The Relaunch of Clive Barker
The Lord of Illusions creates toys, games, films, paintings...and some very hot books
by Jeff Zaleski -- Publishers Weekly, 9/24/2001
NEW YORK CITY: PW/Palio
The invitation arrives on a stiff card designed to look like a piece of movie film. "HarperCollinsPublishers cordially invites you to a private luncheon with Clive Barker, author of Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story."
Clive Barker! It has been three years since the release of his last novel, Galilee, and his last film, Gods and Monsters. That's a long silence from this prolific and controversial talent.
We've heard rumors. That Coldheart Canyon, originally slated for spring 2001 as a short novel, has grown to great size, delaying publication. That the novel has been further postponed because Barker is holed up in his Hollywood compound working on another project, one of such vast scope and potential that it will make him a household name.
Days later we walk into the chic midtown Italian restaurant Palio looking for Barker. Buttoned-down publishing types mill around a long table, drinks in hand. We last saw Barker in 1985 at a book signing in downtown Manhattan. Then he looked every bit the mischievous choirboy, an angel not yet fallen but sneaking peaks at the abyss. No one at Palio looks like that. That muscular man in the corner, though--that grinning pirate in rolled-up sleeves--carries some resemblance. Moving closer, we realize that yes, this is Barker. His handsome face has roughened over 48 years; amid all the suits and dresses, his casual clothes, bristled hair, goatee and two hoop earrings lend him an outlaw air.
We introduce ourselves and tell him how much we admire his work. To our astonishment, he wraps us in a bear hug.
"You must come out to my house in Los Angeles," he says in a voice as murky as the sea bottom. "To see what I'm working on. To see the paintings I've done for Abarat."
CHICAGO: The McCormack Center/The Penthouse Suite, Fairmont Hotel
Book folk jostle one another in their rush to get the advance reading copies of Coldheart Canyon stacked high at the HarperCollins booth during BEA 2001. The novel
does run long, more than 700 pages. The galleys feature a haunting
black-and-white photo of Barker in a white tuxedo, smoothed and glamorized into
a leading man from Hollywood's golden age. Word is out: this is a book everyone
wants to grab.
We read it prior to the show. Gaudy, sexy, spooky and driven by tantalizing characters, Coldheart, which HarperCollins will release on October 1, is Barker's most accessible book and will prove his most popular to date. Certainly the Hollywood setting carries vast popular appeal (the ghosts include real-life celebrities, Victor Mature, Mary Pickford, Ramon Navarro and a beautiful Ava with "long red hair" among them).
Yet Barker hasn't dulled. Violent sexual imagery abounds, horrific yet beautiful, echoing the extremities of Books of Blood, the volumes of short stories that in 1984 brought him international fame at age 32 and inspired Stephen King to declare him "the future of horror." Coldheart distills nearly all of Barker's work. The novel's sophisticated merging of the fantastic and the real, as well as its incredible central device--a room of painted tiles that come alive, luring mortals into the hell they depict--sound themes explored by Barker in his magnificent fantasy epics of the late '80s and early '90s, particularly Weaveworld, The Great Secret Show and Imajica, books that sealed Barker's reputation as a writer of exceptional imagination. (All three novels present fantastic worlds accessible from our own; Barker's favorite books as a child included Peter Pan and The Chronicles of Narnia).
And Coldheart's strong emotional currents flow from Barker's more personal later novels, Sacrament and Galilee. Since Books of Blood, Barker, born in Liverpool of Irish/Italian descent, has moved from London to Hollywood, where he's worked on more than a dozen films as producer, director, writer or actor, including the ultraviolent Hellraiser series and the critically acclaimed Gods and Monsters, about gay film director James Whale. He's become a gay icon himself, and is married to photographer David Armstrong, who shot the Coldheart cover. Sacrament and Galilee, whose hero was inspired by Armstrong, consider issues close to Barker's life--gay sexuality, love, the purpose of art--just as Coldheart presents his feelings about the town where he lives and works.
The novel pours acid on the Hollywood scene and many of its players, thinly disguised. Its aging action hero, Todd Pickett, could look in a mirror and see Tom Cruise, at least until Pickett undergoes plastic surgery that destroys his looks. But on whom did Barker base his rapacious and deliriously beautiful villainness, screen vamp Katya Lupi?
"Katya Lupi is in our brain," we tell the writer when we run into him at the HarperCollins Pub Crawl that night at BEA. Barker, who made his start in the theater and who knows how to make an appearance, is dressed in an NYPD muscle-shirt, jeans and black boots, with a gorilla-shaped knapsack strapped across his back. He bends his knees and roars with laughter. He won't tell us who Katya's model is; he explains that the HarperCollins lawyers might have a problem with that.
We see Barker twice more at the fair. The next day he's striding across the main hall with Armstrong. Would he mind signing a copy of Coldheart for our colleague, Ed Nawotka of PW Daily? Barker takes the galley from Nawotka and, heedless of passing traffic, crouches to the floor and goes to work, drawing not just his name but an elaborate sketch of an otherworldly creature to accompany it.
At a party thrown that night by HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman at her penthouse suite at the Fairmont, Barker magnetizes a crowd that includes, among others, Joyce Carol Oates, Sebastian Junger and wrestler/writer Mick Foley, aka Mankind. One minute Barker walks in; the next he's surrounded by people, mostly women, looking to shake his hand or have him sign a galley. The attention reminds us of how we've seen Paul McCartney orient a room, or Bill Clinton. It's celebrity at work--in this case comprised of Barker's high critical reputation, his reputation as a transgressor and, of course, his Hollywood gloss. His autographing session earlier in the day had been mobbed.
