31 Days of Halloween: Day 5 “Happy Birthday, Clive Barker!”

October 5th marks the 61st birthday of one of the greatest writers of horror fiction in waning days of the 20th century. The yin to Stephen King’s yang, Clive Barker burst upon the scene with his six volume Books of Blood, changing the face of horror forever. Incorporating, at the time, transgressive sexuality and violence into the booming horror genre, these books, along with his first early novels such as The Damnation Game, set him up as the anti-King, the go-to author of horror fiction who was too scary to be read by your parents or the squares who attended your school.

With fame and acclaim under his belt (as well as a film adaption of his short story “The Hellbound Heart” directed by himself as Hellraiser) and Stephen King himself declaring him the future of horror, Clive Barker kicked off 1989 with the release of the first of three books that will forever be marked as the peak of his career.

The Great And Secret Show was the book that really marked Barker’s entry to the big leagues. At almost 700 pages, it was his thickest novel to date. The first book in his (as of October 2013) still uncompleted “Art Trilogy,” it was the novel that fully marked his transition from one of the young turks in the “splatterpunk” movement to an author, like Neil Gaiman a decade later, able to fuse horror and dark fantasy into a greater whole. The story of two men who over time evolve into duelling Christ and Satan figures and the effects their sorcerous battle has on a small town, it has remained a favorite of Barker fans the world over.

His next novel, released in 1991, is considered by myself and many others to be his greatest work of fiction. Imajica is a doorstop of a book that takes place over a multiverse of multiple dimensions as well as  a couple of centuries. A search for love, a quest for God, and a battle for the fate of all mankind and womankind, Imajica is the culmination of every idea Clive Barker had been working up to at this point and did so with panache, gore, and some of the most beautiful yet disturbing imagery he could find. I really can’t recommend Imajica enough.

After filling in the gap with his fantastic young adult novel The Thief of Always, 1994 saw the release of Everville, the second book in the “Art Trilogy.” His last massive novel, Everville picks up some of the threads left over from The Great and Secret Show and weaves them into a new story about the town of Everville, which sits on the borderland between our world and the world of Quiddity, the sea of dreams and magic. A great story that just never seems to quite come together, it perhaps shows Barker’s exhaustion with the epic style of writing. Here in 2013, almost 20 years later, we are still waiting for the last book in the trilogy, Clive Barker’s answer to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Series.

These three books, published within a five year span of time, are the culmination of Barker’s very British strand of horror fiction. While afterwards he never quite got back into the doorstop epic, his career laid the groundwork for others such as Neil Gaiman to follow in his footsteps. In fact there is such a great similarity between the two writers that one can almost imagine a certain passing of the torch from one to another in the late nineties. Hopefully, one day, Clive Barker will finish his “Art Trilogy” but, if he doesn’t, I don’t mind. If you include Imajica in this series (which thematically fits quite in), Clive Barker has perhaps said all he needs to about magic and the role imagination plays in our lives.

So, if you’re looking for 2,400 pages of some of the best horror/dark fantasy written over the last 25 years, you couldn’t do much better than picking up The Great And Secret Show, Imajica, and Everville. Happy birthday, Clive Barker and thanks for providing some of the greatest scares and stories I’ve ever read.

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All three of the books discussed in this post are available in both print and ebook formats from bookpeople.com. Click the title inks above to find out more.