More Books Still To Come...?

Upcoming New Editions ...Earthling Publications have announced a 2007 edition of The Hellbound Heart novella. The edition will feature introductions by Pete Atkins and Ashley Laurence and will include Clive's early Cenobite illustrations together with his new cover art (above). The deluxe and lettered editions are sold out and copies of the trade edition are now shipping - with more details over at Earthling. Pete Atkins has a Hellbound Heart signing planned at Dark Delicacies for 1 March 2008... In The Hills, The Cities gets a new outing in the Ann and Jeff Vandermeer anthology, The New Weird, which is planned for release by Tachyon Publications in February 2008. Not a glimmer, as of yet, of Cemetery Dance's long, long-awaited limited edition of Doug Winter's 2001 biography, The Dark Fantastic, with the last promised publication date ('2007') quietly slipping by once again - CD's website now suggests '2008' - hmm... As self-confessed suckers for a well-bound book, we can't wait to see what extras the publishers will come up with for this - and we hear tell that Clive might have produced yet more original colour artwork to accompany copies of the lettered edition! In the UK you can still find the paperback version on the shelves if you're lucky - see our Dark Fantastic bibliography for more details... We also watch Cemetery Dance for news of their limited editions of Richard T. Chizmar's 2004 Legacies (containing The Age of Desire) and Dark Delicacies - announced back in Spring of 2005 - and both now slated for an as yet undetermined date in 2008. October 2007 saw the announcement that cover artwork and signature sheets are holding up Dark Delicacies... ...Acts of God and man have conspired against B.E. Trice (based in New Orleans)'s limited edition of Visions of Heaven and Hell but the proposal remains live. (Early plans for a Rizzoli limited edition were dropped and the project lies in the hands of B.E.Trice alone). Clive now promises new cover art for this edition! More news just as soon as we hear it... Also upcoming from B.E.Trice will be a limited edition of Mister B. Gone - more details just as soon as they are confirmed... The Scarlet Gospels ...Originally providing a home for all the previously uncollected short stories together with a whole bunch of new pieces of short fiction, this has promised much and is eagerly anticipated. The Scarlet Gospels, originally the title of a standalone collection of erotic poetry and prose, was then recycled and planned as the title-piece within the collection. Now this title piece - the Pinhead versus Harry D'Amour story - has continued to expand and is now expected to be at least 230,000 words long. It has finally broken free of the collected short stories altogether - delaying the revised delivery date - and Clive is now delaying his hope of publishing the short stories originally collected under this banner. Perhaps our friend with the pins has exacted some kind of influence over the publication date now he knows his fate is contained within its pages... Having taken a break before writing the final draft, Clive has since been working on Mister B. Gone and the Abarat series, leaving Scarlet Gospels without a current clear delivery date... As we follow the emergence of The Scarlet Gospels - Clive has passed on an epigram (paint splats and all!) which he is currently considering for the opening pages of the novel: "His friend demanding what scarlet was, the blind man answered: It was like the sound of a trumpet." - John Locke, Human Understanding "I am doing another Books of Blood collection and I'm writing a sequel to the book on which Hellraiser was based - this will be Pinhead's first appearance on the page, because he isn't even named in the original." Hellraiser By Jay Stevenson, Imagi-Movies, Vol 1, No 2, Winter 1993/94 "There will be another book, eventually. The problem right now is getting my publishers to agree to let me do short fiction. It's a troubled market right now. Books are a troubled market. There will be more short stories, for sure. But, my next book is going to be a book of short stories and they said, 'Please don't do this. You will sell five times more if you write a novel.' It's really tough selling short stories. "It frustrates the fuck out of me. I love short stories. I love writing short stories. It's immensely frustrating... my publisher will pay a lot for a Clive Barker book, no surprise there, and I feel a sense of responsibility to them that if I'm going to write a book, then they need to sell some copies. They pay me an immense amount of money. So, they tell me, look, we'll sell five times more copies of a novel than a collection of short stories, I feel I'm bound to listen to them. Now, having said that I've written a new novel [Sacrament], then all bets are off. They were troubled by the idea of having a gay hero in this novel and I told them that was what they were going to get, end of story. Having agreed to doing a novel, I'll do what the hell I like. But, there are real difficulties in the market place with short stories." Interview By Amber Black and Tim Trautmann, Review(?), 1996 "I have more mixed emotions about going back to the horror stuff than I thought I would, and it's really only the horror stuff. I went back and one of the things I'm doing, as a sort of fun thing is going back to a few of the monsters I've created and just writing a couple of short stories about them. And there's this guy with fucking pins in his head, and I thought I should just revisit this guy, to just see who he is these days - it's ten years since I wrote this guy, you know? - What does he sound like these days? How is he? How's he been? You know, is his mother well? All of that stuff, and what was interesting was turns of phrase about oozing viscera which would have just dropped from my pen so readily trouble me a lot more now. And I'm kind of intrigued by that! I don't know quite why that is; I used to be incredibly squeamish about blood and I'm not anymore, but I'm amazed to see how much more these things trouble me, upset me. And I think maybe it's good that they upset me. I think some of the images that have come out are perhaps more powerful this time round because my stomach is churning when I'm writing them. That is a function of age to some extent. I mean, it's a function of experience; I've sat by deathbeds in the last five years and held people's hands while they've passed – things that hadn't happened to me when I was 30, 31 when I wrote those first stories. I'm a different person – I'm not saying better or worse - I'm just different and some of the kind of mean-spirited viciousness of some of those early stories surprises me. I went back and I thought, 'My God!' – I was quite surprised at what I'd actually put on the page, and I want to get some of that in. And it was sort of fun; the Pinhead thing was kind of entertaining because I was sitting there and it was like, it was like an old friend, I did feel a little like Jim Henson and Kermit, you know, here was the sweet little guy, back again. Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead in the movies is one of my oldest friends, I've known him since I was fourteen or fifteen, he's obviously an extraordinarily fine actor... so now I start to write about him, literally this last two or three days, and it feels like I'm channelling Doug Bradley!" LA Times Festival of Books Transcript of an interview by Martin Smith at the LA Times Festival of Books, 25 April 1998 "I don't discount the possibility I will do more short stories after the Pinhead/Harry story which is a very important story for me in my mythology because it will be the last thing that I will ever write about Pinhead. Because after this there will be no more Pinhead stories. Because this story is the end of Pinhead. This story will mark his death. "[Hellraiser Inferno] is just an abomination. I want to actively go on record as saying I warn people away from the movie. It's really terrible and it's shockingly bad, and should never have been made. So I want to give Pinhead a good send-off. I want to do it right. If we are going to get rid of the old guy, let's do it with some style. So my whole idea was if I do it with Harry I can bring in two characters at the same time and sort of weave their stories together. "What it will do for me is kill him in my mythological range. Others may wish to pick the story up and do something else with him, but as far as I'm concerned once I've told the story, it's the last of the guy. "What I'm trying to do is give the guy a decent dignified send-off. It's really important to me, and I think he's a great monster. I really hate the way he's been treated in this film. It depressed me." Confessions By [Craig Fohr], Lost Souls Newsletter, September / December 2000 (note - interview took place 25 August 2000) "I'm also working on another collection of short stories for adults. This should be out after Galilee. You know, it's great fun! I'd forgotten what fun it is to do stories that you can finish in three weeks as opposed to 14 months. It's very gratifying to complete material in that time frame. What I'm trying to do in this collection is really trying to cross back and forth across the generic boundaries . You'll have some horror, some science fiction, fantasy, etc... It's really a reflection of the range of writing that I have been doing in the last few years. I'm also going to be revisiting some of my old mythologies, which will be big fun." Confessions By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998 "Then I will do a collection of short stories which I talked about briefly. Which does have some D'Amour, and a Hellraiser story in it. I'm returning to these mythologies and it was kind of interesting because I thought I would do these things and I thought 'Geez I want to tell a story about the man with pins in his head. I haven't told about him for a long time.' I'm looking forward to that." Explorer From The Far Reaches Of Experience By Kim August, Pharr Out! 1998 [re time-lag between writing sequels] "It's kind of interesting, because I'm writing a Harry D'Amour vs. Pinhead short story right now, so the same question pertains. But it's tremendous fun. They walk onto the page and I think, 'Hey, man, it's good to see you!'" Lord of New Illusions By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998 "I had a hard time persuading my publisher to let me do a collection of short stories. But my approach was 'Well, I've done Everville, Sacrament, and now Galilee. And they're all huge novels.' So I said, 'Guys, give me a break. I've been a good soldier here, writing these big novels, and having a great time doing it. But I now have 20 really cool ideas for short stories, and I really need to write them. Otherwise I'll go crazy!' Finally they said, 'Go to it.' "It's wonderful! I'm having the greatest fun doing it because I'm able to revisit characters that I haven't written about in a long time. One of the stories is a confrontation between Harry D'Amour, whom I've written about a number of times, and the character Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. And I'm having the best time writing that story, you know? [laughs] And there's going to be a couple of other places where I'll revisit past characters and update my approach to them. And there'll be a bunch of new stuff: new ideas ... and new worlds ... and new mythologies. So the book is going to be a very comprehensive cross section of 'the worlds of Clive Barker,' if you will." Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com, 1999 (N.B. interview took place 1998) "One of the things I'm trying to do in the story with D'Amour and Pinhead is, I actually want to kind of make Pinhead feel fucked. I want people to make fools of him as he breathes his last and with no hope of resurrection. No sequels. I swear the way he's going - I have plotted this - the way he's going is so total, is so complete that the most optimistic film producer in Hollywood could never dream of resurrecting him! So I'm going to 'off' him, and I want the audience to say, 'Good'." The Good, The Bad, And The Light In The Dark By Phil Stokes, at the Write On! talk at Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, 11 November 1998 "I'm doing a book of short stories now. A couple of pieces that are set in the not to distant future ... a somewhat fantasticated version of the internet. So, yes I am writing about [the internet]. Chats From The Past Transcript of on-line Hollywood Spotlight appearance, 23 June 1998 "I will turn it in Spring of 1999. They have pencilled in, I emphasise pencilled in, late fall of next year for release. I would always like more time. I would like time to play and whatever. I'm always saying give me another month or so. I've done five of the Mercy and the Jackal stories [about a little girl, Mercy and a wrestler] and I have done a draft of a story called Cold Hard Canyon, based in Los Angeles and is a very dark, very black movie star story. I have a draft of The Last Resrequiem and a lot of shorter pieces which are autobiographical, so I have done quite a lot of the stuff...This book is going to be much, much bigger than any collection of short stories I have ever done before. We should have about seventeen or eighteen stories, plus the introductions for each, all under one cover. Now all I have to do is find a fucking title!" Confessions By Stephen Dressler, Lost Souls, Issue 12, January 1999 "Now, I'm writing a story right now: Harry d'Amour, who's a character I've written about many times, finally does away with Pinhead. It is the end of Pinhead; there is no possibility of resurrection... No! And there is a profound satisfaction in that. "I'm going to give it away - he commits suicide. And that's why he's gone - it's suicide. "And one of the interesting things I'm playing with in this text is, I'm playing with a character that everybody's familiar with. Mostly people are familiar not from the words, and so I'm very aware when I bring this man on the page that he trails movies with him, that it's his movie reputation that he brings on stage, on the page with him." Transcript of Platform Performance Interviewed by Russell Manley, Jeffrey Hall, London, 23 September 1999 "I went to the Aberdeen islands, which are off the west coast of Scotland, with my mother and my husband, David, for a few days in the summer, and we had two-hour nights up there. You watch the sun go down at midnight and rise at 2 o'clock in the morning. I would get up and go to a Viking cemetery within walking distance. I would sit on these grave stones. Who knows who's buried there. The words have long-since been eroded by the sea air and lichen. The graveyard will appear in... in the next two years I'm doing one last Pinhead story. It is about the death of Pinhead. I'm finally killing off the fucker. It will appear in those stories." Barker Worse Than His Bite? By [ ], PC Gameplay.co.uk, 19-23 February 2001 "I think it will be relatively short. Just because I feel as though the fiction I have in mind of Harry D'Amour meets Pinhead - the story is not going to be super short it's not gonna be 25 pages nor is it going to be 700. It's going to be a novella. And I want to give time to the Pinhead story to finish him off graciously... "It would be a fond hope of mine actually, that somebody would actually see, that somebody from Dimension would read the thing and go, Wait a second, maybe we can do something a little bit more graceful with this character than what we've been doing recently.' " Confessions By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls, March 2001 (note - interview took place 14 December 2000) "At the end of the year I will also deliver to Harper Collins a collection of short stories which will collect up a bunch of stuff that has been floating around for a while, there's a Harry D'Amour story which had been published