We make our way through the crush to say hello. "I'm counting on you to come to Los Angeles," Barker tells us. "To see the paintings for Abarat."
NEW YORK CITY: HarperCollins
| Barker at the Movies: From Blood Red to Oscar Gold "In Hollywood," Barker says, "you just never know. It's one of the things that's made me come back to words and painting--I don't want to get fucked around." A conversation with Barker about his films elicits the four-letter words. Yet his celluloid successes overshadow his failures. Barker is much better known as the executive producer of the Oscar-winning film Gods and Monsters and as the writer and director of Hellraiser (1987), which spawned four sequels, than he is as the man who let loose Rawhead Rex (1985), featuring an actor in a monster suit, or Nightbreed (1990), recut by the studio (20th-Century Fox) into a version that drew hoots from critics. Yet the flops still hurt, and the success of Hellraiser carried a price--the typecasting of Barker as "the Hellraiser guy." The last movie Barker directed or wrote was 1995's Lord of Illusions. Since then, he has acted as executive producer on Hellraiser: Bloodline in 1996 and on Gods and Monsters, which was shot in 21 days on $3.1 million and earned $6.4 million domestically while snaring an Oscar for its screenplay by Bill Condon, who directed. Barker explains his role in the making of Gods and Monsters as that of the "800-pound gorilla." He relishes the film's critical success but cautions, "Bill couldn't get a gig after it." What was the problem? "The gay part of it is a problem. I am protected by all of this. If you are a gay filmmaker in this town and you want to play with the big boys, it's very tough. They put up with me, but they put up with me." And they do. With his relaunch in Hollywood, Barker has closed deals with a number of major studios, and continues to attend to a scattering of older deals, including one with Showtime for a six-hour miniseries of Weaveworld. In late August, word leaked that, shades of the Disney deal for Abarat, Barker had sold a project to Nickelodeon. "Clive Barker appeals to us," says Julia Pistor, senior vice-president, Nickelodeon Movies. "We've been pursuing him for a couple of years. We bid on Abarat and were sad to have not gotten it. He has a never-ending imagination, and he has a very gentle soul. We thought it would be great to do something together because kids love scary stuff and fantasy more than anything. He thought long and hard and he came up with the comic book. " That comic book is Ecto-Kid, which Barker developed in the '90s for his Razorline series with Marvel Comics. Ecto-Kid presents the adventures of a homeless boy who sees our world with one eye and the world of the dead with the other. Nick's plans for it include a live-action feature film and a TV series. Pistor scoffs at worries about Barker's image. "People will know that if he's doing something for us, it's going to be responsible and family friendly. I don't think he's like getting into business with the devil." Film deals are mushrooming around Barker. Seraphim is producing the urban legend Bloody Mary for Touchstone. And, Joe Daley tells us, "We are down for The Damnation Game [Barker's first novel, to be produced by Seraphim for Phoenix Pictures and Warner Brothers]. "John Heffernan is adapting it, he wrote Snakes on a Plane for MTV. Lord of Illusions we are going to try and turn into a TV show. And there's Weaveworld." But in Hollywood, as Barker says, you just never know. Until early this year, The Thief of Always was a hot project at Universal. Production came "incredibly close," the author says. "They had a shitload of money on it. The problem was that they could never find a way to put a star into the movie, and the movie's expensive, and it's really about a bunch of kids. It's hard to get a Robin Williams in there, or a Jim Carrey. "I think I'll make a lot more movies in the next few years," muses Barker. "As a producer, not as a director. I enjoyed making the movies I made. It's a great ego fix, you feel like a cross between Napoleon and God. But if I've spent a year painting or spent a year making a movie, which do I prefer? My god, if I am painting and writing, I prefer that, even over a good movie, even a movie that doesn't get fucked around with by a studio." --J.Z. |
Abarat is a quartet of fantasy novels for older children (and adults) about a teenage girl's adventures in an alternate world. HarperCollins Children's will publish the first volume in fall 2002. Five years ago, after the death of his father, a grief-stricken Barker began painting images of another world--paintings that will appear in the Abarat books, along with extensive text. After he completed more than 200 canvases, Barker invited studio moguls to look at them as he narrated the story. In April 2000, the Walt Disney Company contracted with Barker for film and ancillary rights to the project. The price: $8 million.
Before HarperCollins publishes Abarat, though, it will release Coldheart Canyon. We've been at the HarperCollins offices on East 53rd Street for an hour now, meeting with brass eager to answer our questions about Barker and his new novel. Harper has published Barker since it was Harper & Row, beginning in 1989 with The Great and Secret Show. (Barker's first American publisher was Scream Press, which brought out the first three volumes of Books of Blood in 1985.)
Our tour guide has been Justin Loeber, Harper's director of publicity. He took us first to speak with Michael Morrison, publisher of Morrow/Avon and the mass-market lines at HarperCollins/Avon and HarperTorch, which have millions of Barker titles in print. Morrison voiced two ideas that will shadow our exploration of Barker: that there is a "relaunch" of him going on, and that Coldheart will "take him to a new level."
Barker's books have always hit general bestseller lists but never the top. The first printing of Coldheart is a reported 150,000 copies, large but not on the scale of a King or a Koontz. That leaves a lot of potential readers to reach. Harper's job is to show them that Barker is not only a horror writer but the premier fantasist of our time. One way to do that has been through the recent trade paperback editions of his books that Susan Weinberg, editorial director for HarperCollins and Perennial and Quill, showed us in Morrison's office. The books' covers, designed by Chip Kidd, employ disturbing images from some of Barker's favorite artists (including Blake), washed in bold colors. They're classy covers, evidence of Harper's determination to present Barker as a serious literary figure, one whose writing, always stylish, considers grand metaphysical themes such as the elusive nature of reality and the enduring conflict between good and evil. (Like many writers who work in genre, Barker is generally overlooked by the crit-lit establishment.)
