplay.co.uk, 19-23 February 2001

"I think it will be relatively short. Just because I feel as though the fiction I have in mind of Harry D'Amour meets Pinhead - the story is not going to be super short it's not gonna be 25 pages nor is it going to be 700. It's going to be a novella. And I want to give time to the Pinhead story to finish him off graciously...
"It would be a fond hope of mine actually, that somebody would actually see, that somebody from Dimension would read the thing and go, Wait a second, maybe we can do something a little bit more graceful with this character than what we've been doing recently.' "

Confessions

By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls, March 2001 (note - interview took place 14 December 2000)

"At the end of the year I will also deliver to Harper Collins a collection of short stories which will collect up a bunch of stuff that has been floating around for a while, there's a Harry D'Amour story which had been published a long time ago [Lost Souls], which has not been collected... There is about 5 or 6 stories which are already around which have not been collected. There is also about 70 or 80 thousand words of new material, which will include, and most importantly actually, the novella, "The Scarlet Gospels," which is giving the title to the book. The novella "The Scarlet Gospels" which will be the end once and for all of the Hellraiser mythology because I am killing Pinhead. So I am delivering that the end of this year for autumn the following year."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls at www.clivebarker.com, 18 May 2001

"The collection of short fiction will be delivered at the end of this year, which will include the Harry D'Amour/Pinhead story which will bring an end to Pinhead once and for all... I'm writing his death scene; whether they choose to take account of that in the movies is up to them, but I am writing his death scene and after which I will have no more literary or cinematic dealings with him whatsoever."

Nips And Tucks, Tits And Fucks

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 July 2001 (note - full text here)

"The only thing that I'm going to do in a relatively short form is the final Hellraiser story dispatching that damn fellow with the pins in his head - that I will not do at great length. But it won't be a short, short story, it will still, I think, be a novella, perhaps the match of The Hellbound Heart, I'm not sure - I always underestimate what these are going to take!
"There's also a lot of stories that I created for Scarlet Gospels which are very erotic, complete and ready to rock and roll. There's a tale called Jehovah's Bitch, which is one of the most outrageous things I've ever written, and I hope to get into that [short story] collection"

Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)

"This will be basically an anthology of new stories including the final Hellraiser I've been promising myself I would write for a long time. My farewell to that whole mythology even as somebody else continues to make the movies I wanted to be able to close that door once and for all. I should say close that box once and for all. That's why I'm going to do that as part of this anthology, which will than also contain a number of stories that are now out of print. So it will be a mixture of the old and the new."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls)

"I have no reason to believe the short story collection will not precede Abarat III. I have one story left to do, which is the Hellraiser / D'Amour story which I'm writing right now - or actually stopped writing to go and do the final pass on the Tortured Souls script, but then will go back to. And my hope is that in the time between Universal receiving the Tortured Souls script and either saying yea or nay to it, I will finish the D'Amour / Pinhead story and it can go its merry way with the rest of the stories and the collection will be complete. I've plotted it [D'Amour / Pinhead], I'm actually writing it, I've actually written probably 200 pages of it, of handwritten draft. So, it's going to be a long, sort of a novella, I suppose. I forget where the numbers begin - I think a novella begins at sort of 17,000 words, I'm not sure, it's a very strange number... I do remember somebody saying it was 17,000 - in which case this will definitely be a novella, not a short story, because I think I'm probably edging towards 17,000 words already!
"I don't want to make a separate book of it, I don't believe it justifies a separate book. I think it's perfect that it goes with a collection of fiction that either hasn't seen print yet (and including some of the stories that I had created for the Scarlet Gospels) or a few pieces which have never been put between covers before, but have been anthologised - loosely - like Lost Souls, the short story that I did all that time ago for Time Out, and things that need to be under a cover with Clive Barker's name on the front, for completeness' sake.
"I'm trying to get Pidgin and Theresa in there and, there's a bunch of little things. I'm even going to take a couple of the pieces from David's book, from Rare Flesh - not the poetry, but the things which have more narrative cohesion and I'm just going to put a couple of those in there too. So it will be a pretty authoritative collection, I think. Not super-long, but definitely interesting and diverse: some erotic stuff in there, some fantastical stuff in there, some horrific stuff in there. Just in case anybody thought I'd lost my nerve where the horror stuff is concerned during all this Abaratian stuff, the Hellraiser story is blood-curdlingly horrible! I kind of surprised myself with the gusto with which I went back to it! I've been saving it up and it got loose in this story in a major way. And of course I want to pay my respects to all that's been done with the character in my absence, as it were. I've got to pay some homage to the fact that the character has been moved on in those other movies and certainly - and this is the most important point of homage, I think - to Doug, who has been the thread through all these stories and whose character I am now bringing to what I'm sure he thinks is a premature end! Now, whether this means it will be a premature end as far as the movies are concerned - who can say? But as far as I'm concerned, I am writing the death of Pinhead...
"I'm backing and forthing about [the Tortured Souls pieces], because... I'm not sure I like them sufficiently, to be perfectly honest. I have mixed feelings about them, partly, I suppose, because they served another purpose - that they weren't there strictly as literature, if you will. So I suppose I have some questions about whether I like them sufficiently to put them in there, in a collection like this.
"Lost Souls and Coming To Grief will both definitely be in the collection. Amen's Shore will definitely be in the collection, The Departed will definitely be there, Pidgin and Theresa we spoke of, yes. Animal Life - definitely. You see, what I like about all these is that they really were intended as short stories, whereas to me, somewhere at the back of my head is the feeling that, however hard I try, the fiction from Tortured Souls is, you know, stuff that was written to go with some toys - and I'm not sure it really belongs in a collection, I really don't... Chiliad will be there - both parts. If you put all of those together, you actually find you've got a shitload of stuff - there's a lot of stuff there... once you add the very considerable size of the Hellraiser story, plus, obviously, the stuff from Scarlet Gospels - that's a lot of material. And I'm excited to be able to put all this stuff together. I think there's a very fun collection here, and a very diverse collection and, as I say, with the addition of the Hellraiser story, Hellraiser novella, it's going to be quite a piece!"