a long time ago [Lost Souls], which has not been collected... There is about 5 or 6 stories which are already around which have not been collected. There is also about 70 or 80 thousand words of new material, which will include, and most importantly actually, the novella, "The Scarlet Gospels," which is giving the title to the book. The novella "The Scarlet Gospels" which will be the end once and for all of the Hellraiser mythology because I am killing Pinhead. So I am delivering that the end of this year for autumn the following year." Confessions By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls at www.clivebarker.com, 18 May 2001 "The collection of short fiction will be delivered at the end of this year, which will include the Harry D'Amour/Pinhead story which will bring an end to Pinhead once and for all... I'm writing his death scene; whether they choose to take account of that in the movies is up to them, but I am writing his death scene and after which I will have no more literary or cinematic dealings with him whatsoever." Nips And Tucks, Tits And Fucks By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 July 2001 (note - full text here) "The only thing that I'm going to do in a relatively short form is the final Hellraiser story dispatching that damn fellow with the pins in his head - that I will not do at great length. But it won't be a short, short story, it will still, I think, be a novella, perhaps the match of The Hellbound Heart, I'm not sure - I always underestimate what these are going to take! "There's also a lot of stories that I created for Scarlet Gospels which are very erotic, complete and ready to rock and roll. There's a tale called Jehovah's Bitch, which is one of the most outrageous things I've ever written, and I hope to get into that [short story] collection" Open Roads... What Price Wonderland? By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here) "This will be basically an anthology of new stories including the final Hellraiser I've been promising myself I would write for a long time. My farewell to that whole mythology even as somebody else continues to make the movies I wanted to be able to close that door once and for all. I should say close that box once and for all. That's why I'm going to do that as part of this anthology, which will than also contain a number of stories that are now out of print. So it will be a mixture of the old and the new." Confessions By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls - see links page) "I have no reason to believe the short story collection will not precede Abarat III. I have one story left to do, which is the Hellraiser / D'Amour story which I'm writing right now - or actually stopped writing to go and do the final pass on the Tortured Souls script, but then will go back to. And my hope is that in the time between Universal receiving the Tortured Souls script and either saying yea or nay to it, I will finish the D'Amour / Pinhead story and it can go its merry way with the rest of the stories and the collection will be complete. I've plotted it [D'Amour / Pinhead], I'm actually writing it, I've actually written probably 200 pages of it, of handwritten draft. So, it's going to be a long, sort of a novella, I suppose. I forget where the numbers begin - I think a novella begins at sort of 17,000 words, I'm not sure, it's a very strange number... I do remember somebody saying it was 17,000 - in which case this will definitely be a novella, not a short story, because I think I'm probably edging towards 17,000 words already! "I don't want to make a separate book of it, I don't believe it justifies a separate book. I think it's perfect that it goes with a collection of fiction that either hasn't seen print yet (and including some of the stories that I had created for the Scarlet Gospels) or a few pieces which have never been put between covers before, but have been anthologised - loosely - like Lost Souls, the short story that I did all that time ago for Time Out, and things that need to be under a cover with Clive Barker's name on the front, for completeness' sake. "I'm trying to get Pidgin and Theresa in there and, there's a bunch of little things. I'm even going to take a couple of the pieces from David's book, from Rare Flesh - not the poetry, but the things which have more narrative cohesion and I'm just going to put a couple of those in there too. So it will be a pretty authoritative collection, I think. Not super-long, but definitely interesting and diverse: some erotic stuff in there, some fantastical stuff in there, some horrific stuff in there. Just in case anybody thought I'd lost my nerve where the horror stuff is concerned during all this Abaratian stuff, the Hellraiser story is blood-curdlingly horrible! I kind of surprised myself with the gusto with which I went back to it! I've been saving it up and it got loose in this story in a major way. And of course I want to pay my respects to all that's been done with the character in my absence, as it were. I've got to pay some homage to the fact that the character has been moved on in those other movies and certainly - and this is the most important point of homage, I think - to Doug, who has been the thread through all these stories and whose character I am now bringing to what I'm sure he thinks is a premature end! Now, whether this means it will be a premature end as far as the movies are concerned - who can say? But as far as I'm concerned, I am writing the death of Pinhead... "I'm backing and forthing about [the Tortured Souls pieces], because... I'm not sure I like them sufficiently, to be perfectly honest. I have mixed feelings about them, partly, I suppose, because they served another purpose - that they weren't there strictly as literature, if you will. So I suppose I have some questions about whether I like them sufficiently to put them in there, in a collection like this. "Lost Souls and Coming To Grief will both definitely be in the collection. Amen's Shore will definitely be in the collection, The Departed will definitely be there, Pidgin and Theresa we spoke of, yes. Animal Life - definitely. You see, what I like about all these is that they really were intended as short stories, whereas to me, somewhere at the back of my head is the feeling that, however hard I try, the fiction from Tortured Souls is, you know, stuff that was written to go with some toys - and I'm not sure it really belongs in a collection, I really don't... Chiliad will be there - both parts. If you put all of those together, you actually find you've got a shitload of stuff - there's a lot of stuff there... once you add the very considerable size of the Hellraiser story, plus, obviously, the stuff from Scarlet Gospels - that's a lot of material. And I'm excited to be able to put all this stuff together. I think there's a very fun collection here, and a very diverse collection and, as I say, with the addition of the Hellraiser story, Hellraiser novella, it's going to be quite a piece!" In Anticipation Of The Deluge: A Moment At The River's Edge By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 1 and 12 July 2004 (note - full text here) "You know I'm doing this Hellraiser story, the Scarlet Gospels one, which began as a modest little tale... It's now 90,000 words and counting! And so it's now actually a short novel, by definition a short novel... 