More Books Still To Come...?

The Abarat Series : Books Three, Four and Five ...Step into a world in which everything changes 25 hours a day... 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 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. Early plans had the other volumes following at roughly nine-month intervals, but other projects competed for Clive's time and attention. The second volume - Abarat : Days of Magic, Nights of War - was published in September 2004 (with the UK edition following in October). Since then, Clive has been working on two adult novels (Scarlet Gospels and Mister B. Gone) but has continued to paint for Abarat and the astonishing volume of painted canvases (well over 500, now) are stacked around every possible space in Barker's house, lending a comforting sense of momentum to the whole series. March 2006 saw the announcement (see below) that a fifth book is also planned to accommodate the more metaphysical adventures Clive has planned for Candy and the still-growing number of Abaratian characters and landscapes he finds himself painting. Clive is currently writing the final draft of Book Three (so don't expect to see it before Summer 2009 at the earliest) and in late February 2008 he sat us down and read us Chapter Thirteen, set on Gorgossium, which was hot off his desk that morning! Abarat : Absolute Midnight will be black both in sentiment and cover design, with a gold cover planned for Book Four, which we can now reveal has the momentous title, Abarat : The Eternal. Candy's adventures promise to spawn a series of movies, and the possibility of other media in the future. 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 our bibliographies for Abarat and Abarat II with Barker's commentary on Abarat, and on Abarat II. "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 [four] 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, 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) "Well I turned in the text of Abarat 2 to a wonderfully enthusiastic reception... the strongest happiest response I've had to any book I've ever written. Which is incredibly pleasing of course, and also kind of startling because it's the second book in the series. I couldn't have anticipated the level of just happiness that people have got in response to the book. That's great and a huge relief! "I was very determined that the second book be more of a complete experience. Sort of finish, I don't want to give to 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 - see links page) "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 third book is called Absolute Midnight – which suggests it won’t be a happy book! But the idea is that we are aiming for something which is going to be apocalyptic, but it’s going to be a private apocalypse – it’s going to be played out on a grand scale but also played out on a very localised, very intimate scale... "Lots happens to John Mischief; John Mischief is this character who has all his brothers living on horns on his head, and they’re all called John: John Serpent, John Drowze and whatever, and – if any of you have siblings, imagine the consequence of living in constant proximity to the other seven siblings in your life and no possible chance of getting away from them – yeah, nightmare! What’s going to be very interesting, and I’ll give this not as a spoiler away for Book Three, we are going to meet their wives. And their wives are also arranged on two horns – there will be scenes of intimacy (which I will refrain from describing) but it’s, the idea of the brothers Mischief speaking to the sisters whatever they’re going to be called, is going to be quite fun. They’re all going to be called Joyce or Jane or Joan, so it’s going to be Jane or Joan and John – [to John Harrison] you’re going to have to write that scene for the second movie, John! It’ll be fun!." Barnes and Noble Stage Presentation By Brein Lopez, LA Festival of Books, 25 April 2004 "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. "One consequence of this is that, if we don't do [Tortured Souls], Abarat 3 will be pulled up, because that picture would have been eighteen months before I got to Abarat 3... If I didn't do Tortured Souls and, given the scale of the adult novel which I am about to give HarperCollins - that will be about sometime in about June or July... I would hope that they would then leave me clear to get on with doing Abarat 3." The Hellbound Art : Memory, Fantasy And Filigree By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 February 2005 (note - full text here) "Yes, it will be called Absolute Midnight. I don’t have it written yet but I already have about three quarters of the paintings made for it. I just have to guess right now – but I would say something like that. So I’m not sure how quickly I will get to writing it – it depends on whether I go and shoot a movie first. If I go on to direct Tortured Souls, when I finished Scarlet Gospels - then obviously I won’t write Abarat 3 immediately. If having turned in Scarlet Gospels and I feel kind of more excited about Abarat 3 I might just go up and start writing. I have the whole book in my head. But really as you know the paintings are the starting place to do. It’s nice having so many of the paintings done – huge paintings some of them. And for the first time I’ve also done some round pictures. I’ve just finished one round painting which is about 6 feet across. And I have a second round painting which I’m continuing work on tonight. So, that’s fun – I have never done round pictures." Clive Barker On The Phone By [Thomas Hemmerich], That's Clive!, 29 March 2005 (note - full text online at www.clivebarker.de) "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 aware that I've begun a pretty huge narrative with a lot of characters already and even though there was a night of the long knives in the second book and a bunch of characters bit the dust, there's a bunch of new characters waiting in the third book. To give you an example, we have a glyph in Book 4 which is created by 7,000 people and the painting of the glyph is three canvasses long! It's in a style which I have never painted in before because I wanted this thing to look utterly... I just didn't want it to look like a machine or even necessarily a vehicle of conveyance. In a curious way I wanted it to look like something that had been summoned by 7,000 people - actually 7,001 because Malingo leads this joint creation - summoned by 7,001 imaginations and so, yes, I'm pretty clearly sensing what the shape of Book 3 will be. 