"I have one mission," Loeber told us back in his office, "which I have been given. It's like Mission: Impossible. They light the match and there it goes: 'Justin, make Coldheart Canyon a bestseller.' Period. This is HarperCollins's message for Clive and for us."
We were soon joined by Alison Callahan, the young assistant editor who is Barker's most frequent contact at HarperCollins. (Robert Jones, editorial director of HarperCollins and Barker's editor in the New York offices, died in August; Callahan reported to him.) Like everyone else we have met at Harper, Callahan glowed when she talked about Barker.
"The first time I got on the phone with him," she said, "he's got that scratchy cigar-smoking voice, and he sounded to me the way some of the characters in his books are. Sort of scary, a big presence. But the more you talk to him, the more he takes on a sweetness rather than a scariness, and then after you meet him, he's very loving."
One of Coldheart's primary draws is the cover, now finished. The photograph of a cigar-wielding Barker as a suave sophisticate is set off by gold-and-white raised lettering. The back of the jacket presents a long blurb from Quentin Tarantino, who calls Barker "the great imaginer of our time."
"We went through a lot of covers, " said Callahan. "He wanted to see what we would come up with, but nothing was hitting home. We were trying to get the canyon, we were trying to get the house, we were trying to get the lights of L.A."
"Then we were given a slew of pictures," Loeber noted. "When Clive came here from California with David we were asked to choose one. It was a joint decision. The whole thing with the cigar and the earring--it's camp and it's serious and it's scary at the same time."
"So we put that on the ARC," Callahan said, "because we didn't have a cover yet. Everyone we sent it to loved it, and we thought, 'What are we doing? This is the cover of the book.'"
Later we will meet Christine Caruso, marketing director for HarperCollins, who will talk about the campaign for Coldheart. "Clive is going to hand-sign quite a few large posters of the cover for point of purchase display," she will say. "Because so many fans would love to get the signed book, we also had him sign about 2500 tip-in sheets." And we will meet Laurie Rippon, the house's creative director, who will tell us that "Clive is at the top of his game. Everyone feels that this is Clive Barker Time."
Now, though, we're sitting in a spacious office on a high floor. It's the aerie of Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins worldwide. She's looking elegant in a blue suit, and her office is elegant too, done in gray and blue brightened with jaunty touches like the Elvis portrait on one wall. Through the glass that forms another wall we can see an adjoining terrace and cloudy skies above it.
Also in the room are Cathy Hemmings, president and publisher of the HarperCollins General Books Group, and Loeber. As we sip Diet Coke from a heavy tumbler, Friedman tells us about first encountering Barker.
"I met him two and a half years ago. He came into my office to show me some of the drawings that were going to become Abarat. I was completely blown away by him. This is a man whose world is like a Russian doll. You open it and open it and open it and open it and you don't know what's going to come out, but you know it's going to be special.
"I would like him to be more 'mainstream,' " Friedman adds. "I want more people to say 'Clive Barker--oh, Clive Barker!' That's what we're going to do with this book. Clive is different. I mean, let's face it, Clive looks different, Clive speaks different, Clive draws pictures of things that not everybody draws pictures of. And Clive is the most engaging and entertaining sort. So we've taken him out to the bookseller, the bookseller who didn't know him. The whole campaign is based around Clive Barker."
"We are positioning this as his most commercial book in a long time," Hemmings tells us. "This is a Hollywood novel, and it's got all the elements. You know, Clive is a multi-faceted creative genius, but ultimately the core of Clive is a writer. It all springs from that imagination."
Barker's imagination can work in strange ways. Weeks ago we received an e-mail from Stealth Publications, a small house headquartered online and specializing in quality genre hardcovers. In December, Stealth will release three editions of the six volumes of Books of Blood collected for the first time in one volume. According to the promo, the 500 copies of the limited numbered edition, bound in leather, will be "Signed w/photo of (yes, this is for real, folks) a full frontal nude of the author printed on back of the signature sheet." The limited lettered edition, restricted to 52 copies, offers a bonus: "The signature sheet will be signed by Clive Barker IN BLOOD."
We tell Friedman this. She doesn't look happy. She considers for a moment. "I think that we're living in a time where anything goes. The man is a multi-talented unique individual. What he wants to do, the way he wants to look, the way he wants to pose, what he wants to put his name on, that's his business. The books that we publish, we feel, have all the qualities of the books that we want to publish. And I think that's the only thing we can say."
In any case, Friedman is focused elsewhere. "Our goal," she says, "is to make him a worldwide star. And to me the challenge of making him more prominent is one of the things that I love about publishing. We need a bit of that fairy dust that one needs sprinkled on a campaign like this. But we feel the signs are really good."