'It growed like Topsy, sir, honest guv'nor!' What happened was I lightly introduced Jesus into the narrative, thinking I could get away with a quick mention and out again, you know? Actually it was Joseph of Arimathea that I introduced - who brought the Holy Grail actually back to Cornwall, to a tin mine, according to fable. And that sort of got me excited about the narrative in a whole new way and I realised I couldn't finish my man, Pinhead, off in a tale that also has room for Joseph of Arimathea without really dealing some. Otherwise it was going to be a thin little tale and people were going to say Barker should have allowed the richness of this narrative to actually play out - and I would have been one of those people who would have said it. So, I'm glad it's larger and it'll also take up a few more months to finish up. Jane, God bless her!, Jane Johnson is so fantastically in synch with me and always has been and I think it comes from her being a novelist herself. I mean, I think she knows things change and develop and grow and sometimes get out of control and sometimes don't go the way you want them - like the first draft of Abarat II. And so I said to her, 'I'm fighting - this thing's bigger than I thought it was going to be,' and she said, 'You know, this isn't the first time you've told me this, Clive.' Which it certainly isn't!." There And Back Again: Touring The Abarat By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 30 November 2004 (note - full text here) "The Hellraiser novel, which was of course a short story and then became a novella and is now a 120,000 word novel is... I am halfway through the final draft and it is very fun to write, I must say. It's very fun to write but it's now reasonably big; I guess it'll be 400 pages... In about June or July, they'll get this 120,000 word Hellraiser book with the possibility of making it a compilation which will add another 300 pages to it; that's a big book, that's a 700 page book which will be full of very adult material. "I would like it to [stay within the Scarlet Gospels collection] and I don't believe we will know, honestly, what Harper's marketing people will decide until they see the text. There are two opinions here. One is that you take the novel and you separate it off and you make it a thing unto itself which would be perfectly fine, I don't think people would be bothered by a novel that was that length on its own and there's an argument that says it slightly gets lost among a collection of other things which include reprints. But on the other hand part of me, the completist part of me, wants to fling everything into this, probably 700 page book, which would contain as its main entrée, if you will, this novel... "There is a huge enthusiasm to do the short stories and to print everything that's missing that isn't in print, plus of course a lot of the short stories that I've created that I haven't even published - and really I hate to say this, but it sort of is a marketing question. I'm concentrating on the bit that I can have control over, which is writing the book and we'll see what happens. I guess there is a part of me that thinks it would be nice for it to stand alone, more than I thought, because it's quite the big story. You know, we have two of my major characters clashing and I was thinking that if all stories are part of one vast collective unconscious story, then probably the Ur story is the descent into the Underworld; it's certainly the Shaman story, and Harry does that in this book, you know, he descends in pursuit of another soul, a soul whose name he doesn't even know and there's something quite potent about that idea and I wouldn't want it to sort of get lost in a collection of short fiction. But maybe it wouldn't. In other words, I'm a Libran and I can't make up my fucking mind!" "I think the argument for pulling the Hellraiser fans is if you put that on the cover then maybe you also tempt them in to reading some kind of fiction that they wouldn't otherwise have read because the collection is pretty disparate, including obviously the two stories that bookended Millenium/Revelations which is one of my favourite pieces of my own fiction and is much under-read, much under-found, much under-published." The Hellbound Art : Memory, Fantasy And Filigree By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 10 February 2005 (note - full text here) "It’s going to be a big book now – I never thought it would be a big book. But once I started to write it, I realised that in a way I knew a lot of things about hell and a lot about Pinhead – that character that had never appeared in any movie or comic book or anything. These are things which are in my head – and it had been in my head for many years – but that I have never written about. So I’m putting all of that into the book. I’m doing my very best to really develop the mythology and to make this Clive Barker’s definitive book of hell... "So its called the 'Scarlet Gospels' - the thought that I have had for this collection of short fiction - but it actually seems to belong to this novel - it seems to want to belong to this novel... it will be a single volume. This will be a novel on its own I think. And then we will do the collection of short fiction at a later point, I have got a lot of short fiction, which we have not been published. "And what I haven’t realized until I have started writing, was how passionate I felt about the character of Pinhead. I suppose part of it is that I become very familiar with the image of the – like everybody has – the toys, the game, obviously the films and so on. But when I actually went back and wrote about him, wrote in his voice, as it were, I realized that he became more interesting than he had a chance to be in most of the movies. Most of the movies make him into just a simple villain, who is just there, doing this thing, he’s there to cause trouble. And I wanted to write something more complex about him, I think he is quite a complex character. You know he isn’t Freddy Krueger, he isn’t Jason Voorhees, he is something more eloquent and possibly elegant. And so I really wanted to explore this character and really give him a chance to speak one last time - very eloquently." Clive Barker On The Phone By [Thomas Hemmerich], That's Clive!, 29 March 2005 (note - full text online at www.clivebarker.de) "During the day, I am shedding blood like nobody's business in The Scarlet Gospels, which is quite an interesting return to a voice that I thought I'd lost and I'm happy to discover had simply gone into hiding for a while... The tone of Scarlet Gospels is going to remind you I think, in its taking-no-prisoners way, of some of the harsher stories in the Books of Blood and that was a bit of a test for me - did I still have that voice? Was I still, at 52, willing to be that harsh, that cruel? "When I got Pinhead on stage with D'Amour - and I've actually got him onstage with D'Amour as a boy, he meets D'Amour at a Catholic school as a twelve year-old / thirteen year-old, a fully mixed-up, fucked-up thirteen year-old is the first time he encounters this creature - it suddenly, suddenly I realised that this hard-hearted Barker that really liked the imagery, the almost nihilistic imagery that was a part of the Books of Blood, I was really happy to revisit it; I felt there was validity in it. It's interesting to me and I've written seventeen hand-written pages this morning which is very, very unlike me, to get seventeen pages out in a morning - normally I am really pushing by five o'clock to get my twenty and I'm having a good time is part of it. Part of it is, 'Oh, hello Clive, I'm Clive,' you know? So many of the journeys that I've taken in the last few years have taken me to such diverse places, and sometimes very sad places; Sacrament has such sadness in it, certainly, and I think the stuff I did for Chiliad, you know, that was pretty melancholy stuff. Abarat has brightened me and painting brightens me, and when I'm bright, I can go into the dark places more comfortably. It's only when you're actually in a really, really dark place that the idea of getting up in the morning and going into these dark places yourself is really overwhelming... "Lazarus Requiem was, is my notes for Scarlet Gospels. I kind of liked that, the ridiculous paradox of that title, you know, but it sounded, wierdly, too science-fictional. You'd be surprised how many 'Requiem's there are in science-fiction. So - and I rather like Scarlet Gospels more, so - but I'm actually making reference to the Lazarus Requiem within the