In Anticipation Of The Deluge: A Moment At The River's Edge

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 12 July 2004 (note - full text here)

"You know I'm doing this Hellraiser story, the Scarlet Gospels one, which began as a modest little tale... It's now 90,000 words and counting! And so it's now actually a short novel, by definition a short novel... 'It growed like Topsy, sir, honest guv'nor!' What happened was I lightly introduced Jesus into the narrative, thinking I could get away with a quick mention and out again, you know? Actually it was Joseph of Arimathea that I introduced - who brought the Holy Grail actually back to Cornwall, to a tin mine, according to fable. And that sort of got me excited about the narrative in a whole new way and I realised I couldn't finish my man, Pinhead, off in a tale that also has room for Joseph of Arimathea without really dealing some. Otherwise it was going to be a thin little tale and people were going to say Barker should have allowed the richness of this narrative to actually play out - and I would have been one of those people who would have said it. So, I'm glad it's larger and it'll also take up a few more months to finish up. Jane, God bless her!, Jane Johnson is so fantastically in synch with me and always has been and I think it comes from her being a novelist herself. I mean, I think she knows things change and develop and grow and sometimes get out of control and sometimes don't go the way you want them - like the first draft of Abarat II. And so I said to her, 'I'm fighting - this thing's bigger than I thought it was going to be,' and she said, 'You know, this isn't the first time you've told me this, Clive.' Which it certainly isn't!."

There And Back Again: Touring The Abarat

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 30 November 2004 (note - full text here)

"The Hellraiser novel, which was of course a short story and then became a novella and is now a 120,000 word novel is... I am halfway through the final draft and it is very fun to write, I must say. It's very fun to write but it's now reasonably big; I guess it'll be 400 pages... In about June or July, they'll get this 120,000 word Hellraiser book with the possibility of making it a compilation which will add another 300 pages to it; that's a big book, that's a 700 page book which will be full of very adult material.
"I would like it to [stay within the Scarlet Gospels collection] and I don't believe we will know, honestly, what Harper's marketing people will decide until they see the text. There are two opinions here. One is that you take the novel and you separate it off and you make it a thing unto itself which would be perfectly fine, I don't think people would be bothered by a novel that was that length on its own and there's an argument that says it slightly gets lost among a collection of other things which include reprints. But on the other hand part of me, the completist part of me, wants to fling everything into this, probably 700 page book, which would contain as its main entrée, if you will, this novel...
"There is a huge enthusiasm to do the short stories and to print everything that's missing that isn't in print, plus of course a lot of the short stories that I've created that I haven't even published - and really I hate to say this, but it sort of is a marketing question. I'm concentrating on the bit that I can have control over, which is writing the book and we'll see what happens. I guess there is a part of me that thinks it would be nice for it to stand alone, more than I thought, because it's quite the big story. You know, we have two of my major characters clashing and I was thinking that if all stories are part of one vast collective unconscious story, then probably the Ur story is the descent into the Underworld; it's certainly the Shaman story, and Harry does that in this book, you know, he descends in pursuit of another soul, a soul whose name he doesn't even know and there's something quite potent about that idea and I wouldn't want it to sort of get lost in a collection of short fiction. But maybe it wouldn't. In other words, I'm a Libran and I can't make up my fucking mind!"
"I think the argument for pulling the Hellraiser fans is if you put that on the cover then maybe you also tempt them in to reading some kind of fiction that they wouldn't otherwise have read because the collection is pretty disparate, including obviously the two stories that bookended Millenium/Revelations which is one of my favourite pieces of my own fiction and is much under-read, much under-found, much under-published."

The Hellbound Art : Memory, Fantasy And Filigree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 February 2005 (note - full text here)

"It's going to be a big book now - I never thought it would be a big book. But once I started to write it, I realised that in a way I knew a lot of things about hell and a lot about Pinhead - that character that had never appeared in any movie or comic book or anything. These are things which are in my head - and it had been in my head for many years - but that I have never written about. So I'm putting all of that into the book. I'm doing my very best to really develop the mythology and to make this Clive Barker's definitive book of hell...
"So its called the 'Scarlet Gospels' - the thought that I have had for this collection of short fiction - but it actually seems to belong to this novel - it seems to want to belong to this novel... it will be a single volume. This will be a novel on its own I think. And then we will do the collection of short fiction at a later point, I have got a lot of short fiction, which we have not been published.
"And what I haven't realized until I have started writing, was how passionate I felt about the character of Pinhead. I suppose part of it is that I become very familiar with the image of the - like everybody has - the toys, the game, obviously the films and so on. But when I actually went back and wrote about him, wrote in his voice, as it were, I realized that he became more interesting than he had a chance to be in most of the movies. Most of the movies make him into just a simple villain, who is just there, doing this thing, he's there to cause trouble. And I wanted to write something more complex about him, I think he is quite a complex character. You know he isn't Freddy Krueger, he isn't Jason Voorhees, he is something more eloquent and possibly elegant. And so I really wanted to explore this character and really give him a chance to speak one last time - very eloquently."