TEMPE, ARIZONA: Todd McFarlane Productions
Barker creations cover our desk at PW, and none of them are books. There's a computer game, Clive Barker's Undying, released by Electronic Arts in February of this year. "What does not kill you, will make you wish it had," reads the back of the box, which features a monster that looks like a bulb of garlic with pointy teeth and claws. There are worn video cases for several of Barker's films, and a copy of a Hellraiser comic book published by Epic, a prestige division of Marvel, one of perhaps 30 standalone and series comics Barker has developed, mostly in the early '90s. There's an issue of Lost Souls, the newsletter of the official Clive Barker Web site, the most prominent of dozens of sites devoted to the author, many run by fans or dealers in collectibles. A wire basket overflows with downloads describing other projects, past and future, including the extravaganzas that Barker, along with Armstrong, has designed for Halloween at Universal Studios in L.A.: Clive Barker's Freakz, Clive Barker's Hell and Clive Barker's Harvest. (Universal's press release for Hell announced, "Clive Barker... spawns his twisted
terror upon an unsuspecting crowd. He douses guests in the heat of Hades,
engulfing them in the fiery flames... of his HELL!")
It's nasty stuff like this, part of his work but not representative of the whole of it, that has brought Barker notoriety and has curtailed his mainstreaming. And there's more. There's information about an ongoing project in which Barker and Jonathan Davis of the thrash-rock group Korn are marrying Davis's music with Barker's paintings. There's a copy of the Summer 2001 Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, which carries a short interview with Barker and a photo by Armstrong in which the writer is barechested, gagged and possibly blood-stained. And there are the six "toys" from Todd McFarlane Productions. That's the Todd McFarlane who bought Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball for $3 million, and who has made a fortune from, among other enterprises, his immensely popular Spawn line of horror comics.
McFarlane did the toys for Shrek!, but you wouldn't know it from these monstrosities. There are six figures in the Barker/McFarlane Tortured Souls line. The most disgusting, Talisac, is a man suspended from his face by hooks that tear his flesh; he is being kept alive by IV in order to give birth to, as McFarlane's online promo puts it, "a removable egg housing an abominable fetus." The least offensive, Lucidique, is a lissome nonhuman female, scarcely clad in black leather and wielding bloody hooks on chains. The models embody extraordinary detail, enhancing their realism, and each comes with one of the six chapters of an original Barker novella about the figures and their world.
Barker wants, perhaps needs, to show his horrors. His novels, Coldheart included, are filled with atrocities of the flesh and spirit (as well as with affirmations of sublime good). In Barker's fiction, the evil and the grotesque are portrayed in clinical detail, but through prose so formal and erudite as to grant a curious dignity to the depravities. In the other arts he's mastered, there is no such mediation. Barker's films spout blood and gore--as do the toys.
We pick up the phone to call McFarlane at his Arizona headquarters. "Hey, Jeff, what the hell are ya doing today?" says a voice that sounds like J.R. Ewing's.
After pleasantries, McFarlane tells us about the first showing of the toys, at the New York International Toy Fair in February 2001. "There wasn't one person who walked by who didn't react to them," he says. "People either went, 'Oh my God, that's awesome,' or they went, 'Don't look Martha!' " McFarlane's good cheer rises. "It's just silly stuff to us!" he says. "We're two Dennis the Menaces. We sort of giggle and scare people and do creepy stuff!"
On a Saturday night in late July, Barker signed the toys at a Los Angeles store. He signed for five hours, an estimated 7200 times.
HOLLYWOOD: ICM/Bumble Ward Associates
Tall palm trees and soft summer heat. Flowers everywhere,
red, purple and white. Empty sidewalks. Streets lined with SUVs, convertible
Jags and a Ferrari or two but only a scattering of taxis, none of them free. At
Mr. Chow's, slim men and women tanned to walnut pick at their food. The only
overweight person we've noticed in two days has been a guard at the Warner
Brothers Studios, where you can see the piano at which Sam Dooley sat when
Ingrid Bergman asked him to play it again.
Now we're standing with Cevin Bryerman, PW's director of publishing, in front of the imposing headquarters of International Creative Management, directly across Wilshire Boulevard from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The ICM building, constructed of what looks like granite and steel, occupies an entire block. Its large slate courtyard is dappled with pools and fountains. We're here to meet Ben Smith, Barker's agent for nonliterary deals, including movies. After waiting on a sofa with a frosted blonde wearing alligator boots, we're ushered into Smith's small office.
Smith, an amiable young guy, wears a dark suit, white shirt and purple tie with white dots, a rare formality in a town where studied casualness rules. Our gaze falls on a large painting, a swirl of color showing a young girl cleaning the teeth of a dragon.
"That's an Arabat painting, a gift from Clive," Smith tells us. He is proud of it, and speaks of the "joy" of working with Barker, explaining that he's been Barker's film agent for two years but knew his work long before, as a fan. Like the folk at HarperCollins, he talks of a "relaunching" of Barker, and tells us about the deals he's handling for him, with Disney and Showtime and Warner. And Smith hints that there's another major deal brewing for Barker, but he won't say more about it until negotiations are complete. (That deal, with Nickelodeon, is discussed in the "Barker at the Movies" sidebar, opposite).
As we leave ICM on this blue-skyed day and look down Wilshire at the array of office buildings glittering in the sun, we wonder about the hidden dark side of Hollywood that Barker exposes in Coldheart Canyon. Surely, Bumble Ward, Barker's publicist, must know something about it as one of the town's most accomplished spin-meisters. There's no darkness visible in the light turquoise walls and lime green EXIT sign of her reception area, though, nor in the laughter of the young women working computers and telephones behind the desk at Bumble Ward & Associates, a few blocks up from ICM on Wilshire. Above the desk hang three large clocks depicting the time in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo.
BWA's logo is a flying bumblebee and Ward herself bears a bee's colors, with her curly yellow hair and black dress. We sit with her and her senior publicist Sylvia Desrochers in a small conference room whose chairs are cushioned by fuschia pillows.
