Fantasy Artists

Personal life

Barker was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Joan Rubie (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm.[1][2] Educated at the same schools as John Lennon: Dovedale County Primary and Quarrybank, he studied English and philosophy at Liverpool University. Barker lives in Los Angeles, California with his partner of 17 years, photographer David Emilian Armstrong and Armstrong's daughter Nicole from a previous relationship.

In 2003, Clive Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. This award is presented "to an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individual who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for any of those communities".[3] While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has stated that he is a believer in both God and the Bible, and that the Christian message influences his work.[4]

Clive Barker had said, "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."


Writing career

Barker is one of the leading authors of contemporary horror/fantasy, writing in the horror genre early in his career, mostly in the form of short stories (collected in Books of Blood 1 - 6), and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game (1985). Later he moved towards modern-day fantasy and urban fantasy with horror elements in Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1989), the world-spanning Imajica (1991) and Sacrament (1996), bringing in the deeper, richer concepts of reality, the nature of the mind and dreams, and the power of words and memories. His most recent novel (2007) is Mister B. Gone.

Barker's distinctive style is characterized by the notion of hidden fantastical worlds coexisting with our own, the role of sexuality in the supernatural and the construction of coherent, complex and detailed universes. Barker has referred to this style as "dark fantasy" or the "fantastique". His stories are notable for a deliberate blurring of the distinction between binary opposites such as hell and heaven, or pleasure and pain (the latter particularly so in 'The Hellbound Heart').

When the Books of Blood were first published in the United States in paperback, Stephen King was quoted on the book covers: "I have seen the future of horror, his name is Clive Barker."[5] A critical analysis of Barker's work appears in S. T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale. (2001)

Novels

* (1985) The Damnation Game
* (1986) The Hellbound Heart
* (1987) Weaveworld
* (1988) Cabal
* (1989) The Great and Secret Show (first "Book of the Art")
* (1991) Imajica
* (1992) The Thief of Always
* (1994) Everville (second "Book of the Art")
* (1996) Sacrament
* (1998) Galilee
* (2001) Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story
* (2001) Tortured Souls (novelette)
* (2002) Abarat (first book of the Abarat Quintet)
* (2004) Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War (second book of the Abarat Quintet)
* (2007) Mister B. Gone
* (2009) Absolute Midnight (third book of the Abarat Quintet)
* (2009) Mr. Maximillian Bacchus And His Travelling Circus (limited run by Bad Moon Books)
* (20??) The Scarlet Gospels (As of yet unpublished novel in final draft, featuring the characters and universe that first appeared in The Hellbound Heart centering on the character of Pinhead and also featuring Barker's character, Harry D'Amour, from The Last Illusion, The Great and Secret Show, Everville and the film Lord of Illusions. Was originally going to be the title story for a collection of stories, then became a long novella, which may or may not have been included with the short stories.)