Clive Barker On The Phone

By [Thomas Hemmerich], That's Clive!, 29 March 2005 (note - full text online at www.clivebarker.de)

"During the day, I am shedding blood like nobody's business in The Scarlet Gospels, which is quite an interesting return to a voice that I thought I'd lost and I'm happy to discover had simply gone into hiding for a while... The tone of Scarlet Gospels is going to remind you I think, in its taking-no-prisoners way, of some of the harsher stories in the Books of Blood and that was a bit of a test for me - did I still have that voice? Was I still, at 52, willing to be that harsh, that cruel?
"When I got Pinhead on stage with D'Amour - and I've actually got him onstage with D'Amour as a boy, he meets D'Amour at a Catholic school as a twelve year-old / thirteen year-old, a fully mixed-up, fucked-up thirteen year-old is the first time he encounters this creature - it suddenly, suddenly I realised that this hard-hearted Barker that really liked the imagery, the almost nihilistic imagery that was a part of the Books of Blood, I was really happy to revisit it; I felt there was validity in it. It's interesting to me and I've written seventeen hand-written pages this morning which is very, very unlike me, to get seventeen pages out in a morning - normally I am really pushing by five o'clock to get my twenty and I'm having a good time is part of it. Part of it is, 'Oh, hello Clive, I'm Clive,' you know? So many of the journeys that I've taken in the last few years have taken me to such diverse places, and sometimes very sad places; Sacrament has such sadness in it, certainly, and I think the stuff I did for Chiliad, you know, that was pretty melancholy stuff. Abarat has brightened me and painting brightens me, and when I'm bright, I can go into the dark places more comfortably. It's only when you're actually in a really, really dark place that the idea of getting up in the morning and going into these dark places yourself is really overwhelming...
"Lazarus Requiem was, is my notes for Scarlet Gospels. I kind of liked that, the ridiculous paradox of that title, you know, but it sounded, wierdly, too science-fictional. You'd be surprised how many 'Requiem's there are in science-fiction. So - and I rather like Scarlet Gospels more, so - but I'm actually making reference to the Lazarus Requiem within the text, I'm going to put that in."

The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 June 2005 (note: full text here)

"I am writing a novel called The Scarlet Gospels right now, in which a fellow with pins in his head comes to a fucking terrible end. And it's time - he's old, he's senile, his colostomy bag keeps breaking. Doug Bradley, who plays him will never forgive me! So, yeah, I'm writing that book that will come out next and meanwhile I'm doing Abarat stuff and meanwhile I'm doing Jump Tribe stuff. So Scarlet Gospels will come out, it's about a five hundred page novel, will come out next year."

Jump Tribe Panel

San Diego Comic Con, 14 July 2005

"I am into the final draft of The Scarlet Gospels and it's very bloody and very intense - very intense - I'm quite surprised how intense it's got. I think I thought I got used to whatever the S&M overtures or undertones of the Cenobites were; I think I thought, 'Oh well, there's nothing there that could distress or disturb me now,' but in seeking out something which would distresss and disturb my audience, I seem to have found some things to distress and disturb me! It's good!"

Rummaging Through The Toybox: Plushes, Plagues and Plaudits

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 11 August 2005 (note: full text here)

"I think good horror can come from writers of any age. I felt I'd lost that mercilessness with age but it turns I haven't. I think this new book is darker and crueller than anything in the Books of Blood."

Raising Hell

By Duncan Bell, Bizarre, No 106, January 2006

"I'm in a faintly, not a philosophical place in the Scarlet Gospels, but I'm waking out of a dream of transformation which is what's going on on the pages - on page... I can give you a number! Page 1,209 of the final draft... [of] three thousand and something...
"I think the mind is constantly thinking on this and I'd certainly been thinking for a very long time about how I would eventually bring eloquent and respectful closure to the life of a character who has been very good to me. But then I realised that to be respectful and all that good stuff, I also needed to be epic because there was a sense that there was an epic structure somewhere behind him that the films didn't show and my original thought was that I would simply tell a tale of closure that was the size of the tale which introduced him - thirty thousand words - and then I thought that does him a terrible injustice, because we are teased over the films with a sense that there is something, some huge structure there in which he belongs, in which he has a significant part and how can I write that, how can I bring him to his final act without first taking him, taking my readers through what that system is - in other words, taking them down to Hell and showing them what the Order of the Cenobites are and where he belongs in them and what the consequences of rebellion on his part might be, and so on and so forth...
"You can start this book and have read nothing, seen nothing - it's fine. If you have seen the first movie, that's fine. If you've seen the second movie, probably that's fine too. If you've read the novella - The Hellbound Heart - surely, that's fine too. Beyond that, I cannot really... I need to create for Hell the kind of scheme of power and domination and hierarchy, the kind of Byzantine goings-on which I think people find have such fun, have such fun with elsewhere in my fiction and, good God, if it's happening anywhere it's happening in Hell! And so I have, I think, three or four huge surprises in the novel which are about what Hell is and who its architects might be and so on - I don't want to give too much away - all of which are then married to Harry, Norma Paine - the blind medium who appears in a couple of stories with Harry - and of course with the Hell-priest, Pinhead. And by tying these characters to this pretty enormous mythology, which is as significant a re-writing of it from what a medieval scholar would have recognised, but is not a violation, it's a development from ideas which you would recognise from paintings of Hell or illuminations of Hell in a medieval book...
"I've always felt there were contradictions built into the system deliberately by me at the very beginning - like, 'Pleasure gets you pain, but you want the pain in a way because it gives you pleasure' that are worth going back to and looking at again as a writer in going back to Hell. So I've just got five people and an animal are about to enter Hell - the second half, the second two-thirds of the book are set in Hell and they are the most mis-matched bunch of people - a dirty half-dozen..! Trust me, I would love to list them because you'd be entertained but it really, really would spoil it. When you come to that moment in the book you'll have a quiet giggle to yourselves; you'll realise what a totally mis-matched bunch of freakoids these guys are! Wonderful people, but they're all oddities, they're all people who are in some sense or other at the edge of culture, of our culture, like so many of my characters and now they're all together in what I suppose I would think is the largest adventure that I could conceive of that did not take place in another world, unless you view Hell as another world, which in some ways is what I'm doing."