Ward explains that her job is "to educate people as to who Clive is. But it is very difficult, when you have somebody who is a writer, author, playwright and painter, for people to understand the whole person." Ward knows that Barker can generate controversy. But "we don't tend to react to situations," she says. "We tend to know about situations before they bite us in the ass.
"Clive," she says, "has an enormous amount of integrity. He is not ashamed of any part of himself. Right at the beginning of our relationship, he decided that it would be useful and honest and the right thing to do to come out about his sexuality. I love that about him, because here, in Hollywood, everyone is so scared and is hiding something. Clive isn't like that."
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: The Walt Disney Company
Here's a scenario: a weekly tabloid prints a nude photo of Barker, perhaps the one that will grace the Stealth edition of Books of Blood, with the tag line "Welcome to Disney's World." At first thought the marriage of Barker to Disney, and more so of Disney to Barker, seems bizarre. But Disney has long embraced darkness, from Fantasia's terrifying "Night on Bald Mountain" to the murder of Mufasa in The Lion King. More importantly, Disney needs a bold
new franchise to bolster sagging earnings and same-old projects.
Michael Mendenhall is Walt Disney Pictures' president of synergy and marketing. If you're put on hold while calling him at his office you can hear the classic rendition of the preternaturally cheerful "It's a Small World After All." But today we're dialing him at his home, where he's just returned from church services with his family.
After Disney executives saw the Abarat paintings, Mendenhall tells us, the company went to work assembling a "strategic evaluation of the property," exploring the possibilities of Abarat in theme parks, Walt Disney imagineering, films, home entertainment, music, TV animation and so on. "We came up with a timeline and a product life-cycle for where and what we could do with this," Mendenhall says. "Then my role was to pitch that back and make a bid and try to receive the project from him."
Disney is thinking big and long-term about Barker. Mendenhall speaks of various Abarat possibilities, of an interactive game, ancillary publishing, an online component. All that would precede the Abarat feature film, which is years away. "The reason is that we may want to push our film-making technology. If it were to be a combination of live-action and CGI [Computer Graphics Imagery], it's a minimum of three or four years to come out with a really fantastic property."
Is Disney nervous about contracting with the rambunctious Barker? Mendenhall expresses no great concern and makes it clear that Disney will hold firm to its values and image. "Not all of the people he's painted will be a part of the movie, or a part of any other ancillary product that's created off of this. We will not do anything to damage the Disney brand, ever.
"We were so thrilled to get this project," Mendenhall says. "Spielberg and Katzenberg and Fox and everybody were trying to get it. Everyone was pulling out all the stops. But we didn't razzle-dazzle. We basically went back and presented what our assets were, what our company would do and how we would do it."
BEVERLY HILLS: The Clive Barker Compound
| BARKER UNABRIDGED: Audio Rebirth in Coldheart Canyon Clive Barker has been recording his bestsellers on audio since 1987, when The Damnation Game and The Inhuman Condition numbered among the first audiobooks to grace bookstore shelves. At least 10 of his books have been recorded as audios and each has been eagerly bought by fans, but he has yet to have his longer books recorded in unabridged audio form--until now. With Coldheart Canyon Barker goes all the way, giving his listeners the complete audio experience. HarperAudio plans to release Barker's 17-cassette (or 19-CD) unabridged version simultaneously with the book. The CDs will be packaged in groups of four, the spine of each showing a slice of the photo of Barker that's on the Coldheart cover. HarperAudio is set to print upward of 10,000 audio copies. Of those, 5,000 will be in CD format, and the 19th CD of each set will be signed. As Carrie Kania, associate publisher of HarperAudio, puts it, "This is a reinvention of Clive Barker on audio. No one has done this. It's a perfect collector's item for his fans." In addition to publishing audios with Harper, Barker has recorded with such houses as Simon & Schuster (Hellbound Heart; In the Flesh), Pocket (Cabal; Nightbreed), Random House (The Damnation Game) and New Star Media (In the Flesh). As Barker's reputation has grown, so has his audio success. Each of the four books HarperAudio has turned into audio--The Great and Secret Show (1989), The Thief of Always (1992), Sacrament (1996) and Galilee (1998)--has sold over 10,000 copies. Sacrament alone sold over 20,000 copies. But of all his published audios, only one, Galilee, is still in print. Perhaps Barker's fans require him in his entirety. "His audios were very successful at the time," explains Kania. "I know that Clive Barker never wanted his work abridged, but he allowed it because at the time, that was the audio market. But now that the market has matured, we are able to do him unabridged." Barker is thrilled. He remembers his experience taping Imajica, which had been abridged: "I sat down to read it. After about a half hour I broke out into a cold sweat. It was an incredibly painful experience. When you spend a year and a half writing a book, you're crushed to find only 17% of the book remaining." Recording Barker Coldheart Canyon's reader Frank Muller, perhaps audio's best-known voice, agrees that Barker is best unabridged. Muller is no stranger to unabridged audio--he read King and Straub's The Talisman. He believes that Barker's writing requires unedited audio. "He is one of the authors who deserves that kind of treatment. The book holds up extremely well in long audio format. The storytelling is solid and the plot moves along well." For this project, Muller spent three weeks in the studio an average of 15 hours for each hour of audio time. Many scenes in Coldheart Canyon are better heard by adults, but in 2002, Barker will go back into the children's market with the release of the audio version of Abarat. (His earlier work for children, The Thief of Always, was taped unabridged in 1992.) For this project, it's reported that HarperChildrens will work with Disney to produce the audio, which will be simultaneously released with the book series. In the meantime, listeners can revel in the trials of Tammy Lauper, Coldheart Canyon's heroine. "She's a real person who encounters these people who live on another planet--Hollywood," Muller says. His reading wonderfully reveals the confusion Tammy suffers. And he's thrilled that readers will get the whole story. "I think it would be a tragedy to abridge something like this," Muller adds "You would have to cut all the flesh off the bones." After all, that is work better left for Barker himself. --Mark Rotella |
"The house itself was palatial Spanish in style, with more than a hint of Hollywood fantasy in its genes.... There was everywhere evidence of master craftsmen at work: from the pegged wood floors to the elegantly carved ceiling panels; from the exquisite symmetry of the marble mantels to the filigree of the wrought iron handrails." So does Barker describe the haunted house that beckons at the heart of Coldheart Canyon. It's his own house, of course, once owned by film star Ronald Colman and nestled deep within a small canyon that you reach by driving twisty roads flush with flowers and greenery. Barker's compound includes extensive grounds, the mansion and two other buildings: his painting studio and the offices of Seraphim Films, his production company.