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... "What's touching Abarat are actually much more emotional pieces of metaphysics; I mean what happens when you find you are not the person you thought you were, but in fact two people in one, how you separate yourself off, is it possible to separate yourself off from someone that you have lived with for sixteen years, particularly if that person doesn't necessarily - and I'm giving a hint here - doesn't necessarily mean you good." The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 June 2005 (note: full text here) "[Absolute Midnight] 's certainly going to be the longest and darkest so far. Whether it will be longer or darker than the fourth, I cannot tell." Visions In Paint And Celluloid By Carnell, Fangoria, No.247, October 2005 "There is a backlog in my imagination of stuff which I now very much want to paint for the third book, because... when I turn in Scarlet Gospels... I'm going to be straight in to Book Three. "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) "In about six months I'll be writing the third book and 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) "Well, Abarat 3 is in front of me right now and I have plotted it in the time that I’ve been waiting for Scarlet Gospels to be fully spell-checked so that I don’t have to deal with that minor stuff when I do the final pass. I have taken ten days to bring together, from those file boxes, where we’d arranged the contents into piles: one of those piles, about seven or eight inches tall, was all my notes on Abarat 3 and now I’ve gone through all that and thrown out the dumb ideas, taken out the songs and put them in a separate box - so I’ve now got a repository of Abaratian songs and poems, I’m talking about hundreds now, which I will either use or generate new versions or however it strikes me as I get closer to the material - but what is wonderful is that I’ve finished that whole process; I am looking right now at maybe a dozen sets of notes to still go through which I shall probably finish this afternoon and that will leave me with Abarat plotted and ready to rock and roll... "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. "You know, just a couple of teasers: Bill Quackenbush finding Wolfswinkel’s hats… where the water recedes from Chickentown there’s a shitload of stuff which has been washed into the town and when the waters recede, dumped there, left there like the stuff you would find at a high water mark and a lot of that stuff is related to [Abarat]. There are forces within the town which arise pretty much out of nowhere just to make sure this stuff is burned. Whereas Mister Quackenbush, Daddy Quackenbush, who you know has always been a little sad character sitting in a smoke-filled world drinking beer, finds Wolfswinkel’s hats, finds them washed up and left as garbage and he puts them on and he feels this flow of power he has never felt before. So that’s sort of fun. What does a man as unpleasant as Bill Quackenbush do with the power he now has, now taken from a dead wizard? - not that he knows it’s a dead wizard’s; he knows nothing about these hats, it’s just that when he puts them on, man, he feels amazing and because they are old felt hats he has them made up into a check shirt – he doesn’t wear hats, but can wear this patchwork shirt - and carrying the power around with him." Pinhead's Progress By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 15 and 22 December 2006 (note - full text here) "All the paintings [for Abarat Three] are now done and so now it’s really just a question of turning those paintings into a narrative reality which is coming together very nicely. 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) "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) "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 "He is the embodiment of Midnight - I don’t mean literally, I mean this will be the title page of the third book. I wanted something to announce: alright, we’re going into another gear, we’re going up a gear, you know? And he is somebody, almost like the guy at a circus, the ringmaster as it were, saying, ‘OK, get ready, here it comes, now you’re getting into the really dark stuff.’ And at the same time I wanted him to have an Abaratian strangeness to him; in his tail, with the faces in the light coming up from the branch he’s holding. So that's Midnight... "I have what can only be called genocide in Abarat, because that’s what it is, and the fact that it's led by the kind of people that persecute people who are blue or green, as opposed to black and yellow or that they go to a different church or they practice love in a different way, is by the by. It’s the same old story throughout history of how differences in others have always been treated and I’ve always been - I won’t say always but I’ve very often - been pro-‘others’, you know Nightbreed being an example, where people identify with the monsters... "I’m glad to be actually writing Abarat Three, which is what I’m doing right now... Everything’s been going beautifully, and you can let everyone know that I am halfway through the penultimate draft." Working In The Midnight Hours... By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 17 December 2007 (note - full text here) "I'm writing Abarat 3, with all the paintings painted now. In fact, some of the paintings that are on display and for sale at the [Packer Schopf] exhibition are Abarat pictures. I think what I write is pictorial, shall we say. A lot of my stuff begins with an image that - for some reason or another - I couldn't get out of my head. It's a bit like the piece of sand in the oyster, not to say all my work is pearls. But it serves the same function. It irritates in an interesting way." Barker Talks About His Baby 'Hellraiser' On Its Birthday By Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune, 11 January 2008 (note - full text available online at www.chicagotribune.com) "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’m on Chapter Twenty-Seven now, so that feels about right, I’m about 50,000 words through the final draft, which is a little under halfway. I think the other books are about 110,000 to 120,000 words. So it’ll be of that length. I just had one of those emotions where you go ‘Oh fuck, I should have done that..!’ So I backed up two days ago to go and do that and I was so pleased. You know, Chris is typing it and every now and again I’ll check in and see what he’s feeling and what he’s finding a little tiresome and I’ll listen to him, of course, he’s the first person reading it and he made a casual observation which got me thinking about something and I thought, my God, I could do this - it’s actually to do with Bill Quackenbush and his possession of the hats which had belonged to Wolfswinkel... "I have been using the patchwork coat [made from Wolfswinkel's hats] as something that happened more at a distance, it wasn’t front and centre and I suddenly realised that there was a way I could make it front and centre that would be just tremendous. So I back-tracked a couple of chapters and wove this new element in and it just got me so damn excited I didn’t want to go to sleep. You get to these places - it’s always wonderful when you get to this place in a book where you just don’t want to go to sleep and the last two or three nights have been like that because I am excited. There are basically five storylines in this book, five clusters of narrative elements: Candy obviously has one of those and she trails a series of other characters that you’re obviously familiar with. So there are five of these and what I’m trying to do is make sure that the weaving in and out of those remains in balance - I feel a bit like one of those guys with plates spinning up on sticks, and who's racing back and forth to make sure they all stay up in the air, but actually that’s part of the fun of it and it was inevitable that in this book I was going to have a lot of things in play and so there’s a lot of stuff going on and a balancing act. I’m proceeding cautiously because I want to make sure we don’t lose sight of any one character for more than three or four chapters and I’m actually having a blast and I’m painting at the same time, so it’s all very good." Pivotal Voices: Was, Is And Will Be By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 11 April 2008 (note - full text here) 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 Click here for More Books Still To Come ...And Still To Come Index | Home page This page has been created for information and entertainment purposes only. All quotes remain the copyright of the original owners.