Abarat. Abarat. Abarat. Abarat... Abarat!

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 13 and 20 March 2006 (note: full text here)

"I'm on the final draft of Scarlet Gospels... I'm on page 1,959... These are big buggers, you know... I hear people saying it'd go so much faster if you type it in, but I'm an old fashioned kind of guy. What works for me works for me, and I tend to be loyal to the things which work best for me... I do little doodles sometimes in the margins, how a creature might look or how a street might be arranged or how a world might be arranged, which I need to go back to and reference later on. Or I'll play through particularly inventive variations of invented names. I really try and do that. I do like the fact that on this page that I've almost finished there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve... thirteen smaller scribblings and one entire line scribbled out. And the nicest thing about that is I can still see what's beneath it, which is useful because when I come to do the final polish it will have been typed out, and I'll have this by my side - I'll tend to go back to the handwritten draft and peer through the scribbling. And sometimes I'll find that the first decision, the first choice I made was the better of the two...
"You reach me half an hour after an incredible sort of coincidence that's happened. Harry D'Amour in The Scarlet Gospels - the hero of The Scarlet Gospels - is pursuing Pinhead across the landscape of Hell; I won't tell you what Pinhead's plot is, but he does have one... Halfway across Harry is given access to a vision of Christ which he doesn't necessarily particularly want, but he gets it anyway. I won't tell you the circumstances, because that's sort of fun - the way it comes about... Christ's on a cross and Harry's drawn in this vision very, very close to Christ. And he can see the barbs of the thorns, how deeply they dig into the flesh of Christ's head. And what he hadn't realised was that Christ feels the same way as Pinhead does. I'd never thought of that, in all the years I'd been thinking about Pinhead, it never occurred to me that Pinhead is wearing an organised crown of thorns. But he is essentially, right...?
"Harry says, 'There's another who's been at the back of my head and I couldn't think who it was. But I've remembered now.' Christ says, 'What about the other?' 'His head is pierced like yours, not with thorns but with nails.' Christ says, 'How he must suffer.' 'You think so?' 'Oh, I'm certain. So have him come to me, I would turn him, I would bring him into the circle of my suffering.' Harry says, 'He has done terrible things.' And then the conversation gets a lot darker! It suddenly gave this wonderful chance to have Christ say, 'Well bring him on over! It'll be fine. We'll chat - he's had some nails, I've had some thorns...' But it's funny I should live with a piece of mythology, a piece of imagery as long as I've lived with Pinhead, and got to twenty years of living with him, as it were, and had never made that connection before... I'm not saying this is a revelation, I'm sure lots of people have thought of this before me. It's just a case of the author being incredibly frigging slow!"

Lord Of Art, Master Of Illusions

By Paul Kane, (i) FantasyCon brochure, 22-24 September, 2006 (ii) excerpted in The BFS: A Celebration, 2006 (note: full text online at www.shadow-writer.co.uk) (interview took place 10 May 2006)

"I am on the final draft of The Scarlet Gospels, with a huge final polish to do, simply because it's a huge book. If you want to know, I'm on page 2,298 of my handwritten draft and I'm averaging between twelve and fifteen pages a day - which is not quite where I would like to be but it's very dense writing. I mean, I'm in Hell, but this is not a Hell you've ever seen before and these are not places you'd expect to find in Hell; in other words, what I'm trying to do is deliver a Hell that is fresh and new in large measure. Obviously it's going to have demons and it's going to have pain and suffering, but I'm talking about topography and architecture and wildlife - all the other things that give texture to my other invented worlds, if you like, to Imajica, for instance. I'm trying to give some of that feeling to Hell so that it'll be Clive Barker's Hell. It's like writing a very, very, very dark fantasy book right now.
"I think it'll be pretty scary; I think it goes in some very dark places, but it also... I'm not going to say anymore!! I'm excited and anxious at the same time. I live and breathe it, you know?...
"I have promised that I will deliver this at the turn of the year, so, HarperCollins are looking for an autumn of next year publication. And it'll be a big bugger, you know? It'll be a Great And Secret Show-sized book, so I think it'll be well worth the wait."

You Called, He Came...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 and 3 June 2006 (note: full text here)

"This is a Hell of which the Cenobites and sado-masochism are only a part, and what we're going to see is a much larger landscape, so I'm about a third of the way through the final draft now. It's a horror novel, and my fans of that stuff deserve a big, fat book, so that's what I'm giving them."

Weird Fantasy

By Joe Nazzaro, Starburst, Special No 76, July 2006

"This book is not about Lemarchand, it's about what happens when Hell puts down its machinery, meaning the little boxes, and takes up its older ways.
"There won't be a lot of back-story about Pinhead but we will be in his head a lot. I will also be revealing his true Cenobitic name, yes, that will be there. I think it is going to be fun - there has never been a Hell like this, I can reasonably say, and it's still revealing things to me, day by day, so that's fun...
"How much of Primordium will be echoed in the Hell of Scarlet Gospels? Some of it, yes, in the sense that the city is indeed a proper city. You know, this is not a mediaeval vision of Hell that just looks like Hell's Kitchen, you know, with a bunch of people being boiled in oil and thrown in fires. This is a place where fallen angels have attempted to build a society and a culture for themselves. They haven't necessarily been very good at it, but they've tried and Hell is in many ways a reflection of their inability to build because the vision they needed is a Divine vision and they don't really have anyone among them... There were a few exceptions, Lucifer would be one of them but Lucifer doesn't come on the stage until towards the end...
"When he does show himself we see, oh boy, what Hell probably was at the beginning when the fallen angels decided to try and make Heaven themselves and the only reference to that is a melancholy reference - I wanted to be melancholy about it. I'm a great reader of Hellblazer, you know, the John Constantine comic, and whenever John goes down into Hell it's always fire pits and terrible monsters and so on. But you think, but what do they do the next day..? You know, my characters are down in Hell for two-thirds of the book - I had to get a sense for, how do you live down there? What colour is the sky? I have, in other words, approached Hell much as I would approach a fantasy world, asking the questions that a fantasy writer would ask of his or her world: 'What is the colour of the sky? What is the design of the buildings?' and so forth. There are patches of this huge novel that remind me of Imajica, simply because we're in this very fucking strange place with nothing quite being what it seems, and yes it's violent and yes sometimes it's scary, though it's not a horror novel in the conventional sense of the horror novel, in the sense of it having a ghastly little jump every few minutes. I have no problem with it being called a horror novel - it should be - but it's an unconventional vision of what a horror novel should be..."