It's morning on a warm day in July when we exit our cab and notice Joe Daley walking toward us. Daley, tall, young and blonde, is the vice-president of production for Seraphim. He leads us into the Seraphim offices, where we spot Ana Osgood running a vacuum; she's the Barker assistant who arranged many of the interviews for this article. Daley explains that Barker isn't quite ready for us and offers to show us around. We pass through a small room crammed tight with screenplays and step outside, onto a balcony from where we can see the reaches of the canyon. Daley directs our eye to a hilltop overlooking Barker's property. Visible is the corner of a large structure--one of several up there, Daley says, that belong to Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, who chopped off the top of the hill to make room. "And that orange house there," he says, "Elizabeth Taylor used to live there." We can see Gypsy Rose Lee's old house, too, and Daley tells us that Brendan Fraser, who costarred in Gods and Monsters, lives just down the road.
We leave the Seraphim offices for the painting studio. There, on the walls of the entrance hall, on the walls of the rooms beyond, everywhere we look, are the Abarat paintings.
There's one depicting an elfin creature with google eyes, scoop-shaped ears and little heads sprouting from his thick antlers. There are beings angelic and demonic, plant people and a redhaired goddess and a wise-looking cat with a cavern in its torso. A clownlike figure, electricity crackling around his body, grins savagely. An old man, perhaps an old salt, perhaps a seer, pushes his hands into his coat pockets and looks at us.
It's as if another, more wondrous world has penetrated into ours, emerging from every available inch of Barker's wall space, a world of intense colors, yellows, purples, oranges, inhabited by creatures charming, dangerous, awesome, always surprising. In an alien woods backdropped by golden clouds embedded with stars, a young girl in pigtails gathers stalks, each a thin reed topped by the head of a bird. Elsewhere, a man with hair of flames and sewn lips glowers, and a great stone island in the shape of a head thrusts upward from a dark sea.
Seeing these paintings makes you feel like Dorothy when she opened the door of her Kansas farmhouse to behold the Technicolor Land of Oz.
NEW YORK CITY: HarperCollins Children's
In 1992, HarperCollins published Barker's The Thief of Always, with artwork by the author. Although marketed as a fable for all ages, Thief is really a kid's book. Its hero is 10 years old and the story, about the boy's visit to a land where each season passes in one day, is conveyed in simpler prose than that of Barker's adult books. Thief has
sold more than 500,000 copies.
Joanna Cotler, publisher of Joanna Cotler books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children's, wasn't involved with The Thief of Always but was aware of its effect on Barker, whom she's known for about 12 years. "He showed me a bunch of letters. He would get letters from fourth-graders about Thief of Always and he was astounded by the kind of love that comes from children. A kid won't feel any embarrassment at saying anything in a very direct way. I think it struck a chord for him."
We're sitting in Cotler's comfortable offices a few days after our visit to Barker's compound. A large poster with Abarat images hangs on a door. Cotler will edit and publish the quartet, on which HarperCollins has world rights.
She hands us a marketing packet designed to sell Abarat foreign rights at Bologna and Frankfurt. Much of the copy was written by Barker.
"We first see Abarat," the press materials read, "through the eyes of Candy Quackenbush, a 16-year-old girl from the little city of Chickentown in Minnesota. When Candy crosses over between this world and Abarat it seems to be an accident, but as the books proceed we discover that Candy has a deep-rooted connection with the 25 islands that make up the archipelago of Abarat, set in the sea of Izabella....
"As the books progress, Candy assembles a circle of allies, uncovering a plot to blot out the Sun, Moon and Stars, and achieve a condition of Permanent Midnight....."
"In order to prevent this disaster, Candy must find the courage to face the Lord of Midnight himself, Christopher Carrion.... And in confronting Carrion, she will also come to understand who she really is: a revelation which will transform her own understanding of her place in the epic events of 'The Abarat Quartet.' "
The packet also contains sample pages from something called Book of Hours.
"Abarat began based on the idea of a traditional medieval Book of Hours," Cotler explains. "It was a single volume. Each island in the archipelago of Abarat was a single hour. As the story grew, we realized that we couldn't possibly make this one book. Clive has more ability, creativity, imagination, guts, and intelligence in his pinkie than most of us have in a lifetime, and then he does something with it. I don't know when he sleeps."
The sample pages for Book of Hours, the project's original title, include ample room for paintings as well as for drawings that crawl around the text, sometimes intruding on it. "It's going to look a little different than a normal illustrated book," says Cotler.
