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.
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