By Christina Radish
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Clive Barker with his life partner David Armstrong |
In his illustrious career as an author, artist and filmmaker, Clive Barker has become known as a master of horror and the fantastical. Born on October 5, 1952 in Liverpool, England, Barker began his career in the arts as a playwright, actor and director for a fringe theater group that he formed in London. By the mid-1990s, he had a slew of best selling novels, short story collections and comic book series bearing his name.
Creator of such recognizable horror figures as Pinhead and Candyman, the 53-year-old Barker took time off from writing his newest creation, The Scarlett Gospel, to talk exclusively with MediaBlvd Magazine about his latest endeavors, and finding the time to do everything he hopes to accomplish.
“I’ve got a long way to go before I’m finished with The Scarlett Gospel. I’m actually on page 2,445 of my hand-written third draft. The first two drafts were 3,000 pages apiece, so it’s going to be a long one. But, if you’re going to go down to Hell, you’re not going to do it more than once, so you make it a proper trip.”
With an energy and imagination that seem to have no bounds, Barker has received both the acclaim of critics and the admiration of millions of fans around the world. The prolific writer and painter believes that, even though it is possible to hone your craft, you really have to be born with the gift for storytelling.
{quote_top}“I don’t believe you really can train to write. You can polish your craft by reading and studying the people that you admire, but I think it would be really hard to teach people what brings me to the desk every day at 9 o’clock because I don’t know. It’s an urgency, a need to express myself and to tell stories that appear in my head without me even really inviting them to appear. I remember, even as a relatively small kid, being left with my younger brother and being told to entertain him by telling him stories. That goes to say something about the fact that, early on, my parents knew that that was something I could do, and enjoyed doing. The fact that I can still tell stories that engage people, and that they can be stories of different kinds -- whether it be horror stories, or lighter stuff, like The Thief of Always, or something that’s very fantastical, like Imajica, or even something that has a religious underpinning, like Sacrament, or even The Scarlett Gospel -- and find an audience, greatly pleases me.”
Although he achieved his initial success as a horror writer, Barker reveals that the stories that he wrote for his own entertainment, as a kid, or for the entertainment of his schoolmates or his brother, were not horror stories. “They were always tinged with an element of fantasy. Scary stuff was interesting to me, but no more, no less than any other kind of story, to be perfectly honest. And, I think the fact that I began with horror stories is really, as much as anything, because I saw that there were books of short stories out there with horror as their subject, and there weren’t a lot of other kinds of short story books out there. I didn’t see books of short fantasy stories. If I had, I might very well have started there.”
“In my library of the stuff that I collected, I had collections of short horror fiction, and I knew from reading those that that was something I could probably try my hand at. And, once I’d tried my hand at that, and done six books of short stories and a novel, Damnation Game, in the same genre, I pretty much felt as though I’d played out what I wanted to do in that area. Even though I’m going back to the dark stuff again, The Scarlett Gospel is a very different kind of dark stuff. It’s a much more epic narrative.”
Barker’s horror stories are so scary because they are psychologically horrific as much as they are gory, making them all the more terrifying. “In my ideal world, the stories should have a little bit of both. There should definitely be an element of the psychological, but there should also be an element of the gory. If you don’t deliver that, you’re not delivering the punch that I, as an author, have become associated with. I’m an author that people expect a certain kind of extreme from. If I’m going to go to a fantastical world, it’s going to be extremely fantastical. If I’m going to do something horrific, it’s probably going to be pretty intensely so. And, I like to be identified with taking people on extreme journeys of one kind or another.”
Since the success of his horror work, Barker has also proven his cross-over appeal with his children’s books, such as The Thief of Always and his Abarat series. But, that was definitely not the case, in the beginning.
“With The Thief of Always, there was no enthusiasm from my publishers that I could do it. In fact, early on, there was an active attempt to dissuade me from doing it. So, I sold the book for $1 to Harper Collins because, that way, they weren’t at any risk, financially. At that time, they had no faith that a Clive Barker book for children would sell. That was then, and things change. What drew me to writing a children’s book was nothing more than the instinct that the story was in me and, at one point or another, was going to be told. And, the book is taught in schools now, which is nice. I get a lot of letters from readers who say, ‘This is the first book I read,’ and, to me, it’s very important that you can attract a reader with a story that will then open up the whole reading experience to them. To be able to do that is wonderful.”
{quote_middle}When it came time to do the Abarat series, Barker says that he knew he wanted to do a book about an invented world, much like the Narnia books are about an invented world, that he could return to, in subsequent volumes. “I’d known that I wanted to do that, since the very beginning, because I took pleasure in such books, when I was a kid. It’s very hard to be sure where the idea begins and where the percolation is. I will nurture ideas for a long, long time, before they will eventually find their moment. I wanted to do the Abarat books, or books similar to the Abarat books, since I didn’t know that they were going to be called Abarat, for a long time. My editor and I had been plotting to try to get Harper Collins to agree to it for 12 years, before they eventually said, ‘Yeah, okay.’”