"Feel this," she says, handing us a dummy book leaved with thick paper.
"Because it's got full-color art throughout, I have to use a different kind of paper. He's very invested in the physical look of this book. I had this made for him. I want him to feel this and say, 'Well, that's a heavy book.' I want him to feel the paper and see how interesting it is, to have a book with paper like that. This is going to be a really big fat thing. "
Cotler calls in seven of her staff to fill in the details. Alicia Mikles, associate art director and the designer for Abarat, is among the group. "I went to see Clive's paintings," she recalls. "My role will be to try to take the essence of that amazing experience and translate it into the book. We want to surprise the reader, and also to draw on classical ideas and use ornamental things that Clive has always been happy to provide. Like the cat he drew. He painted 10 more cats, because he didn't want to repeat the same cat."
BEVERLY HILLS: The Clive Barker Compound
While waiting for Barker in his painting studio, we
talk with Seraphim vice-president Joe Daley. "Each day," he says, "you are
working on films, television, books, paintings, toys, video games. You are doing
research for his new book, you are doing anything and everything."
We note that most of these projects are only in the development stage. Why is that?
"Two years ago," Daley says, "Clive and I sat down for a long conversation. We were with a different agency, we had different lawyers, we had different everybody. Everybody in this town saw Hellraiser. Nothing else. Yes, he writes books, but no one reads book here. So he was Hellraiser. I went to Clive and I said, 'Let's move it out.'
"We found a good friend of mine as an agent, Ben Smith. He and Clive have relaunched into Hollywood, and it has worked gangbusters. We let go of nearly every old project. We said, 'This is a new Clive Barker,' and we made people realize who he is on a wide spectrum. That he's an artist, a poet--we pulled out all the pieces of Clive that no one knew about. I found a great lawyer [David Colden] and we collected a team, had a publicist [Bumble Ward] who said, 'Let's relaunch.' "
Daley takes a deep breath. "Thank God, it worked." He waves at the Abarat paintings on the wall. "We used these as a springboard. People will say, 'He hasn't made a movie in five years, what's happened to him?' They don't know. He doesn't go out and blab that he has done over 300 paintings. This is what Clive Barker is all about. He has to get all of that imagination out. He is always drawing, there are pads all over the house."
A stocky guy with long dark hair walks into the room. He is Marcelo "Buddy" Martinez, co-publisher for Gauntlet Press, a small outfit best known for the horror novels of its founder, Barry Hoffman, and for its rad publication, the semi-annual Gauntlet Magazine, devoted, as its Web site says, to "discussing censorship and the limits of free expression." Next year Gauntlet will publish Tar Babies, a full-color coffee-table book of erotic photos by David Armstrong with some poetry and prose by Barker.
"Clive approached us with the idea for this. David had been doing these photographs, very cutting edge, very surreal, erotic and sensual, taboo, everything rolled into one. Clive knew that we have no taboos, that he and David could have free rein with the book. I think one of the things that Clive really liked about us is that he would have total control over how the art would end up looking. You know, 'Clive, what you want is what you get.'"
A small house like Gauntlet needs to make those concessions to attract a Barker, we think, as we eat some chicken salad brought in for lunch. When Martinez leaves, David Dodds, thin and studious looking, sits down at the table. Earlier, Joe Daley had told us that 'Clive could not live without David. They have been best friends forever.' Dodds, once Barker's lover, has known him since 1985, and moved to the States with him from London in 1991.
Dodds describes himself as Barker's "office manager." His current task is to transcribe the first book of Abarat from Barker's handwriting onto a computer.
"I hate to be interrupted at that," Dodds says. "He has never written anything like it. It has a completely different feel from Thief of Always. It's fantastical but on a much, much richer scale, like Lord of the Rings."
Dodds's years with Barker give him a unique perspective on the author. "How," we ask, "has Barker changed?" Dodds answers hesitantly. "I think he is more cautious in some respect with the people he's dealing with, particularly in this town. And he's much more direct. He's really honed his business skills. He's able to do his own negotiations, and that is very rare for an artist."
NEW YORK CITY: Janklow Nesbitt
Barker employs others to participate in those
negotiations, of course, including the eminent firm of Janklow Nesbitt, which
has handled his literary affairs since 1996.
The agency's Park Avenue reception area exudes prosperity and dignity in a tastefully generic way, with white walls, brown leather armchairs and a big floral arrangement on a glass table. We could be in the waiting room of a top physician or attorney, we think during our visit two weeks after our trip to Barker's Beverly Hills refuge, except for the shelves that display the firm's stock in trade: bestselling books by such names as James Patterson, John Glenn, Al Gore, Robin Cook, Thomas Harris--and Clive Barker.
Barker's agent at Janklow Nesbitt is Anne Sibbald, who talks with us in her airy office. She's wearing a black dress with pearls and sits in a high-backed chair behind her desk.
The first Barker title Sibbald worked on signaled the repositioning of him in the market. "We got together with Cathy Hemmings at HarperCollins," she says, "and came up with the idea for The Essential Clive Barker because Harper, too, felt that he hadn't had the broad exposure that he deserved. People didn't know what he was capable of." The Essential is a showcase of long passages drawn from Barker's novels, stories and plays, selected by Barker and arranged thematically; it carries a foreword by Armistead Maupin that praises the "absolute authority" of Barker's voice.
Sibbald, too, admires Barker. "He's branched into all these different fields. Most people, either out of inability or fear, will hold themselves tight in the world. They will say, 'Okay, this is where I fit. I am comfortable here.' But Clive is always pushing himself."