text, I'm going to put that in." The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 June 2005 (note: full text here) "I am writing a novel called The Scarlet Gospels right now, in which a fellow with pins in his head comes to a fucking terrible end. And it’s time – he’s old, he’s senile, his colostomy bag keeps breaking. Doug Bradley, who plays him will never forgive me! So, yeah, I’m writing that book that will come out next and meanwhile I’m doing Abarat stuff and meanwhile I’m doing Jump Tribe stuff. So Scarlet Gospels will come out, it’s about a five hundred page novel, will come out next year." Jump Tribe Panel San Diego Comic Con, 14 July 2005 "I am into the final draft of The Scarlet Gospels and it's very bloody and very intense - very intense - I'm quite surprised how intense it's got. I think I thought I got used to whatever the S&M overtures or undertones of the Cenobites were; I think I thought, 'Oh well, there's nothing there that could distress or disturb me now,' but in seeking out something which would distresss and disturb my audience, I seem to have found some things to distress and disturb me! It's good!" Rummaging Through The Toybox: Plushes, Plagues and Plaudits By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 11 August 2005 (note: full text here) "I think good horror can come from writers of any age. I felt I'd lost that mercilessness with age but it turns I haven't. I think this new book is darker and crueller than anything in the Books of Blood." Raising Hell By Duncan Bell, Bizarre, No 106, January 2006 "I'm in a faintly, not a philosophical place in the Scarlet Gospels, but I'm waking out of a dream of transformation which is what's going on on the pages - on page... I can give you a number! Page 1,209 of the final draft... [of] three thousand and something... "I think the mind is constantly thinking on this and I'd certainly been thinking for a very long time about how I would eventually bring eloquent and respectful closure to the life of a character who has been very good to me. But then I realised that to be respectful and all that good stuff, I also needed to be epic because there was a sense that there was an epic structure somewhere behind him that the films didn't show and my original thought was that I would simply tell a tale of closure that was the size of the tale which introduced him - thirty thousand words - and then I thought that does him a terrible injustice, because we are teased over the films with a sense that there is something, some huge structure there in which he belongs, in which he has a significant part and how can I write that, how can I bring him to his final act without first taking him, taking my readers through what that system is - in other words, taking them down to Hell and showing them what the Order of the Cenobites are and where he belongs in them and what the consequences of rebellion on his part might be, and so on and so forth... "You can start this book and have read nothing, seen nothing - it's fine. If you have seen the first movie, that's fine. If you've seen the second movie, probably that's fine too. If you've read the novella - The Hellbound Heart - surely, that's fine too. Beyond that, I cannot really... I need to create for Hell the kind of scheme of power and domination and hierarchy, the kind of Byzantine goings-on which I think people find have such fun, have such fun with elsewhere in my fiction and, good God, if it's happening anywhere it's happening in Hell! And so I have, I think, three or four huge surprises in the novel which are about what Hell is and who its architects might be and so on - I don't want to give too much away - all of which are then married to Harry, Norma Paine - the blind medium who appears in a couple of stories with Harry - and of course with the Hell-priest, Pinhead. And by tying these characters to this pretty enormous mythology, which is as significant a re-writing of it from what a medieval scholar would have recognised, but is not a violation, it's a development from ideas which you would recognise from paintings of Hell or illuminations of Hell in a medieval book... "I've always felt there were contradictions built into the system deliberately by me at the very beginning - like, 'Pleasure gets you pain, but you want the pain in a way because it gives you pleasure' that are worth going back to and looking at again as a writer in going back to Hell. So I've just got five people and an animal are about to enter Hell - the second half, the second two-thirds of the book are set in Hell and they are the most mis-matched bunch of people - a dirty half-dozen..! Trust me, I would love to list them because you'd be entertained but it really, really would spoil it. When you come to that moment in the book you'll have a quiet giggle to yourselves; you'll realise what a totally mis-matched bunch of freakoids these guys are! Wonderful people, but they're all oddities, they're all people who are in some sense or other at the edge of culture, of our culture, like so many of my characters and now they're all together in what I suppose I would think is the largest adventure that I could conceive of that did not take place in another world, unless you view Hell as another world, which in some ways is what I'm doing." Abarat. Abarat. Abarat. Abarat... Abarat! By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 13 and 20 March 2006 (note: full text here) "I’m on the final draft of Scarlet Gospels… I’m on page 1,959... These are big buggers, you know... I hear people saying it’d go so much faster if you type it in, but I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. What works for me works for me, and I tend to be loyal to the things which work best for me... I do little doodles sometimes in the margins, how a creature might look or how a street might be arranged or how a world might be arranged, which I need to go back to and reference later on. Or I’ll play through particularly inventive variations of invented names. I really try and do that. I do like the fact that on this page that I’ve almost finished there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve… thirteen smaller scribblings and one entire line scribbled out. And the nicest thing about that is I can still see what’s beneath it, which is useful because when I come to do the final polish it will have been typed out, and I’ll have this by my side - I’ll tend to go back to the handwritten draft and peer through the scribbling. And sometimes I’ll find that the first decision, the first choice I made was the better of the two... "You reach me half an hour after an incredible sort of coincidence that’s happened. Harry D’Amour in The Scarlet Gospels - the hero of The Scarlet Gospels - is pursuing Pinhead across the landscape of Hell; I won’t tell you what Pinhead’s plot is, but he does have one... Halfway across Harry is given access to a vision of Christ which he doesn’t necessarily particularly want, but he gets it anyway. I won’t tell you the circumstances, because that’s sort of fun - the way it comes about... Christ’s on a cross and Harry’s drawn in this vision very, very close to Christ. And he can see the barbs of the thorns, how deeply they dig into the flesh of Christ’s head. And what he hadn’t realised was that Christ feels the same way as Pinhead does. I’d never thought of that, in all the years I’d been thinking about Pinhead, it never occurred to me that Pinhead is wearing an organised crown of thorns. But he is essentially, right...? "Harry says, 'There’s another who’s been at the back of my head and I couldn’t think who it was. But I’ve remembered now.' Christ says, 'What about the other?' 'His head is pierced like yours, not with thorns but with nails.' Christ says, 'How he must suffer.' 'You think so?' 