Happy Birthday Clive Barker!!!
Today’s Clive Barker‘s Birthday! Born in 1952 in Liverpool, Merseyside, Clive grew up creating stories for his toys, making little movies with them and repainting the wallpaper with watercolors when things went wrong with the monster spitting fire at the plastic men. He was entertained by the spooky tales his grandmother used to tell him by the fire, or some of Spring-Heeled Jack’s bloody adventures. Always creative, he wrote The Wood on the Hill as a pre-teen and his first novella, The Candle In The Cloud as a young teenager.
Making some great friends during college, he once thought he had the school desk where John Lennon had carved his name until he realized that there were several of those in the school, looking different from each other. Always drawing, then painting, then making theater and important artistic friendships that would continue well into adulthood and become a part of his own work, he got his great break after the publication of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood from Sphere Books in the Spring of 1984.
The Books of Blood went on to win the World Fantasy Award for Vols. I-III in 1985 and 2 awards from the British Fantasy Awards for their stories The Forbidden and In The Hills, The Cities in both 1985/86. In 1985, Stephen King famously sent a letter to Clive’s publisher at the time, with that line that’s been quoted repeatedly on so many of Clive’s book covers and even some movie trailers: “I have seen the future of the horror genre, and his name is Clive Barker“.
Today we celebrate his birthday, and wish him many happy returns! We love you Clive, your worlds keep us dreaming.
Here’s his latest status update, given to Phil and Sarah Stokes in the latest 32nd Revelatory Interview, ‘Artist and Imaginer‘:
Revelations : Hey, Clive, how are you?
Clive : I’m better than I was… it’s taken three years for me to get better but I am getting better.
I can’t get to people right now but I don’t want them to think I’ve gone anywhere… I want to be able to talk at conventions and things like that and not have people worry about me, because these are nice folks and they do worry about me.
The thing I would love to let everyone know is that I’m working hard and that, even though I’m not as public as I was, it means zero in terms of my commitment to the work which remains as strong – as you both know – as it ever was. Physically I’m not at present able to paint the big paintings but I’ll get there, and in the meantime, yeah, there’s literary stuff going on.
Abarat 4 is almost finished and Abarat 5 has been plotted. But…, because there are so many illustrations in the books and they’re all painted, it takes a hell of a long time to produce those books. They won’t be out ‘soon.’ There’s a lot of publishing work to do – you know, which picture goes where and we’ve got design issues and so on… [read more]
Go wish Clive a Happy Birthday today on his Facebook Page!
