"There will also be a book called Shadows In Eden which is the Clive Barker compendium, if you like, in the sense that it's part biography, part essays, part interviews. There's a lot of stuff about the theatre work, a lot of stuff about the paintings. Steve Jones is editing.
"It will be a very big, very lavish book with a lot of drawings in it, a lot of hitherto unpublished visual material, a lot of work on the Hellraiser pictures. A nice project, a very exciting project."

Chains Of Love

By Mark Salisbury, Fear, No 3, November - December 1988

"As Mr. Jones points out in his introduction, this book is not a biography. The articles gathered between these covers make only passing reference to the names, dates and locations which constitute the conventional stuff of biography. But my life has been in every way stamped by the work that is the subject of those articles; so heavily that to try and separate life from work is beyond the doing. My emotional troughs and peaks are reflected in the stories I choose to tell; stories into which I put my doubts, desires, hopes and confusions. What price names, dates and locations when these rawer revelations are all too readily available, laid out in black, white and Technicolor? If I'm anything, it's the feelings and ideas I value highly enough to try and convey in images, or narrative, or both. These are the truest things about me. The rest is gossip; or worse, mere particulars.
"This book then, while not a biography, serves as footnotes in the fact of my fiction. Mr. Jones has assembled the articles meticulously sifting through box after box of photographs, sketches, reviews, magazine articles, theater posters and programs, press releases, cover designs, personal correspondence and public pronouncements, finding - amid a mass of redundant material - the hopefully illuminating nuggets he has chosen to publish here. I thank him for the gentility of his persistence, and for his insight. He has been in every way a perfect detective: not seeming to intrude, yet not leaving, at the end, a single box unopened. The process took dedication, courtesy and skill. He has displayed all three in abundance. May I also extend my thanks to Mr. Underwood, who has shown great faith in this project, though at times - almost always through fault of my own - its completion has seemed as notional as the Quest Beast."

Shadows In Eden

Afterword by Barker, June 1989 in Shadows In Eden

"It's edited by Stephen Jones and it will be a great collection of essays, biographical things, pictures, a lot of unseen graphics for the movie stuff and that kind of thing. I guess that'll come out sometime around Spring 1989. A big and lovely book. It will be the definitive work, it'll also contain a big bibliography. It'll be a fun thing.
"It will contain some of that [early work, plays]. It will certainly contain a whole bunch of interviews with the actors who worked on those projects, so that'll be kind of fun. Doug Bradley, who was Pinhead, was one of those. I think it'll be a fun book. Quite a big book too. I'm looking forward to it."

Running With The Monsters

By Gerald Houghton, Grim Humour, No 14, [Autumn] 1989

"There's a book about me coming out next week called Shadows in Eden, which is biography, plus bibliography... I went through the book and I thought, all the real important details of my life are actually in the novels. Every single obsession, all my taboo stuff, all the private preoccupations, all the fears, all the hopes, are there. Maybe they're encoded, maybe they're presented as allegories, but they're there. And the rest of it is just husks. But, we live in a world that thinks about people in terms of numbers, that thinks of authors in terms of thirty million copies sold. Simple, trite ways to classify people."

Clive Barker

By Joe Schreiber, Michigan Daily, [Autumn] 1991

"Somewhere between what the biographer writes, the conscience confesses and the critic accuses you of, can be insights the reader may find of interest and amusement. This book promises to contain all of the above, plus some stuff even my analyst doesn't know..."

Shadows In Eden

Quote by Barker on the cover of Shadows In Eden

...other comments

Stephen Jones: "The idea goes back to 1987, when I was doing Hellraiser with Clive. At that time we talked about it and decided it would be entertaining to do a book about the first five years of Clive Barker. In fact, it was the first book I ever signed a contract for. It is now about the twentieth of mine to come out, it has been that long. I delivered the bulk of the book around 1989, after we had finished up on Nightbreed. It's taken this long to design and layout the book...
"I came up with this non-fiction anthology idea to collect these snippets of information. It worked on three levels. You can read the material in the margins, which is basically reviews and quotes by Clive and other writers - that could make up one book. Then there are the main articles, some of which are reprints and others that were done originally for the book - which makes another layer of the book. Or, you could just go through and look at all the artwork and photographs. On top of all that, you obviously have the working bibliography at the end.
"So the basic concept is, if you had all the other Clive Barker books, this is the one that goes on the end of the shelf next to the rest."

