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Horror is anti-life, a celebration of death, but the writing is pro-life.
- Clive Barker
Not every reader is going to respond favourably to a novel that begins like this: "The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning."
But if you're the sort of reader who does, well, welcome to the world of Clive Barker. And be advised (or forewarned, as the case may be): There are 24 or 25 other Barker books with sentences like the one you just read, which is from 2002's Abarat, the first volume of a projected quintet of novels.
At 55, Barker is a very big deal in the horror/fantasy genre and has been since the early 1980s when none other than Stephen King declared: "I have seen the future of horror fiction and its name is Clive Barker." Not only is Barker a phenomenally prolific producer of novels and short stories -- all of which he writes in long hand -- he's a painter, book illustrator, screenwriter, movie director and producer, comic-book author, concocter of computer games and, for a spell in his 20s at least, a playwright. Remember Pinhead, the aptly named and ferociously evil villain in the Hellraiser movies? Blame Barker if you do.
All this has made the former Liverpudlian with a voice akin to that of a bullfrog in the throes of strangulation a millionaire many times over, and given him the wherewithal to create a fenced-in compound of three houses in the hills above Los Angeles, anchored by a four-storey 1926 mansion owned first by one Oscar winner, Ronald Colman, then another, Loretta Young.
Naturally, there's a large and lovely pool on the premises in which "I swim occasionally," a tanned Barker remarked during a visit to Toronto last year. But "my relaxation is my work," he confessed with a raspy chuckle. "I'm incredibly lucky in that somebody up there decreed, 'This man will have a hole in his head and we'll be able to pour strong fluids, liquors and syrups into his brain and he will imagine bizarre things.' "
In fact, the man's latest fictional foray, Mister B. Gone, published in the waning weeks of 2007, is 248 pages of relaxation. For the last year or so, Barker has been working up a big novel called The Scarlet Gospels featuring characters and settings that appear in one of his earliest books, 1986's The Hellbound Heart. By mid-June last year he'd completed his third draft and was facing what he hoped would be the fourth and final rewrite, totalling 4,000 hand-written pages, when he decided he needed "a break from this dark Dante-esque thing I was writing." Simultaneous with this, "I had in the back of my head this notion: What would happen if a book is possessed, if the book is watching you, figuring out your personality, interpreting the sweat of your thumbs as they rest on the page?' "
Mister B. Gone is the realization of that notion. It's narrated in the first-person by one Jakabok Botch, a two-tailed demon who, after being hauled to the Earth's surface from his home in the Ninth Circle of Hell (the aural allusion to Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, creator of The Garden of Earthly Delights, is entirely intentional), has 100 years or so of brutal adventures in medieval Europe. These culminate in a fateful visit in 1438 to Mainz, Germany, where Botch meets Johannes Gutenberg who's putting the finishing touches on his new invention, the printing press.
Barker's book, of course, is a metaphor for the infectious nature of reading, the power that words can have for good or ill, the dangers and delights that came with the promiscuous proliferation of printed texts. But it's also about sex or, rather, the lack of sex. "I think there is an absolutely direct, indisputable correlation between my life as an artist and the rhythms of my life as a writer and the rhythms of desire," Barker observed. With Mister B. Gone, "I wanted to do something that just came out of my guts and, yes, my balls and through my heart, bypassing my brain, and out. I had to be in that man, that creature, Jakabok Botch." All of which meant that Barker for several weeks last spring put himself on a regimen of writing six hours a day, starting around 9 in the morning, for seven days a week -- and no sex. "We're talking about energy essentially, creativity: The sex goes into the book, even though there's no sex in the book. If I have sex in the morning, I am useless for the rest of the day; I'm too bloody happy; I've scratched the itch."
So it's like that post-coital line of Woody Allen's in Annie Hall, "As Balzac said, 'There goes another novel' "?
Right, Barker agreed. "You have to pay the price and the price is orgasm."
For the last 17 years, Barker has been living with David Armstrong, the African-American photographer whom Barker easily and unpretentiously refers to as "my husband" while sporting a wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand. The couple also has joint custody of Armstrong's daughter, Nicole, from a previous relationship.
Barker has been openly gay for many years and believes his orientation has fed into the directions both his writing and life have taken. Coming of age in the late 1960s, studying university-level philosophy and English literature in the tough, working-class milieu that was Liverpool, "I felt intensely different," he averred.
"Not in a bad way, not in an injured or self-pitying way, but I stood a little away from the tribe and that gave me a wonderful ability to look at the tribe with different eyes, to critique it, if you will."
Horror has proven a decidedly protean genre, he finds, "a compendium of possibilities" rather than just "a one-trick pony that does nothing more than go, 'Boo.' " Yet the idiom will never be entirely domesticated, never entirely in and of the mainstream. As a result, its otherness resonates with his homosexuality.
Even the decision to move to Los Angeles in the mid-nineties had its roots in gay experience - in this instance, seeing David Hockney's famous 1967 painting A Bigger Splash at the Tate in London when Barker was 18 or 19. A Brit like Barker and gay (but almost 20 years older), Hockney visited California for the first time in his mid-20s and determined to escape there from England's dreary skies. "I saw Hockney with Peter Schlesinger, his then-boyfriend, and all these pretty boys by the pool in the sun," Barker recalled, "and I thought, 'One day, Barker, one day, you're gonna do that.' "
It took a while for that to happen, however. In fact, in the late 1980s, he bought a five-storey Georgian house in a posh London neighbourhood. "But then I crept toward my 40th birthday and I thought, 'I need to make an active move.' "
Barker now has dual citizenship but prefers to spend most of his time in Los Angeles because "I hate to fly." Generally, life is pleasant, especially since he decided a few years ago not to direct any more films. "I've hit walls with movies, with dealing with studio people where you're up to your seventh draft and, y'know, they don't know what they want, they just want something different." He laughed. "It's a town where people are in love with the sound of their own voices. I mean, I remain astounded at how celebrity seems to confer a validation on an opinion. Pretty soon someone's gonna ask Paris Hilton about the state of the economy."