'Oh, I’m certain. So have him come to me, I would turn him, I would bring him into the circle of my suffering.' Harry says, 'He has done terrible things.' And then the conversation gets a lot darker! It suddenly gave this wonderful chance to have Christ say, 'Well bring him on over! It’ll be fine. We’ll chat - he’s had some nails, I’ve had some thorns…' But it’s funny I should live with a piece of mythology, a piece of imagery as long as I’ve lived with Pinhead, and got to twenty years of living with him, as it were, and had never made that connection before... I’m not saying this is a revelation, I’m sure lots of people have thought of this before me. It’s just a case of the author being incredibly frigging slow!" Lord Of Art, Master Of Illusions By Paul Kane, (i) FantasyCon brochure, 22-24 September, 2006 (ii) excerpted in The BFS: A Celebration, 2006 (note: full text online at www.shadow-writer.co.uk) (interview took place 10 May 2006) "I am on the final draft of The Scarlet Gospels, with a huge final polish to do, simply because it's a huge book. If you want to know, I'm on page 2,298 of my handwritten draft and I'm averaging between twelve and fifteen pages a day - which is not quite where I would like to be but it's very dense writing. I mean, I'm in Hell, but this is not a Hell you've ever seen before and these are not places you'd expect to find in Hell; in other words, what I'm trying to do is deliver a Hell that is fresh and new in large measure. Obviously it's going to have demons and it's going to have pain and suffering, but I'm talking about topography and architecture and wildlife - all the other things that give texture to my other invented worlds, if you like, to Imajica, for instance. I'm trying to give some of that feeling to Hell so that it'll be Clive Barker's Hell. It's like writing a very, very, very dark fantasy book right now. "I think it'll be pretty scary; I think it goes in some very dark places, but it also... I'm not going to say anymore!! I'm excited and anxious at the same time. I live and breathe it, you know?... "I have promised that I will deliver this at the turn of the year, so, HarperCollins are looking for an autumn of next year publication. And it'll be a big bugger, you know? It'll be a Great And Secret Show-sized book, so I think it'll be well worth the wait." You Called, He Came... By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 and 3 June 2006 (note: full text here) "This is a Hell of which the Cenobites and sado-masochism are only a part, and what we're going to see is a much larger landscape, so I'm about a third of the way through the final draft now. It's a horror novel, and my fans of that stuff deserve a big, fat book, so that's what I'm giving them." Weird Fantasy By Joe Nazzaro, Starburst, Special No 76, July 2006 "This book is not about Lemarchand, it's about what happens when Hell puts down its machinery, meaning the little boxes, and takes up its older ways. "There won't be a lot of back-story about Pinhead but we will be in his head a lot. I will also be revealing his true Cenobitic name, yes, that will be there. I think it is going to be fun - there has never been a Hell like this, I can reasonably say, and it's still revealing things to me, day by day, so that's fun... "How much of Primordium will be echoed in the Hell of Scarlet Gospels? Some of it, yes, in the sense that the city is indeed a proper city. You know, this is not a mediæval vision of Hell that just looks like Hell's Kitchen, you know, with a bunch of people being boiled in oil and thrown in fires. This is a place where fallen angels have attempted to build a society and a culture for themselves. They haven't necessarily been very good at it, but they've tried and Hell is in many ways a reflection of their inability to build because the vision they needed is a Divine vision and they don't really have anyone among them... There were a few exceptions, Lucifer would be one of them but Lucifer doesn't come on the stage until towards the end... "When he does show himself we see, oh boy, what Hell probably was at the beginning when the fallen angels decided to try and make Heaven themselves and the only reference to that is a melancholy reference - I wanted to be melancholy about it. I'm a great reader of Hellblazer, you know, the John Constantine comic, and whenever John goes down into Hell it's always fire pits and terrible monsters and so on. But you think, but what do they do the next day..? You know, my characters are down in Hell for two-thirds of the book - I had to get a sense for, how do you live down there? What colour is the sky? I have, in other words, approached Hell much as I would approach a fantasy world, asking the questions that a fantasy writer would ask of his or her world: 'What is the colour of the sky? What is the design of the buildings?' and so forth. There are patches of this huge novel that remind me of Imajica, simply because we're in this very fucking strange place with nothing quite being what it seems, and yes it's violent and yes sometimes it's scary, though it's not a horror novel in the conventional sense of the horror novel, in the sense of it having a ghastly little jump every few minutes. I have no problem with it being called a horror novel - it should be - but it's an unconventional vision of what a horror novel should be..." Sowing The Seeds Of The Story Tree By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 28 August and 4 September 2006 (note - full text here) "One of the many characters in the story is Harry D’Amour, the detective whose life has been dogged by numberless encounters with the fecal matter of Hell. By chance I am presently writing a novel called The Scarlet Gospels, in which Harry, a weary but defiant hero, tracks a friend of his, taken hostage by the character colloquially dubbed Pinhead, down into the lowest levels of Hell. Here, a life-changing event will take place. An event that will deliver Harry back into The Art Trilogy (of which The Great and Secret Show is but the first volume) fundamentally and irredeemably changed. That descent, and Harry’s wounding, was supposed to take about 35,000 words to write and be delivered to my publishers as a novella. It is now 240,000 words long, or thereabouts, and still growing. I mention this only because I very much hope that the extraordinary work that Chris, Gabriel, and colorist Jay Fotos have done on The Great and Secret Show, will be read and loved passionately enough to tempt them back to adapt the second book in The Art Trilogy, Everville." Introduction By Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show, Part One, 24 August 2006 "I’ve delivered to my typist everything from Scarlet Gospels; they’ve typed it all out and I’m just starting now the nine months process of refining and just making it better. It’s 232,000 words, however, just because it’s been typed and I’ve got a number of words and whatever, it's very tentative because the next piece of work to be done on it is in a way the most important of the lot, which is the subtle surgery which comes with the desire just to make the thing better... "It’s a longer than normal book, I mean [nine months is] the time that Imajica took to be polished and I don’t know what the word-count of Imajica is, my guess is Imajica is 40,000 words longer than this, but I don’t have a really accurate number in my head. It’s just very hard to make any real judgement about how long it’s going to take because it’s not just a question of reading and correcting a piece of syntax here or putting a comma there - for me it’s also a chance to step back from it for a little while while they’ve been typing it up and now, on Monday next I can step back in and start the process of simply making the work better. I’m pretty sure that what I have right now would be printable but it wouldn’t be me doing my best and my readers deserve that. So that’s where that is. "The enormity of Scarlet Gospels, not actually even the wordage but the conceptual enormity... We’re going to Hell, guys! We’re going to meet Lucifer, we’re going to see all those things that I’ve talked about almost in passing in other