New Trilogy “Library of the Dead” coming from Clive Barker!

Ryan and I have been following this one since it showed up on social media (hey, where’s our press release?!) with great excitement for a while now, and it’s official: Clive Barker has a new publishing event, and it is enormous.

If you’ve been listening to this show since 2011 — and some of you genuinely have, which still blows my mind — you know we’ve spent over 530 episodes treating Barker’s catalog like scripture. We’ve argued about the theology of Imajica. We’ve gone scene by scene through Books of Blood. The BarkerCast has been more than a hobby, it’s been a sustained, good-faith effort to keep this author’s work in front of an audience for over a decade.

Barker and his team (Phil and Sarah Stokes, Clive Barker Ink) just launched a year-long publishing event called Library of the Dead, a trio of new collections that his team is calling the spiritual successor to Books of Blood itself. Three hardcover volumes, shipping quarterly throughout 2027, available exclusively through this Kickstarter:

• Fear Eternal
• Pyres of Bedlam
• Dark Descents

Cover art comes from Franck Besançon, and here’s the part that got me: the first two books, Fear Eternal and Pyres of Bedlam, are already finished manuscripts being edited for printing, with the third one currently being completed. This is real, close-to-done work from a writer who hasn’t given us this scale of new fiction in a long time!

Each volume mixes new original stories with rare, hard-to-find short fiction and poetry that’s been curated specifically for this collection, plus black-and-white illustrations Barker drew himself. If you’re the kind of listener who gets excited when we trace a recurring image or motif across decades of his work, this is going to be a gold mine for future episodes.

Alongside the three new books, there’s a Books of Blood Remastered Edition, the complete six-volume series that started it all, collected into a two-book leather hardcover omnibus for the first time in over a decade. New foreword, new interior illustrations, and a format that’s never existed before. For a show like ours, literally built around close-reading The Books of Blood with our current Book Club episodes, this is perfect.

But there’s more!

• A nine-print original art portfolio — fine art prints of new Barker artwork made specifically for this project
• A polystone “Book Coffin,” topped by a statuette based on Barker’s 1992 sketch Demon Putting Out His Eyes, to actually house your new collection
• Numbered and signed leather editions
• A vanishingly rare Dedication tier (52 lettered copies) with hand-drawn original artwork from Barker in your book, your name on the dedication page, and community access to the author himself

And then there’s the part that feels most mysterious: backers who can decode a secret woven into the pages of Library of the Dead will unlock a surprise item that can’t be bought at any price — revealed at a future invite-only streaming event. A hidden text inside the text. I don’t know why I expected anything less.

Library of the Dead is being edited by Phil and Sarah Stokes, who’ve been documenting Barker’s work through Revelations and the Clive Barker Archive for more than twenty-five years and are the authors of Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds. That’s the kind of stewardship this material deserves.

As I write this, the campaign still has 17 days to go. Tiers range from digital and audiobook editions up through the full leather Signature Collection and the ultra-limited Dedication Collection. If you back it, or even if you’re just curious about it, come talk to us about it. We’ll be covering this campaign and its rollout throughout the year, and honestly, I want to know which tier you’ve backed, or are considering backing.

Let’s travel through the Library of the Dead together. Remember, the dead have highways.

— Jose, BarkerCast.

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