Sowing The Seeds Of The Story Tree

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 August and 4 September 2006 (note - full text here)

"One of the many characters in the story is Harry D'Amour, the detective whose life has been dogged by numberless encounters with the fecal matter of Hell. By chance I am presently writing a novel called The Scarlet Gospels, in which Harry, a weary but defiant hero, tracks a friend of his, taken hostage by the character colloquially dubbed Pinhead, down into the lowest levels of Hell. Here, a life-changing event will take place. An event that will deliver Harry back into The Art Trilogy (of which The Great and Secret Show is but the first volume) fundamentally and irredeemably changed. That descent, and Harry's wounding, was supposed to take about 35,000 words to write and be delivered to my publishers as a novella. It is now 240,000 words long, or thereabouts, and still growing. I mention this only because I very much hope that the extraordinary work that Chris, Gabriel, and colorist Jay Fotos have done on The Great and Secret Show, will be read and loved passionately enough to tempt them back to adapt the second book in The Art Trilogy, Everville."

Introduction

By Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show, Part One, 24 August 2006

"I've delivered to my typist everything from Scarlet Gospels; they've typed it all out and I'm just starting now the nine months process of refining and just making it better. It's 232,000 words, however, just because it's been typed and I've got a number of words and whatever, it's very tentative because the next piece of work to be done on it is in a way the most important of the lot, which is the subtle surgery which comes with the desire just to make the thing better...
"It's a longer than normal book, I mean [nine months is] the time that Imajica took to be polished and I don't know what the word-count of Imajica is, my guess is Imajica is 40,000 words longer than this, but I don't have a really accurate number in my head. It's just very hard to make any real judgement about how long it's going to take because it's not just a question of reading and correcting a piece of syntax here or putting a comma there - for me it's also a chance to step back from it for a little while while they've been typing it up and now, on Monday next I can step back in and start the process of simply making the work better. I'm pretty sure that what I have right now would be printable but it wouldn't be me doing my best and my readers deserve that. So that's where that is.
"The enormity of Scarlet Gospels, not actually even the wordage but the conceptual enormity... We're going to Hell, guys! We're going to meet Lucifer, we're going to see all those things that I've talked about almost in passing in other stories, or hinted at in other stories, this time we're going to see the geography, this time there's going to be, if not a literal map, you could certainly draw a mental map of Hell from the story and it would not resemble anything that Dante cooked up or actually any other vision of Hell; I think it is unto itself. There's Hell, but also going to Golgotha, seeing Christ crucified; this isn't stuff I would want to treat lightly or without due reverence. And the sheer scale of that... I was carrying it around for a long time and it was a big old weight and a number of times when you've seen me it's been sitting on my head and even though I'm not done with it yet, I still have one more journey through its complexities, I suppose since I've let it go, since I put the final full-stop on, I feel a lightening of myself."

Pinhead's Progress

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 15 and 22 December 2006 (note - full text here)

"Scarlet Gospels has reached its penultimate draft... I always go draft, draft, penultimate draft, finish. So the last draft was the penultimate draft, I have to hope. You'd scare me if you said it was any other way. But I can't go back into it too quickly. It's so fucking dark and I needed, having written 12,000 pages over the three drafts, I couldn't, I just couldn't do it, I wanted to take a breath. It is an oppressively dark book and it was intended to be that, but, boy! I didn't realise that living with it was going to be so heavy-going...
"I think Mister B. Gone is exactly what I wanted it to be and I'm very proud of it and I think Scarlet Gospels will be exactly what I want it to be, but it was so much what I wanted it to be that I have to take a breath! So, Mister B. Gone is breath one and breath two is what I'm doing now which is Abarat Three. And then, we'll see, but I think, you know, it'll be a question of whether we do Abarat Four or whether I go back and do Scarlet Gospels and finish that off."

Mister B.

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 18 June 2007 (note - full text here)

"I'd finished the penultimate draft and had one more to go. I gave myself a week between finishing that draft and starting the final one, and in that week, I thought, 'You know, there's something in here that I want to spit out before I begin anything else big,' because the Scarlet Gospels drafts are enormous and incredibly dark - even by my somewhat dark standards. It just felt to me like there was something else cooking. I keep a journal of ideas that come along, and I went through that and found the word 'Jakabok,' which I kind of liked. It was something I'd written down - something I'd come up with in a period of name inventing. I have nights when I just decide to fill a few pages with invented names - most of which will be shit, but every 25th one will be worth something, and Jakabok had a nice rhythm to it. Then I'd written 'Not Book' and then the phrase 'Burn this book.' It sort of went from there... "Abarat is in 42 languages and there are people in 42 countries saying, 'Where's the next one?' Scarlet Gospels is there waiting for one more draft, which will take a year to do because that's the size of the book. And that's fine. I'll get to it. But I really feel the urgency of the audience, so Abarat is next, and I've finished almost all of the paintings for the third volume. The Abarat books are probably going to get a little bit larger as they go on through the series. It's just the nature of telling those stories. The epic narrative is only just unrolling, and certainly the paintings have become bigger - not physically larger, but in their subject matter. They've become more ambitious and broader.
"I've always been inspired by the pictures. They always come first. I know from the paintings that this narrative is going to huge places. So Abarat will definitely have to be next in order to keep that story rolling, and we'll see where we go from there. I can't look too far ahead; otherwise it just gets overwhelming."

