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Clive Barker: Revelations


More Books Still To Come...?



The Painter, The Creature and The Father of Lies: Essays by Clive Barker


revelations: "We are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of The Painter, The Creature and The Father of Lies: Essays by Clive Barker...
"Over the last 25 years, aside from his novels and screenplays, Clive has produced numerous other written pieces: introductions to both his own work and the works of others, newspaper and magazine articles, tributes and appreciations and other contributions to books. We've tracked these down over the years and have now edited them all together into a comprehensive collection of Clive's non-fiction work.
"And, of course, it wouldn't be us if we hadn't also made sure that we'd had a good old rummage through Clive's own archive and unearthed a couple of added extras...
"The Painter, The Creature and The Father of Lies will be published by Paul Miller at Earthling Publications either late this year or early in 2008. More details and information on how to order copies just as soon as we have them..."
Announcing The Painter, The Creature and The Father of Lies
By Phil and Sarah Stokes, Revelations at www.clivebarker.info, 26 May 2007

Hank Wagner : "One can guess how Barker's introduction will unfurl. No doubt it will be tinged by a bit of nostalgia, a (deserved) sense of achievement, and a sense of oddness at looking back at body of work - one created when he was, in effect, a different person. Based on the varied and consistently engaging pieces featured in this new collection, it's also a good bet that it will be thought-provoking, insightful, and well worth reading, especially for Barker fans.
"The Painter includes all the introductions, forewords, afterwords, essays and articles Barker has written over the last twenty five years, both for his own works and for those of others. As such, it's an extremely interesting and valuable relic, a summation of his career thus far, and of the state of the horror / dark fantasy genre over the past quarter-century.
"Barker's opinion is always informed, always entertaining. His intelligence and wit is evident in each piece, as is his hard-earned insight. By opening this tome, you're putting yourself in the hands of a gifted polymorph, unafraid to air his views and happy to teach."
Burn This Book
By Hank Wagner, Dead Reckonings, No 3, Spring 2008


The Solution!

...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 3, 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...


Clive Barker "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 {Note : interview took place in June 1989}

Clive Barker [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

Clive Barker "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 (note - interview took place 4th January 1992)

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "[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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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 - see links page)

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)


...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 providing a home for all the previously uncollected short stories (including, possibly, the Tortured Souls pieces, but not Mercy and The Jackal, nor Jehovah's Bitch) together with a whole bunch of new pieces of short fiction, this has promised much and is eagerly anticipated. '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.

Although the remaining stories have already reached final draft, a publication date remains currently un-planned...


Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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)

Clive Barker "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)


...Of course these are almost finished... Yeah, right. Despite William Collins signing a five year deal with Barker in 1989 to deliver Cabal 2 and 3 and The Art 2 and 3, almost 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. Keep your fingers and toes crossed though - Cabal 2 might just be in the promised short story collection...

Clive Barker "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}

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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)


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

Clive Barker "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

Clive Barker "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 - see links page)





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