#BookishThoughts – A Gratitude Post for Kendall Reviews and Clive Barker

I wanted to reach out with this relatively reflective piece of bookish ruminations, to say a massive thanks to the awesome Kendall Reviews for their superb Clive Barker centric Unholy Advent Calendar.

It has been a pure pleasure to read the daily entries from far and wide, astounded by the knowledge that not only did Gav manage to gather these amazing writers together, but that he also rebooted a genuine love for the earliest works of the fabulist, Clive Barker.

There was supposed to be a piece by me, for ‘Twilight At The Towers’ a brilliant body horror tale of identity and sadly this was not to be, as I have been pretty much sick all month. I have not been able to do much more than drag myself to work and come home and sleep, reading has pretty much been off the table. And like a bright light in a dark tunnel, the regular dropping of the Kendall posts in my mailbox have been the high points of my day.

Admin has fallen by the side, I have no idea where I am with anything and it’s all a bit upside down, but I am getting there and will be replying to any and all messages, emails etc over the next week, but for now, I would be so grateful if you would indulge me at this time in saying thanks to the supporters of the dark arts, the ones who keep the flames burning bright and long through the winter nights.

Kendall Reviews is new to me, I have only recently -last couple of years-been regularly using Twitter to find new authors and bookish bedfellows and holy crap did I hit the motherlode when I signed up to the newsletter!

New authors? They got them.

Highlighting the lesser known corners of the horror world? Check.

Reviving and breathing fresh life into thought pieces and interviews? You got it.

Finding you a hand of glory to carry out a much needed ritual? Nope, that was someone else but I am sure they know a man who can….

With a wicked sense of humour and a dedication to promoting horror which is unsurpassed in my experience, I have been thoroughly entertained all year, reignited my love of this genre and found the most amazing community.

So if you enjoy being scared , I would highly advise you check them out, and in particular, the labour of love which is the Advent Calendar.

What you will find behind each door beats a square of chocolate and a poorly drawn representation of the Nativity…

Reading the introduction to the new omnibus edition of Books Of Blood 1-3 took me on a trip down memory lane, to the very first time I encountered the master of horror fiction.

It was the early 1990’s and , intrigued by all the dynamic covers of the individual paperbacks, I picked up the first volume and dived straight in to a world unlike any I had read before. To say it broaden my horizons as a teen would be inaccurate-it smashed that horizon to shards of waste and replaced it with a beautiful and deadly landscape , filled with Bosch-ian creatures. Creatures that look surprisingly human.

To be put frankly, I was in love. I devoured these nightmares, or did they devour me?

‘The Hellbound Heart’ ‘Cabal’, ‘The Damnation Game’,…I could not get enough and, there was a part of me that was incredibly disappointed that Clive went off into the realms of fantasy where I felt I couldn’t follow. This was a time of massive social unrest, the Iraq wars were beginning, the AIDs epidemic was in full swing and it felt like the world that I knew, even in the relatively protected confines of a small Welsh town, was coming apart at the seams.

Blood, death destruction….give me all you got!

And then, you get older, things change , you become a parent and see through very different eyes. The things you didn’t ‘get’ when younger become the things you lean on as an adult. ‘The Books Of Blood’ went away at some point, lost in a move or donated, I cannot remember, but Clive’s fantasy novels were where it was at for me. ‘Imajica’ became my Bible and horror receded into the background, like Pinhead being yanked down a long , long corridor so that his ministrations to worship at his feet can no longer be heard. We were painting on a complex canvas now, real world horrors intruded and fantasy was where it was at.

And then Gav from Kendall Reviews put a call out for reviewers to be a part of a Clive Barker Advent, which seems an oxymoron, but when you think about it, the story of Jesus’ birth is actually pretty damn horrific.

There were so many tales in these 6 volumes, I picked myself these 2 omnibus’ (omnibuses?!) and read words which I hadn’t encountered in almost half a lifetime. Hello, old friends.

Anyway, back to the point, the Books Of Blood appeared, one at a time, when I moved to Newcastle and was a trainee midwife. It was a whole new world, one which had a bookshop, the biggest I had ever seen, and for the first time, there was a horror section! Pure bliss!

The notion of the juxtaposition of life, and death, as well as the processes that get you there, were constantly on my mind. They moved beyond an abstract concept to a daily occurrence, literally nature red in tooth and claw.

The idea of the point of which a person becomes a human, being the first pair of hands to cradle a new life, the link between flesh and the soul contained within it…it’s something quite incredible. The transmutation of a line, moving from a reading on a monitor to a living, screaming, blood slick, bluish, brand new human, is really miraculous, bizarre, wonderful and terrible all at the same time.

The euphoria is mixed with dread, hope and regret because you are literally delivering this unknown quantity, this brand new person into a world which would swallow it whole. And yet, there is hope, and expectation that this one, this brand new person might be the one who has the answer , they might hold  the solution to the biggest questions we ask every day. That is one hell of a burden for a newborn soul.