Gone And Back Again

By Carnell, Fangoria, No 268, November 2007

"Scarlet Gospels is a bloody big book. I have done three drafts on it, each one of which has been 4,000 pages of handwritten material. This is a very dark book, even by my standards, and I wanted it to be my definitive visit to Hell. I also wanted it to be my farewell to what I will always think of as Doug's Pinhead. Whenever I bring the character to mind, it's Doug's face I see. As you know it's also got D'Amour in, so it's Scott Bakula's face I also see in that role.
"But I'd been working on it a long time and I'd got into a very, very dark place. There's a line from Nietzsche that often gets quoted: 'If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' And that was what was happening, I had got into a place where I felt as though I needed to take a step away from the work and before I did the final draft, I would take a breather.
"Having decided to do that, the Devil finds work for idle hands. I have to write every day; it's in my bones, I can't not do it. So the question was, 'do I start something, do I write a couple of short stories?' Somehow that didn't feel right. I've had for a long time this idea of writing a book that really addressed the audience, the reader, in a way which was relatively new. I couldn't find anyone who'd attempted this before. But I thought it's such an obvious idea in one sense."

Barker Gets Darker With Mister B. Gone

By Paul Kane, Dreamwatch Presents Total Sci-Fi, 1 November 2007

"Before starting The Scarlet Gospels, I went and looked at every book about Hell I could find, to see if there was anything that had anything close to what I wanted. The closest that I got was actually pictures of war-torn cities, cities after destruction by gunfire, heavy duty artillery. That's the best description of the Hell in Scarlet Gospels...
"The stuff in Scarlet Gospels is neither Miltonic nor Dante-esque, nor is it Hellraiserian. Though of course the guy formerly known as Pinhead - he has another name in the book - he despises the name Pinhead; it's a name given to him by the creatures he tortures. It's not a very respectful name, so it pisses him off a little bit. The Hell I'm creating for that book, I just want it to be real. I want it to have no clear sense of dominions and principalities, no clear sense of order, the way that - I was talking to my friend who did two tours of duty in Iraq - the kind of chaos of Baghdad, no one really knowing anything for sure, even the soldiers. Everything being in doubt all the time, to the extent that it becomes part of a soldier's day, to listen to every piece of rumor, even about what his own people are saying...
"I suppose if I had to liken Hell to anything, it would be what would happen if a massive bomb were to go off in the present day Vatican, and you and I were the first people to get there after it had gone off. What would you see of treasures, and pain, and glorious things and inglorious things? Shit and Michelangelo. To me, that's a very potent idea, to put those two things together. Yes, shit and Michelangelo."

The Company of Monsters: An Interview with Clive Barker

By Evan J. Peterson, The Southeast Review, Volume 26.2, 2008

"[The Scarlet Gospels] will come along - you know, I have three drafts of it. To be very honest, I had a grim period in my life where a lot of very dark things happened and the idea of going back and doing the fourth draft of a 250,000 word book with so much death around me was just a little too much for me at that point, so I did what I knew was best for my psyche. And I think that's one thing probably I never talk about which is the fact that, because I treat this stuff with respect, it has an effect upon me, and it would be stupid of me to minimise it and say, 'Well, you know, it's inconsequential' - it isn't inconsequential, these things affect me deeply."

Interview With Clive Barker

By Rick Kleffel, 1 and 2 September 2008, The Agony Column (note - full audio online at www.bookotron.com/agony/)

"I am also going to kill Pinhead, which I know a lot of fans are looking forward to... The man with the pins in his skull will be put to rest in a book I am paying close attention to called The Scarlet Gospels. I am saying goodbye to the 'hell' portion of my life forever. This is my farewell and goodnight. The reason it has not been finished is because the pressure has been on for me to get more Abarat out there - so I think it will be about three more years before The Scarlet Gospels is completed. It is a humongous book and it brings my career full circle in many ways...
"One of the reasons I wanted to take such time and care with The Scarlet Gospels is because I want to do right by it and by the mythology. I am killing off Pinhead in this book in such a way that it will be impossible for me - and I emphasise me - to ever resurrect him. What people do after I am gone is up to them. I don't have the movie rights over the material so I have no control. That is what it is. I will just get on, write my novel, and I think people will find it to be a satisfactory farewell."

Still Raising Hell

By Calum Waddell, Judge Dredd Megazine, No 286, 21 July 2009

"It will blow your mind, I hope, when it's delivered. But it's not ready yet and it's too important for me to spoil. No pressure."

Twitter Posts

By Clive Barker, 14 October 2012

"A lot of you ask about the status of The Scarlet Gospels. Firstly,thank you for caring. Several portions of the book are written and the scale of the narrative is massive. This is without doubt the most metaphysically ambitious book of mine since Imajica. But unlike Imajica, which offered an entirely new cast of characters,The Scarlet Gospels builds its narrative around Harry D'Amour and the Hellraiser mythology. Unlike Mister King, who has found brilliant ways to connect his different worlds so that we come to understand that each is an echo or reflection of the rest, I have no such grand ambition in mind. I simply want to tell an apocalyptic tale in which Harry will meet the forces of Hell as they appear in The Hellbound Heart and the first Hellraiser movie.
"Since I became so unwell earlier this year I am trying to be a little kinder to myself. That means that I can't tell you exactly when the book will be finished,only that it will be. My love and heartfelt thanks for all the concern you've shown for my well being. Over and over again I've been gently advised to get well first, then worry about which story will be told when I've finished the fifth and final Abarat book. I hope this was useful. Now I head back [to] Abarat, where Christmas Day has just dawned..."

