Behind the Scenes with The Scarlet Gospels!!!
Over at Clive Barker’s official Facebook page they’ve started a photo album that will take fans behind the scenes of the upcoming and highly anticipated novel The Scarlet Gospels. The album will contain handwritten pages, notes, and personal musings by Barker as he slowly crafted the final horrific tale in the Hellraiser mythology. We’ll keep this article up to date as new material comes in.
Also, don’t forget you can pre-order the US and UK editions of The Scarlet Gospels through realclivebarker.com.
http://www.realclivebarker.com/product/the-scarlet-gospels-us-and-uk-editions-hardcover/
Update
– 2/12/2015
2/18/2015
Real CliveBarker continues to share more behind the scenes material of the Scarlet Gospels. Finally some good old fashioned Hellraiser style writing.
“Lucifer devises a death machine made of his own bone. It fits over his head. He wants to experience the great human mystery: death. Not fast, but slowly, agonizingly…”
This is great! I went back to the Scarlet Gospels page at Revelations this morning after a self-imposed ban on all information about the book. I learned that the penultimate draft was 230,000 words and then it was cut down to the 100,000 we have now. Someone has to write an epic book about this process.
Dave,
Do you think there could be a Scarlet Gospels Uncut Edition like they did with Stephen King’s The Stand?
I have a feeling there will be more releases of this book in the future.
Yeah, I thought about that unedited version of The Stand for a minute, but I don’t think so for this writer. These are Clive’s babies and he wouldn’t let it out the door if he thought there was a better version in there, especially after he has spent so long on it.
The good news is that the final draft has possibly erased all the spoilers Clive has been giving us over the years. About 15 years ago he revealed exactly how Pinhead was going to get his ticket punched. Now? Nope, everything can be all new. My only thought is that he spent a lot of time growing the story and then a lot of it ended up getting cut or drastically revised. Maybe he just ultimately thought than an Imajica sized book set in hell would end up being too oppressive?
My hope is that one day Phil and Sarah Stokes will document some of the story lines that were pared down in their “Memory, Prophecy, and Fantasy” books. It’ll be a while, though, because they are only up to The Books of Blood!
Where can you get those Memory, Prophecy, and Fantasy books? I want to start collecting them sometime later this year.
They still have copies available here:
http://www.clivebarker.info/memorybooks.html
These books are a great resource for diehard CB fans. For me it’s the history of how his early beginnings helped form the imagination we all hold dear.
How many pages are these a piece? Just curious.
I think they average about 350 pages.