Portal:Horror/Selected biography archive/February 2007

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Clive Barker (born October 5, 1952) is an English author, film director and visual artist. Barker was born in Liverpool, England. Before reaching college, he went to the same schools as John Lennon. He studied English and philosophy at Liverpool University.

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 (1986). Later he moved towards epic 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's distinctive style is characterized by the notion of hidden fantastical worlds coexisting with our own (an idea he shares with contemporary Neil Gaiman), the role of sexuality in the supernatural and the construction of coherent, complex and detailed mythologies. Barker has referred to this style as "dark fantasy" or the "fantastique". His stories give equal time to the heavenly and awe-inspiring as to the hellish and horrific.

When the Books of Blood were first published in the United States in cheap paperback editions, the originality, intensity and overall quality of the stories led popular author Stephen King to say of Barker: "I have seen the future of horror and its name is Clive Barker." (This is a paraphrase of a famous quote said of Bruce Springsteen at the beginning of his career). Barker himself prefers not to be limited to the image of a gore and horror writer. (continued)