Facebook Posts

By Clive Barker, 21 October 2012

"The Scarlet Gospels is half way done, but contains a lot of very dark and controversial material which will take much more work before it's ready for publication. I believe it will be quite an interesting subject for debate in the Vatican when it's published."

Facebook Q&A

Replies to questions at a live Facebook Q&A session, 15 December 2012

"Let me offer some clarifications regarding the projects I will pursue after Abarat... The Scarlet Gospels... will bring the haunted detective Harry D'Amour face to face with Pinhead on a trek back to the night of the Nativity."

Facebook Posts

By Clive Barker, 19 March 2012

Mark Miller : "When Clive asked me if I would help finish The Scarlet Gospels, I said 'Yes' without hesitating. Clive paused and told me I should probably think about it and then get back to him. Then, without hesitation, I again said 'Yes.'
"Shortly after, Robb Humphreys handed me a stack of paper over 2,000 pages high and said, 'That's most of it.' It was then that I realized I should have hesitated. But despite its Herculean appearance, I've already completed a considerable chunk of the beast and am having a tremendous amount of fun in the process.
"Clive started the book no small number of years ago, and the fans have been waiting even longer than that, so I hope I can do it justice. Whether I will remains to be seen, but what I can tell you is the book is well on its way. The Scarlet Gospels are almost here."

E-mail to Revelations

By Mark Miller, 24 September 2010

Mark Miller : "We're about 80% of the way done... and it would be further along but we lost all of our Hellraiser [comic] writers and so I'm pretty much, you know, the number one guy on that and that's taking up a lot of time. But my run ends with issue sixteen. I've just finished fourteen. As soon as I've finished fifteen and sixteen and they get those back for editing and those are ready to go... [It'll take] maybe a month, maybe two months... but Gospels is on its way!"

Mad Monster Party Part 1

By Ryan Danhauser, The Clive Barker Podcast, 28 March 2012 (note - full audio online at www.clivebarkercast.com/)

Galilee 2

...As the Galilee mythology has emerged as a pair rather than a trilogy of volumes, it may mean that the conclusion of the Barbarossa versus Geary conflict will be easier to finish than The Art was / is. Volume Two was plotted at the same time as Volume One and was, at one stage, something of a priority to be written while it was still fresh. Now though, along with The Art 3, it's one of the books planned for after the Abarat Series...

I expect two seven hundred page books, back to back. It's set in New York, Hawaii, Japan, Hollywood, Charleston and Bentonville North Carolina. It's also set in South Carolina and the Caspian Sea in central Asia. Galilee spans the times of long before human kind even raised their noses, the time of the Civil War and in contemporary times. It's [an] incredibly complicated and complex structure. I hope it's very emotionally rich as well. I am about three quarters of the way through the final draft of the first book. The other drafts of the second book are already written but I still have the final draft to do of that book.
"There are things which are seeded in the first book which do not come into full bloom until the second book. I needed to know how those blossoms were going to look so I need to make sure the narrative elements were in place in the first book to resolve themselves in the second book... I don't want there to be a big gap between books. "

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 9, November 1997

"Yes, there will be another book. Just one. It will carry the story of the Barbarossas and the Gearys to what I hope will be a mind blowing conclusion. That inevitably means that the ending of this first book leaves some questions unanswered. I can understand how that might be a little frustrating (it's a bit like leaving Han Solo frozen alive at the end of The Empire Strikes Back) but I guarantee that all the threads will be tied up by the end of the saga. It's just that I love large canvases and it sometimes takes a while to fill in all the detail."

Thoughts on Galilee

Reaction to Galilee reviews at amazon.com by Barker. 27th July 1998.

"The second book of Galilee - I'm not sure what it'll be called right now - doesn't ever leave this planet or dimension; it stays firmly in this world. Which isn't to say there aren't metaphysical revelations to be made apparent."

Lord of New Illusions

By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

"I think we'll have to see how this book plays out first. If this book is really working for people, I might be onto the sequel quickly. I certainly know what the subsequent book will be about. I also feel that this book, absolutely, has a shape and completeness of itself. An astute reader will absolutely grasp where I left places for the narrative to continue. This is not Part One of something. It's a thing unto itself with, I hope, a completion at the end and one large arc of storytelling told... That first draft is a raw, unsophisticated statement of what this book may be about. And then, as I sophisticate it, as I think about it and as I research, things change and develop and enrich. It really becomes a different animal. So even though I have a first draft for the second book, the implications of that first draft have been transformed completely by the fact that I have now completed the first book. The knock-on effects that I have made over those drafts are astronomical."

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998

"Galilee is a complete novel unto itself. I will, and have already begun to, revisit these characters in a separate volume. I see them as companion volumes dealing with the same world - or worlds. The emotional engine which drives this first novel - the relationship between Galilee and Rachel - has a complete arc in this novel and reaches, I hope, a very satisfying conclusion. But the narrative engine of the second book will be something completely different.
"The Galilee books are - let's put it this way - as realistic as I'm ever going to get, they are not realism obviously in the same way to, say, Norman Mailer's approach to realism. But they are still pretty realistic."

Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique

By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com 1999

"A bus would have to drop on me to stop me writing those books. Both [Galilee 2 and The Art 3] are big books. Frankly, I would have been writing Galilee 2 starting in October where it not for the Abarat. The Abarat books have grown a bit because of the Disney deal and they've become a huge project. Both books are very important to me. Both will be written."

