His Words, Our Heart

To really understand why fans folk to bookstore shelves for the next Barker book, is to understand a little about your own mortality, a little about the dark and wondrous, and a lot about the fantastic gift of true storytelling. A story is a gift, whether it's format be a novel, short story, video, game, poem, or something spoken to you, whispered in your ear as your heart races away.

It's about escaping, it's about the curiosity and adventure, it's about wanting to understand more of the worlds within the imagination, and less about mortgages and the problem of raising the debt ceiling. It's less about the hustle-and-bustle of traffic, the shoe-lace coming undone, the milk souring in the fridge, and more about the elves hidden in the trees, the magic in the wand, and the heart of the fire-breathing dragon inside of the frosty caves. It's imaginers like Barker, telling us to forget the world, and remember your dreams that keep us alive and well.

 "I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers."

                                                           - Barker - cite 1

It's prose like:

"There is no delight the equal of dread. If it were possible to sit, invisible, between two people on any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that subject. Cetainly the debate might appear to be about something else entirely different; the state of the nation, idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care; but strip away the metaphor, the innuendo, and there, nestling at the heart of the discourse is dread..." -  from "Dread" from Books of Blood, Vol. 1.

That keeps you wanting more, and keeps you with a hungry heart for what goes bump in the night.

Please continue downward to the showcase we have in store for you!

Splatterpunk, yes ma'am!

What is Splatterpunk? 

Splatterpunk. A contemporary mixture of horror, gore, fantasy, grunge and sci-fi rolled up like a burrito.

Why is Clive Barker Splatterpunk?


If you've followed these blogs, you can see why the aforementioned and Clive Barker fit into a nice little niche together, and why it's people like Clive Barker surging the Splatterpunk movement.

It's bloody descriptions, it's detail galore, and it's enjoying pulling out the innards of juicy, wet, fantastic stories like...Clive Barker's "Pig Blood Blues", "The Yattering and Jack", "The Midnight Meat Train", it's stories that grip you, and make it a race against time to continue reading, and continue falling deeper under the spell.

His Growing Legacy

Clive Barker, is beyond the page and pen, the brush and pad, or the screen and reel.

- A Barker Painting

The variety in Clive Barker's works even include books that border on being children's books, such as the Thief of Always - a coming-of-age story of victory against a soul-stealer who traps you in a world of pleasant bliss; a faked reality - as it robs you of your youth and soul. 

His films, though not as wildly successful as his literature, have been both panned by critics, and loved, some like the above, turned into cult classics for the b-horror movie genre-junkies. 

His stories invite you to glimpse all of the romantically fantastic, all of the grossly gruesome, the horribly horrific, the sexy-sinister while enjoying something laced with magic and wonder. Stories like the 'Hellbound Heart' - a story of a puzzlebox that's also a gateway portal to torture, and the architects of pain and sensuality, the Cenobites (demons) - creatures like:

Pinhead. A horror movie icon, and haunter of nightmares.

Drum roll, please! Introducing our main attraction...

Critical Wave #6, published 1988. Portrait of Clive Barker by Iain Byers.

What makes a man like Clive Barker, horror author, vivid imaginer, accomplished painter, film director, producer, and video game producer, and comic book writer and artist, wake up each morning with imagery like 'wrapping its purple-black arm', 'one was perhaps eighteen or twenty feet tall...its skin that hung in folds...its head a cone of exposed teeth set in scarlet gums' blistering through his subconscious? Those fragments are from a short story entitled 'The Skins of the Fathers' from Barker's acclaimed, and 

multi-award-winning series, the Books of Blood, Vol. 2.

His prose can illicit praise, like the quote above from Tarantino, but did you know that even the great Stephen King keeps the light on to get through Barker's yarns? The below is from King. 

"He scares even me...What Barker does in the Books of Blood makes the rest of us look like we've been asleep for the last ten years. Some of the stories were so creepily awful that I literally could not read them alone; others go up and over the edge and into gruesome territory...He's an original."

                                                  - From the Books of Blood inside cover

Whether or not the gravity of the words above has you clamoring for the next Barker book, talent like his is rarely so multifaceted, so well-received, and unyielding.

  
Barker's writing style is distinctively unique even in the horror and fantasy genres. Since the early 1980's, which saw the release of his earliest short stories and novels like The Damnation Game, The Hellbound Heart,  Weaveworld, Cabal, and The Great and Secret Show - Barker has claimed his seat as one of the most influential, prolific, unreserved, and uncompromising authors of our century. 

His film works, such as "Hellraiser", "Candy Man", and more recently, "Midnight Meat Train", and "Book of Blood" have been scaring the daylights out of people since the early nineties as well.

 

Welcome, friend

It's easy to overlook how frightened you once were.


It's in the past, tucked neatly away behind every other memory both tedious, and worthwhile. You chained it up like some unwanted stepchild. You've stacked up defenses against the dark and macabre, against what once made you grip the comforter closer to the pounding in your chest, what you tried to will away by biting down on the soft tissue of your lip.

It's okay. It's understandable. It's normal.

That's why you came here isn't it? You wanted reassurance that the noises from the hall are just the house settling, just the dog screwing around with the trash, just the wind throwing around the chimes, right? Okay, we'll say it is for now...