Clive, on the Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy series:

"I sobbed my heart out because there were so many things in there that I hadn't thought of before. Amazing. Breath-taking. And you have captured, or quoted, or found things I just would not have remembered in my life, you know? I think in some ways I was crying for a life that I'd forgotten. You know, my thoughts, and meanings: you are the keepers of those."

Order all three volumes at The Clive Barker Archive

Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy

...Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy is our continuing project to document the evolving themes, concerns and passions within Clive's work. With full access to Clive's archives and invaluable contributions from his friends and closest collaborators, for the last fifteen years we have been piecing together fragments, scripts, sketches and ephemera to chart the successes, the failures and the what-might-have-beens, compiling the definitive and illustrated portrait of Clive's work.

What started as a personal exploration into the plays performed by the Dog Company in the years before Clive rose to prominence with his eponymous Books of Blood has blossomed into a multi-volume series that will ultimately cover all of Clive's works, all the way from those earliest plays through his more famous works and right up to the present day.

Clive: "I've had times when I haven't been able to get up and write and one of the things I did was sit down and read from page one through both of the books you did about my life and putting all those pieces in order with all those wonderful illustrations and, I have to tell you, the critical analysis that you guys did of all the material is second to none, it's absolutely breath-taking... Watching you summarise the plays and the stories and then draw it out in a very straightforward, clear fashion what the salient points are: breath-taking. I just wanted you to know that...
"And what the two of you have done with these books, what you are doing, is going to be - when all of us are dead, unfortunately! Certainly when I'm dead! - is going to be a matrix, a model for a way that people won't do things in the future. Just as people don't do things the way Cocteau did things - back in the Fifties there just weren't the models - people don't make art that way anymore and I think the models will have changed again. What you're doing is, doing for me, is what nobody ever did for Cocteau which is to preserve everything. We know almost nothing about his early drivers. We know them only as echoes of what Picasso was doing, we know what Picasso was painting and we know Cocteau's there because he's in a drawing but quite what he was doing there at the age of twenty... ? You know, he obviously was doing something of significance because he's in all the drawings and all the photographs, but nobody knows. And you've done that for me. You've filled in all the blanks."

Although originally planned to be covered in Volume Three, we had so much to pack into 1981 and 1982 that we didn't get as far as Clive's final three staged plays - Crazyface, Subtle Bodies and Colossus. These will be covered in Volume Four, along with a chapter on the life of Clive's plays since the publication of Incarnations and Forms of Heaven in the mid-1990s. If you have been involved in a production of one of the plays (or maybe an adaptation of one of Clive's books for the stage), we'd love to hear from you.

Order all three volumes at The Clive Barker Archive