Confessions

By [Craig Fohr], Lost Souls Newsletter, September / December 2000

"David's family. And my family [were the inspiration for the Barbarossa's]. The connections will become even stronger in the sequel, which will be the next large book I do after the 'Abarat' text is written. These are the times that I wish that I could clone myself because I can feel the sequel to 'Galilee' in my fingertips. But you know, there is only one of me so I got to wait. But it is a book that I'm really looking forward to writing because I loved writing the first book so much. There is so much more to say about the Barbarossas. There is so much more to say about the magic of their world and the second book will go much more into the mysterious past of that family and particularly into the connection of the Barbarossas and the political life of America, because obviously Cesaria's great love was Jefferson. Actually they are finding more and more things about Jefferson. I don't know if you guys have been watching any of this, but in the past year Jefferson has been getting a makeover but not a particularly attractive one. And it is quite interesting to see that happening and I want to get some of that into the new book but its gonna have to wait a little time. Now that I've got the big Hollywood book done the next two big books, in this order, will be the sequel to 'Galilee', and a big big book: the last book of the 'Art.' "

Confessions

By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls, March 2001

"I'm going to spend the next two years on the four books of the Abarat, and then I will do two big books back-to-back: one will be the sequel to Galilee, which will be the end of that story; and the other will be the third book of The Art."

The Dark Backward

By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 200, March 2001

"Trust me, you can find me saying I'm going to do the next Galilee book one day, and then saying the third book of the Art the next! Different books capture different parts of my personality, and I don't hear voices in the traditional sense of sitting down and literally hearing someone speaking in my ear, but there are some days when certain narratives seem right and surface out of my subconscious and demand that I go do some writing. It's interesting that there are hundreds of pages on the third book of the Art and hundreds of pages on Galilee Two already written, hand-written drafts, just because [I've never left them]. Going back to your point about Tolkien never leaving Middle-Earth, I never actually left Maddox on the road and I certainly never left Quiddity, and so those remain open worlds in my head and that's kind of exciting in a way. In any day in my imagination I might totter along any given roads."

Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)

"I will go straight on to Abarat 3, knowing that two huge projects wait in the wings... The less huge of them, though still not a sure book, by any means, is the Galilee book, which is heavily structured in my head. But they're both year and a half long books. They're big projects that are very strong in my head. I wish I could clone myself. It would be very useful."

Confessions

By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls)

"I'm looking at my notes for Galilee 2 and I'm looking at my notes for Art 3, you know. I'm moving towards the end of the Abarat series and I'm looking forward to, literally looking forward in both senses to, you know, finishing the trilogy and finishing the second of the Galilee books and what I find, I didn't realise, I don't realise, because this is a repeated thing, until I come to these things just how much there is... I mean I've never stopped juggling Art III, never, and I've never stopped juggling Galilee."

We Are All Imaginary Animals...

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 11 & 12 October 2008 (note - full text here)

"I think Galilee is my masterpiece. It was a very sexy book to write and I was very much in love when I wrote it. I was completely swept up in the settings, the romantic elements and the characters... That story is also something that I want to revisit: there is definitely a sequel to come."

Lord Of Illusions

By Calum Waddell, SFX, No 194, May 2010

"There is a second Galilee novel which will be the great battle between the families."

Facebook Q&A

Replies to questions at a live Facebook Q&A session, 15 December 2012

"Let me offer some clarifications regarding the projects I will pursue after Abarat. First, the third book of the Art. Paul Currie asks what's left to tell? Vast amounts, Paul, believe me. Secrets within secrets, worlds within worlds... The same is true of the second and last volume of Galilee... The order in which these books are finished and published is not reflected in this list, of course."

Facebook Posts

By Clive Barker, 19 March 2012

Thief of Always II

...Who knows? As and when the movie finally gets made and is a success this one could be right back on the priority track...

"I have played around with taking Harvey on another adventure, yes. I don't know whether I will yet, but I haven't discounted the possibility . I like Harvey and I like being in his company. One of the things you do when you're writing is to seek out characters that you want to write about because you have to spend a lot of time in their company. Will Rabjohns, the hero of Sacrament, is a guy whose company I have enjoyed being in and Harvey is the same. I don't discount the possibility that at one point he'll figuratively tug on my sleeve and say 'How 'bout it?'"

Confessions

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 3, [March] 1996

"Every now and then I think of something and I think maybe there's going to be a follow-up. It needs to be completely right or I won't do it. The thing about The Thief of Always is that it stands on its own beautifully. So if I am going to open up the narrative again there really needs to be a really good reason to do it. The story has got to present itself in a way where I go, 'Oh yeah, that's right. That's the story I need to tell.' And, to be perfectly honest, I haven't found that story yet - which isn't to say that I won't find it at some point in the future, but right now I'm content to let The Thief of Always be its own sweet self."

An Interview With Clive Barker

By [ ], The Thief Of Always graphic novel, Book 3, May 2005

Another Children's Book

...First mentioned in 1994 as a book due to arrive in 1995 and then mentioned again in 1998, Abarat has probably squeezed this one out of the priorities for now...

"There will be two more books next year. One is a book of short stories and another is in the same tone as The Thief Of Always, which I enjoyed writing immensely. I had a great time writing that book."

Lord of Illusions

By J.B.Mauceri-Macabre, World of Fandom, Vol 2, No 22, Fall 1994

"I love writing for children. There's this huge project I was talking of a little earlier, with many short stories and illustrations, which will be called Clive Barker's Book of Hours. There's also another book similar to Thief noodling around at the back of my head."

People Online

By Laura Kay Smith, [27/30] July 1998