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Clive Barker with one of his latest business endeavors |
With all of the product lines that Barker lends his name to, he says that his priorities still remain his writing and his painting. “My two primary jobs are at the desk, writing novels, and in the studio, where I’m painting. Everything else, like the movie world, the comic world, the toy world and the game world, are places that I, obviously, have interest, but I’m not going to try and pretend, for one moment, that I can sit down and really adapt my own work into comic book form. I think that would be fairly disastrous, for one thing. I wouldn’t know what to throw out. I’d want everything in, and it would be a 90-issue run. I think it’s important to have other people around you, who can teach you, or who can simply do the job better, and you can just take the pleasure in picking up the comic every month.”
The most recent comic book endeavor that Barker has become involved with is IDW’s adaptation of The Great and Secret Show. “We had some initial concerns because, originally, they were going to try to do it in only six issues, and I didn’t think that was doable. Eventually, we brought everybody around to the idea that we could do it in 12. But, beyond that, I leave the people who know their job best to go do it.”
On an average day, Barker admits to spending 2-3 hours, in favor of his writing, which means if he spends six hours writing, he devotes about four to his painting. Even so, he is currently working on about 40 different paintings, which are in various stages.
“Part of that is about the process. Oil paints take a long time to dry, and I like to lay on one color and then lay another color on top of it, and then scrape off the top color to reveal some of the color beneath, so you have to be cognizant of the drying times. And, some of it is that you paint a picture, get half-way through, and you just don’t know how to get it that final distance to where it needs to be. That can be very frustrating, sometimes, because you know the painting is in there somewhere, but you’re damned if you know how to get it out. There’s a constant challenge in all these arenas, but in the painting arena, it’s really one of getting out of my own way and not over thinking things and not over intellectualizing it.”
“Almost always, when I go to a canvas with a very clear intention, I screw it up. I’m always disappointed when they turn out badly, very frequently. There’s a huge wastage. But, I like to be surprised by what appears on the canvas, as much as possible. I’ll have a vague idea because, obviously, if you’re drawing a human being, or you’re drawing a landscape, the first marks you make on the canvas are going to be different marks. Beyond that, the thing sort of evolves with its own energy and its own language, and I think it’s important to let it do that.”
{quote_bottom}Over the years, Barker has always been more than gracious with his fans, often spending hours at book signings, penning his signature on bags of books and answering questions about his work. “Here I am, meeting my readership, and they often have very useful things to say about what works and what doesn’t work for them. They’ll ask when I’m going to finish this story or when I’m going to start that one. One of the reasons why my signings take so long is because I tend to take a little time with each person because everybody is different. People have different questions and different ideas. I thought that, when the Internet came along, it would, in a way, answer people’s questions because the websites would be a focus for people’s questions and they could be answered that way and, therefore, the signings would move along more quickly. But, in fact, what’s happened is that the existence of the websites has simply made it easier for people to know of the signings, so there’s just more people there.”
Although he says he has very rarely left a signing with a bad feeling about the experience, Barker has had an occasional odd fan request. “I’ve signed on various pieces of anatomy, and I’ve drawn pictures which have been tattooed over. One person came back at the end of the signing, and already had it tattooed over. I have had invitations to some extremely strange parties, not that I’ve gone to them. Occasionally, people have wanted me to sign their books in blood, because of my Books of Blood, but that happens less and less. The tone of the signings tend to be up, and people tend to enjoy themselves. I know of friendships and, indeed, marriages that have started in line at my signings. I know of three or four couples who met in line and later married and had kids. In the full sum of things, with the number of signings that I’ve done over the years, the tone has been overwhelmingly benign.”
Looking to the future, Barker has so many things that he wants to accomplish that he merely hopes he’ll have time to get to them all. “I was actually talking with somebody who lived, and was brought up in, India, and who practices a lot of Indian medicinal methods, and he looked at me and said, ‘You have a very strong constitution. You’re going to live a very long time.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s good because I have a lot to do.’ There’s a lot of painting and a lot of writing and, maybe, one of these days, I’ll get back to making a movie.”
“I would like to clone myself. It would be easier. Every morning, I wake up with more stuff buzzing around my head -- stories to be told, pictures to be drawn -- and I’m very grateful. I wake up in the middle of the night and poems are there, in my head, and if I’m quick enough, I can get them down. I, literally, wake up with them in my head, in their entirety. I can’t really make too much claim for them, except to say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s my poem.’ It’s somebody’s poem, and it was presented to me, or my subconscious was nicely cooking it up behind my back.”