Clive Barker's Shadows In Eden

By [ ], World of Fandom, Vol 2 No 15, Spring 1992

"The stunning looks of this book didn't come easy and if it looks expensive, there's a reason. It is expensive.
"Looking at the details from page to page, the constant torrent of sketches and drawing, the beautiful layout, the color plates, one gets, well, used to it. But it didn't come cheaply. 'We spent $25,000 in typesetting alone,' Miller confides. Unfortunately it hasn't paid off as well as they'd have liked... 'We hope that the Hellraiser movies and the media involvement will increase sales, and his new book, which he'll be touring to support. When he's signing those new books, that's a good opportunity to sell Shadows in Eden.' "

From Beyond - The Dangers Of Electricity: Publishing And The Small Press

By [ ], Midnight Graffiti, No 7, Fall 1992 (including an interview with Chuck Miller of Underwood-Miller)

Revelations: "This astonishing, inspirational book retains a freshness and depth such that, a decade after its publication, it is never far from our desk. Testament only to the very best sources of knowledge and research, its covers rarely stay closed and we, long ago, had to buy a second copy as a working copy.
"It's a beautiful book - the layout and format are instrumental in its dual abilities to act as a kind of Readers Digest of quotes at the same time as offering in-depth articles, criticism and insight. The enormous impact of the design team at Underwood-Miller cannot be underestimated here as the same overall approach by Stephen Jones in his James Herbert book, By Horror Haunted, produced a far less user-friendly experience.
"It's also a wealth of fascinating information. Shadows In Eden was the book that fired our desire to gather together our own thoughts and insights in order to track and remind ourselves of all that makes Clive's work an essential part of our lives. We had a clear vision at the start of creating Revelations about the kind of areas we wanted to cover and this was helped in no small part by the understanding we had taken early on from Shadows In Eden of the various facets of Clive's work.
"Published at a time when horror - and the economy generally - was at a low point in the cycle, the high cover price and "serious" nature of the work deterred some consumers and some critics, already annoyed at Barker's seemingly meteoric rise to fame, openly questioned the need for such a work about such an author. However, the collection was acknowledged as ground-breaking by many and won the 1992 Bram Stoker Award in its genre. A paperback release of the book in 1993 attempted to make the work more accessible with colourful images from the Razorline comics and Hellraiser 3 on its cover and a much friendlier price.
"We can offer no greater praise than, if asked to recommend one non-fiction item to a friend to explain just why it is that we devote so much time to Clive Barker, this would be the one. It's long out of print but, if you don't own a copy, give yourself a treat and get out there and find one.
"We've had an open offer out to Stephen Jones to work with him on a sequel ever since we put Revelations up online and keep hoping for a call to arms..."

Revelations Review

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, March 2002

Stephen Jones: "Shadows in Eden... grew out of working with Clive on the first two Hellraiser movies and Nightbreed. We just accumulated a lot of stuff, some of which I used in a couple of illustrated books, Clive Barker's The Nightbreed Chronicles and The Hellraiser Chronicles. After the first five years of Clive's meteoric rise to fame, it seemed to me the right time to do a book about him. I knew somebody would eventually do a book about him, so why shouldn't it be me? Clive and I discussed it, and we both decided we didn't want to just do a straight biography. Instead it would tell his story from various viewpoints, using articles, interviews and reviews, plus his own artwork and designs. We thought it was very important to make the final product as attractive as possible. It took four years from start to finish. It was a way of presenting the information in a different, and I hope entertaining, way. I'd seen what had been done with some of the books about Stephen King, and I didn't want to go that route. Of course, Clive's background as an illustrator and a filmmaker helped us enormously with the visual approach."

Jack Of All Trades, Master Of Some

By [ ], Tabula Rasa, No 6, 1995

S. T. Joshi: "Clive Barker's Shadows In Eden is a magnificent compilation. It has just about everything the Clive Barker fan could want: rare materials by Barker, many interviews of him, appreciations by his colleagues, a few serious critical analyses, and a rich abundance of photographs of and drawings by him. Most of the items are reprinted: of the fifty or so pieces here, thirty-seven are previously published; of the thirteen original pieces (two by Barker), at least three are reworkings of earlier articles. The arrangement of articles (as well as a large number of sidebars and marginal comments) has been accomplished with exceptional skill, and presents just about as complete a picture of Barker the man and writer as we are likely to have for a long time. The overriding question of whether Barker the man and writer genuinely deserves this sort of treatment is one that this volume cannot, I suppose, be expected to answer...
"It is not to be expected, perhaps, in a book of this sort - in which Barker himself has lent much assistance - that anything especially negative would be printed. Certainly none of the actual articles are, and some of them - as well as the interviews - are so effusive that in the end they become a little sick-making. Some of the sidebars, however, print negative reviews of his plays, books and films and these are rather entertaining."

Barker (And Others) On Barker

By S. T. Joshi, Necrofile, No 2, Fall 1991

Chuck Miller: "Shadows In Eden came to us via a note from Steve Jones in 1987 who saw what we were doing with the King books and said, 'Do you want to do something like this with Barker?' And we thought it was a good idea, so we took it and ran with it."

Spotlight On Publishing: Underwood And Miller

By Bob Morrish, Cemetery Dance, Vol 4, Issue 1, Winter 1992

George Beahm: "A companion book compiled in collaboration with Clive Barker, Shadows In Eden is a textual and visual delight - assuming your tastes run a little on the dark side. Published by Underwood-Miller, this 465-page book is profusely illustrated by Barker, whose demons, imps, and hellish souls spring from his pen with the ease with which his stories flow from that same pen...
"It's a hellish book - there's no other way to describe it - and simply indispensible reading for any Barker fan."

Clive Barker, Shadows In Eden

By George Beahm, The Stephen King Companion (revised edition), 1995