And throughout this time, as I travelled up and down the north east coast of England, 500 miles away from home, Clive Barker was my constant companion. This was not so great when going on the underground at night, sometimes I was the only person on the train, and the noise of my thumping heart when we stopped in the tunnels and you could hear scratching between the stations…I felt sure everyone could hear it! And I was lucky enough to meet him, at a screening of Hellraiser where he did a Q And A afterwards with a local journalist . The thrill of sitting in the dark, terrified by what was happening on the screen , whilst knowing the creator of these tales was somewhere, behind you, in the dark was delicious and intoxicating. He was a pure delight, and insisted on staying in the art house cinema’s main viewing room to sign the books, and articles of every single attendee. He did not stop smiling nor made you feel like an inconvenience, he made all of us feel seen.

The fever dream of those 3 years of life and death, growth and rebirth, was accompanied by the Books Of Blood which travelled everywhere with me. It was with me when I moved to Liverpool and visited the bar in Hanover Street which is mentioned in Weaveworld. And when my daughter was born there, he came and did a signing of , I think, Sacrament, in the Liverpool branch of Smiths and there I stood again, lining up with my toddler who had no idea what was going on. Trying to shush a rapidly ratty baby amongst this huge line of horror fans, looking a complete sight, he was incredibly kind to a person who was, at that time, very fragile and in a great deal of pain.

The books were there when I ran half way across the country with my daughter, and started again. They are here, now, at my journey’s end, in a place which is home, where , thanks to Kendall’s Reviews, I have dug old friends out of hiding and made room for them. I am so very grateful to have this passion for a writer who is unafraid to take risks, and pull you into the dark corners of the world, push you through those thin spaces and asks you ‘What do you see? What do you feel?’ 

I cannot imagine a better place to celebrate the life of an author who means so much to so many, over the past 4 , very turbulent decades.

Raising a glass to you all, those who have stuck this far, I would love to wish you the most wonderful Christmas , wherever you are and whoever you are with. We are blessed to be in a community which thrives on love, acceptance and inclusivity in the same way that the fiction slashes, burns, examines the human condition and turns it inside out over and over again. No finer place to be!

About Clive Barker…

Clive 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. Educated at Dovedale Primary School and Quarry Bank High School, he studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University and his picture now hangs in the entrance hallway to the Philosophy Department. It was in Liverpool in 1975 that he met his first partner, John Gregson, with whom he lived until 1986. Barker’s second long-term relationship, with photographer David Armstrong, ended in 2009.

In 2003, Clive Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th 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”. While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has stated that he is a believer in both God and the afterlife, and that the Bible influences his work.

Fans have noticed of late that Barker’s voice has become gravelly and coarse. He says in a December 2008 online interview that this is due to polyps in his throat which were so severe that a doctor told him he was taking in ten percent of the air he was supposed to have been getting. He has had two surgeries to remove them and believes his resultant voice is an improvement over how it was prior to the surgeries. He said he did not have cancer and has given up cigars. On August 27, 2010, Barker underwent surgery yet again to remove new polyp growths from his throat. In early February 2012 Barker fell into a coma after a dentist visit led to blood poisoning. Barker remained in a coma for eleven days but eventually came out of it. Fans were notified on his Twitter page about some of the experience and that Barker was recovering after the ordeal, but left with many strange visions.

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.

Barker has a keen interest in movie production, although his films have received mixed receptions. He wrote the screenplays for ‘Underworld’ (aka Transmutations – 1985) and ‘Rawhead Rex’ (1986), both directed by George Pavlou. Displeased by how his material was handled, he moved to directing with ‘Hellraiser’ (1987), based on his novella The Hellbound Heart. His early movies, the shorts ‘The Forbidden and Salome’, are experimental art movies with surrealist elements, which have been re-released together to moderate critical acclaim. After his film ‘Nightbreed’(based on ‘Cabal‘), which was widely considered to be a flop(not by me! It is a brilliant film underserved by a studio which did not get the source material!) Barker returned to write and direct ‘Lord Of Illusions’ Barker was an executive producer of the film ‘Gods And Monsters’, which received major critical acclaim.

Barker is a prolific visual artist working in a variety of media, often illustrating his own books. His paintings have been seen first on the covers of his official fan club magazine, Dread, published by Fantaco in the early Nineties, as well on the covers of the collections of his plays, ‘Incarnations’ (1995) and ‘Forms Of Heaven’ (1996), as well as on the second printing of the original UK publications of his Books of Blood series.

A longtime comics fan, Barker achieved his dream of publishing his own superhero books when Marvel Comics launched the Razorline imprint in 1993. Based on detailed premises, titles and lead characters he created specifically for this, the four interrelated titles — set outside the Marvel universe — were Ectokid

Links-http://clivebarker.info/

Twitter @realclivebarker @KendallReviews