stories, or hinted at in other stories, this time we’re going to see the geography, this time there’s going to be, if not a literal map, you could certainly draw a mental map of Hell from the story and it would not resemble anything that Dante cooked up or actually any other vision of Hell; I think it is unto itself. There's Hell, but also going to Golgotha, seeing Christ crucified; this isn’t stuff I would want to treat lightly or without due reverence. And the sheer scale of that... I was carrying it around for a long time and it was a big old weight and a number of times when you’ve seen me it’s been sitting on my head and even though I’m not done with it yet, I still have one more journey through its complexities, I suppose since I’ve let it go, since I put the final full-stop on, I feel a lightening of myself." Pinhead's Progress By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 15 and 22 December 2006 (note - full text here) "Scarlet Gospels has reached its penultimate draft... I always go draft, draft, penultimate draft, finish. So the last draft was the penultimate draft, I have to hope. You’d scare me if you said it was any other way. But I can’t go back into it too quickly. It’s so fucking dark and I needed, having written 12,000 pages over the three drafts, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t do it, I wanted to take a breath. It is an oppressively dark book and it was intended to be that, but, boy! I didn’t realise that living with it was going to be so heavy-going... "I think Mister B. Gone is exactly what I wanted it to be and I’m very proud of it and I think Scarlet Gospels will be exactly what I want it to be, but it was so much what I wanted it to be that I have to take a breath! So, Mister B. Gone is breath one and breath two is what I’m doing now which is Abarat Three. And then, we’ll see, but I think, you know, it’ll be a question of whether we do Abarat Four or whether I go back and do Scarlet Gospels and finish that off." Mister B. By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 18 June 2007 (note - full text here) "I’d finished the penultimate draft and had one more to go. I gave myself a week between finishing that draft and starting the final one, and in that week, I thought, 'You know, there’s something in here that I want to spit out before I begin anything else big,' because the Scarlet Gospels drafts are enormous and incredibly dark - even by my somewhat dark standards. It just felt to me like there was something else cooking. I keep a journal of ideas that come along, and I went through that and found the word 'Jakabok,' which I kind of liked. It was something I’d written down - something I’d come up with in a period of name inventing. I have nights when Ijust decide to fill a few pages with invented names - most of which will be shit, but every 25th one will be worth something, and Jakabok had a nice rhythm to it. Then I’d written 'Not Book' and then the phrase 'Burn this book.' It sort of went from there... "Abarat is in 42 languages and there are people in 42 countries saying, 'Where’s the next one?' Scarlet Gospels is there waiting for one more draft, which will take a year to do because that’s the size of the book. And that’s fine. I’ll get to it. But I really feel the urgency of the audience, so Abarat is next, and I’ve finished almost all of the paintings for the third volume. The Abarat books are probably going to get a little bit larger as they go on through the series. It’s just the nature of telling those stories. The epic narrative is only just unrolling, and certainly the paintings have become bigger - not physically larger, but in their subject matter. They’ve become more ambitious and broader. "I’ve always been inspired by the pictures. They always come first. I know from the paintings that this narrative is going to huge places. So Abarat will definitely have to be next in order to keep that story rolling, and we’ll see where we go from there. I can’t look too far ahead; otherwise it just gets overwhelming." Gone And Back Again By Carnell, Fangoria, No 268, November 2007 "Scarlet Gospels is a bloody big book. I have done three drafts on it, each one of which has been 4,000 pages of handwritten material. This is a very dark book, even by my standards, and I wanted it to be my definitive visit to Hell. I also wanted it to be my farewell to what I will always think of as Doug’s Pinhead. Whenever I bring the character to mind, it’s Doug’s face I see. As you know it’s also got D’Amour in, so it’s Scott Bakula’s face I also see in that role. "But I’d been working on it a long time and I’d got into a very, very dark place. There’s a line from Nietzsche that often gets quoted: 'If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' And that was what was happening, I had got into a place where I felt as though I needed to take a step away from the work and before I did the final draft, I would take a breather. "Having decided to do that, the Devil finds work for idle hands. I have to write every day; it’s in my bones, I can’t not do it. So the question was, ‘do I start something, do I write a couple of short stories?’ Somehow that didn’t feel right. I’ve had for a long time this idea of writing a book that really addressed the audience, the reader, in a way which was relatively new. I couldn’t find anyone who’d attempted this before. But I thought it’s such an obvious idea in one sense." Barker Gets Darker With Mister B. Gone By Paul Kane, Dreamwatch Presents Total Sci-Fi, 1 November 2007 Galilee 2 ...As the Galilee mythology has emerged as a pair rather than a trilogy of volumes, it may mean that the conclusion of the Barbarossa versus Geary conflict will be easier to finish than The Art was / is. Volume Two was plotted at the same time as Volume One and was, at one stage, something of a priority to be written while it was still fresh. Now though, along with The Art 3, it's one of the books planned for after the Abarat Series... I expect two seven hundred page books, back to back. It's set in New York, Hawaii, Japan, Hollywood, Charleston and Bentonville North Carolina. It's also set in South Carolina and the Caspian Sea in central Asia. Galilee spans the times of long before human kind even raised their noses, the time of the Civil War and in contemporary times. It's [an] incredibly complicated and complex structure. I hope it's very emotionally rich as well. I am about three quarters of the way through the final draft of the first book. The other drafts of the second book are already written but I still have the final draft to do of that book. "There are things which are seeded in the first book which do not come into full bloom until the second book. I needed to know how those blossoms were going to look so I need to make sure the narrative elements were in place in the first book to resolve themselves in the second book... I don't want there to be a big gap between books. " Confessions By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 9, November 1997 "Yes, there will be another book. Just one. It will carry the story of the Barbarossas and the Gearys to what I hope will be a mind blowing conclusion. That inevitably means that the ending of this first book leaves some questions unanswered. I can understand how that might be a little frustrating (it's a bit like leaving Han Solo frozen alive at the end of The Empire Strikes Back) but I guarantee that all the threads will be tied up by the end of the saga. It's just that I love large canvases and it sometimes takes a while to fill in all the detail." Thoughts on Galilee Reaction to Galilee reviews at amazon.com by Barker. 