Books last. Okay, some books last. Some books are hailed upon publication and instantly attain 'classic' status; the reputation of others grows only slowly; still others appear and just as quickly vanish. Reputations, too. In the 'Horror Rewind' series I've looked at a selection of horror fiction from the 70s and 80s to examine how … Continue reading Horror rewind #7 – ‘Skeleton Crew’ magazine, July 1990
Oh, this is luscious. Produced by Phil and Sarah Stokes, the forces behind Clive Barker's official website, this huge book (350+ pages) is copiously illustrated with cover artwork, behind-the-scenes photos from the likes of Hellraiser and Nightbreed, rare promo materials and Barker's own sketches and paintings. For those Barker fans who already own Stephen Jones's … Continue reading ‘Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds’
Or should that be "Anti-Horror Rewind"? American lawyer Douglas E. Winter made his literary name with one of the first book-length studies of Stephen King's work (The Art of Darkness), and in 2001 wrote the authorised biography of Clive Barker (The Dark Fantastic). In between, he edited (although curated may be a more appropriate term) … Continue reading Horror Rewind #4 – “Prime Evil” (ed. Douglas E. Winter) (1988)
The Folk Horror Chain is a framework devised by writer and film-maker Adam Scovell in his essential study of the genre, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. For Scovell, Folk Horror can - among other things - be categorised as "a work that uses folklore…to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for … Continue reading The Folk Horror Chain in Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood”
Welcome to the first in an occasional series of retrospective looks at 80s & early 90s horror. There are, I know, loads of excellent websites covering this area. Will Errickson's Too Much Horror Fiction is the Daddy, and of course Grady Hendrix's essential Paperbacks from Hell is your print companion. Elsewhere in the Gyre I've … Continue reading Horror Rewind #1 – Mark Morris’s “Toady” (1989)
"At last, the night has a hero" - Cabal strapline. I've written elsewhere about the anticipation my friends and I felt in the months before the release of Clive Barker's second feature film Nightbreed in the autumn of 1990. Not that we got to see it: an unimpressive box-office in America meant it only got … Continue reading At last…Clive Barker’s ‘Nightbreed’ (1990/2014)
Bernard Rose's 1992 film horror Candyman was adapted by him from Clive Barker's 1985 short story "The Forbidden", published in volume 5 of the groundbreaking Books of Blood. Candyman transports the action from Barker's Liverpool to Chicago, specifically to the "projects" (US term for "housing scheme") of Cabrini-Green. In addition to the source material's look … Continue reading Clive Barker: “Candyman”, “The Forbidden”, Place, Race & Time
Happy 66th birthday to @RealCliveBarker My personal Top 10 of his novels at Into the Gyre
This piece was an unsuccessful competition entry. The brief was "memories of cinema-going". Not for us the spurious joys of cider by the fountain, or Tennent’s behind the hut in the top park. The summer my friends and I turned sixteen we marked this coming-of-age by getting into the cinema to watch 18-rated films. With … Continue reading 1990: summer of cinema
Clive Barker’s 1988 novel Cabal is short: at 253 pages, padded out by chapter breaks and illustrations, it’s practically a novella. After the effort of writing the 700-odd pages of Weaveworld, this was a refreshing length for the author: "One of the interesting things about going to Cabal after [Weaveworld] was that I found a … Continue reading In praise of brevity: Clive Barker’s “Cabal” and the anti-epic
Into the Gyre 