27th July 1998. "The second book of Galilee - I'm not sure what it'll be called right now - doesn't ever leave this planet or dimension; it stays firmly in this world. Which isn't to say there aren't metaphysical revelations to be made apparent." Lord of New Illusions By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998 "I think we'll have to see how this book plays out first. If this book is really working for people, I might be onto the sequel quickly. I certainly know what the subsequent book will be about. I also feel that this book, absolutely, has a shape and completeness of itself. An astute reader will absolutely grasp where I left places for the narrative to continue. This is not Part One of something. It's a thing unto itself with, I hope, a completion at the end and one large arc of storytelling told…That first draft is a raw, unsophisticated statement of what this book may be about. And then, as I sophisticate it, as I think about it and as I research, things change and develop and enrich. It really becomes a different animal. So even though I have a first draft for the second book, the implications of that first draft have been transformed completely by the fact that I have now completed the first book. The knock-on effects that I have made over those drafts are astronomical." Confessions By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998 "Galilee is a complete novel unto itself. I will, and have already begun to, revisit these characters in a separate volume. I see them as companion volumes dealing with the same world - or worlds. The emotional engine which drives this first novel - the relationship between Galilee and Rachel - has a complete arc in this novel and reaches, I hope, a very satisfying conclusion. But the narrative engine of the second book will be something completely different. "The Galilee books are - let's put it this way - as realistic as I'm ever going to get, they are not realism obviously in the same way to, say, Norman Mailer's approach to realism. But they are still pretty realistic." Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com 1999 "A bus would have to drop on me to stop me writing those books. Both [Galilee 2 and The Art 3] are big books. Frankly, I would have been writing Galilee 2 starting in October where it not for the Abarat. The Abarat books have grown a bit because of the Disney deal and they've become a huge project. Both books are very important to me. Both will be written." Confessions By [Craig Fohr], Lost Souls Newsletter, September / December 2000 (note - interview took place 25 August 2000) "David's family. And my family [were the inspiration for the Barbarossa's]. The connections will become even stronger in the sequel, which will be the next large book I do after the 'Abarat' text is written. These are the times that I wish that I could clone myself because I can feel the sequel to 'Galilee' in my fingertips. But you know, there is only one of me so I got to wait. But it is a book that I'm really looking forward to writing because I loved writing the first book so much. There is so much more to say about the Barbarossas. There is so much more to say about the magic of their world and the second book will go much more into the mysterious past of that family and particularly into the connection of the Barbarossas and the political life of America, because obviously Cesaria's great love was Jefferson. Actually they are finding more and more things about Jefferson. I don't know if you guys have been watching any of this, but in the past year Jefferson has been getting a makeover but not a particularly attractive one. And it is quite interesting to see that happening and I want to get some of that into the new book but its gonna have to wait a little time. Now that I've got the big Hollywood book done the next two big books, in this order, will be the sequel to 'Galilee', and a big big book: the last book of the 'Art.' " Confessions By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls, March 2001 (note - interview took place 14 December 2000) "I'm going to spend the next two years on the four books of the Abarat, and then I will do two big books back-to-back: one will be the sequel to Galilee, which will be the end of that story; and the other will be the third book of The Art." The Dark Backward By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 200, March 2001 "Trust me, you can find me saying I'm going to do the next Galilee book one day, and then saying the third book of the Art the next! Different books capture different parts of my personality, and I don't hear voices in the traditional sense of sitting down and literally hearing someone speaking in my ear, but there are some days when certain narratives seem right and surface out of my subconscious and demand that I go do some writing. It's interesting that there are hundreds of pages on the third book of the Art and hundreds of pages on Galilee Two already written, hand-written drafts, just because [I've never left them]. Going back to your point about Tolkien never leaving Middle-Earth, I never actually left Maddox on the road and I certainly never left Quiddity, and so those remain open worlds in my head and that's kind of exciting in a way. In any day in my imagination I might totter along any given roads." Open Roads... What Price Wonderland? By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here) "I will go straight on to Abarat 3, knowing that two huge projects wait in the wings... The less huge of them, though still not a sure book, by any means, is the Galilee book, which is heavily structured in my head. But they're both year and a half long books. They're big projects that are very strong in my head. I wish I could clone myself. It would be very useful." Confessions By Craig Fohr, Lost Souls, 1 August 2003 (note - full text online at Lost Souls - see links page) Thief of Always II ...Who knows? As and when the movie finally gets made and is a success this one could be right back on the priority track... "I have played around with taking Harvey on another adventure, yes. I don't know whether I will yet, but I haven't discounted the possibility . I like Harvey and I like being in his company. One of the things you do when you're writing is to seek out characters that you want to write about because you have to spend a lot of time in their company. Will Rabjohns, the hero of Sacrament, is a guy whose company I have enjoyed being in and Harvey is the same. I don't discount the possibility that at one point he'll figuratively tug on my sleeve and say 'How 'bout it?'" Confessions By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 3, [March] 1996 "Every now and then I think of something and I think maybe there's going to be a follow-up. It needs to be completely right or I won't do it. The thing about The Thief of Always is that it stands on its own beautifully. So if I am going to open up the narrative again there really needs to be a really good reason to do it. The story has got to present itself in a way where I go, 'Oh yeah, that's right. That's the story I need to tell.' And, to be perfectly honest, I haven't found that story yet - which isn't to say that I won't find it at some point in the future, but right now I'm content to let The Thief of Always be its own sweet self." An Interview With Clive Barker By [ ], The Thief Of Always graphic novel, Book 3, May 2005 Another Children's Book ...First mentioned in 1994 as a book due to arrive in 1995 and then mentioned again in 1998, Abarat has probably squeezed this one out of the priorities for now... "There will be two more books next year. One is a book of short stories and another is in the same tone as The Thief Of Always, which I enjoyed writing immensely. I had a great time writing that book." Lord of Illusions By J.B.Mauceri-Macabre, World of Fandom, Vol 2, No 22, Fall 1994 "I love writing for children. There's this huge project I was talking of a little earlier, with many short stories and illustrations, which will be called Clive Barker's Book of Hours. There's also another book similar to Thief noodling around at the back of my head." People Online By Laura Kay Smith, [27/30] July 1998 Click here for Books That Got Away ...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.