Also in the room is Cullen Stanley, the firm's director of foreign rights. She's younger than Sibbald and dresses young in a polka-dot skirt with a blue top. Prior to Coldheart, Barker's work has been translated into 21 languages, but the general global perception of him as a horror author persists. Stanley is determined to break Barker out.
"Our goal with Coldheart, at least in foreign, is to move him out of being a genre author, into the mainstream. In Germany, he has never been published in hardcover. Coldheart will be his first there. This book gives us an opportunity to adjust him in certain markets."
BEVERLY HILLS: The Clive Barker Compound
The largest room in Barker's studio is, like every room there, festooned with Abarat paintings. One canvas
overpowers the others. A triptych 19 feet long and 8 feet tall, it serves as a
map of the Abarat archipelago, showing all the islands in the dark sea of
Izabella, upon which only red boats sail. Above the islands spreads an indigo
sky speckled with comets and myriad stars. A moon with a hole through it floats
above the horizon, as does a radiant sun with a piece ripped away. We're peering
at the map when Daley announces, "Here's Clive."
Barker has on a black T-shirt and jeans that complement his blue eyes. He looks rested and incredibly fit and ready to talk. But first he shows us around the studio, leading us downstairs to look at some canvases in progress. He paints with oil, but "none of that grinding your own pigment shit." Back upstairs, he ushers us into the varnishing room, where stacks of paintings await finishing, then down the hall that serves as an Abarat galley. We stop at one painting, not big, of an android warrior composed of liquid gold, with a great wound disfiguring his body. Barker declares the painting "Blakean" (he sometimes refers to his own work as "Barkerian") and tells us that a girl will talk to the warrior as he turns his terrible head slowly toward her.
We ask Barker how long it takes him to complete a painting. Some can take a day, we learn, and some can take weeks. He says that Disney plans to pick up all the canvases soon but that he'd like to hold them off until he finishes the first book.
We scan the wonders that surround us. Barker has devoted years to elaborating this strange world. He says that the manuscript of the first book will run a bit over 100,000 words, with the full Abarat exceeding 400,000 words, plus "300 paintings and some."
"I wanted to create a place where I could play almost endlessly and never run out of room. In this world I can go anywhere. I can talk about family relations, I can talk about the place of the imagination in the human heart. I can talk about the nature of evil--and that is a central issue in these books, particularly how the knowledge of evil gets passed down from one generation to another."
Barker's voice is remarkable, an English-accented low growl that seems to caress each word as it leaves his throat. He gestures toward a painting that depicts Christopher Carrion, a villain of the series. Carrion's lips are threaded shut and around his mouth there's slung a transparent apparatus from which he drinks what Barker calls a "soup" of his own nightmares.
"Christopher Carrion wasn't always a villain," Barker says. "Christopher Carrion is a villain because he has been horribly dealt with by his family. I try and trace the villainy in order to say to the reader, 'Look in your own lives to see if there aren't hurtful things that make you behave hurtfully."
That's a very psychological explanation for evil, we say. In most of Barker's fiction evil has a metaphysical or supernatural cast.
"Right," Barker confirms. "I am being a little coy, because I am leaving the real villain of the book out of this discussion. There is a villain who stands behind these villains, whose nature I don't even want to talk about. He won't appear in the first book, he isn't painted on these walls, but of course there is a devil here in the islands. And there's an awful lot of good in this book, too. Just as night and day are in balance, and light and dark are in balance in the healthy human psyche, so evil and good will be pretty much balanced in the narrative."
And what of the word "Abarat"? Where did that come from?
"I just wanted a word that would be easy for people to say and sell. It sounds faintly perhaps Arabic, but it should also be a nonsense word. 'Abarat,' it sounded nice."
At the lunch at Palio, Barker had told us that Disney's plans for Abarat included developing an island within DisneyWorld in Florida for possible rides and environs.
"They were so canny," he now recalls. "They came in here and said, 'Wow, we want this!' and 'We have just the island for you.' They had built an island, I think for the [classic computer] game Myst, but they decided against it. So one of the high-ups said, 'You know, we've got the island where we could put this'--and that's music to an author's ears.
"Disney's imagination transformed the way we imagine all kinds of things. Haunted mansions, journeys to the center of the earth, dancing mushrooms. I want to be a part of that wonderful tradition of imagining. At the same time I feel that I can bring my own literary element to play--and they are looking for something with a bit of an edge."
Barker glances at someone who's entered the room with a camera. There's a brief discussion of angles. The camera clicks as we continue to talk, its flashes reminding us that this is the public Barker we're seeing, not the private one. Is Barker always so steady, so thoughtful, so focused?
"You know when Disney bought this," he says, "they had one word written down, Abarat, and a bunch of paintings and reproductions of paintings. So they paid eight million dollars for a word and the paintings. Now, I had told them the story, so they knew it all, but they didn't have a novel, they won't get the novel for another month or so. It was a huge act of faith on their part."
A young man shows up with a small wooden box that he hands to Barker.
"Ah, my cigars!"' The author plucks out a thick Casablanca and lights up, turning his talk to the roots of Coldheart Canyon.
"I became an invitee to [actor] Roddy McDowall's. I was blessed in the last years of Roddy's life to be allowed to be sitting and eating fried chicken with Elizabeth Taylor and hearing stories of old Hollywood from Maureen O'Hara. And Roddy showed me thousands of photographs that he had taken over the years of behind the scenes.
"My imagination was really fired. I started to think, 'I can do this, I can write about Hollywood, I can certainly write about it from the contemporary point of view because I have lived that.' I know what it's like to go to the Oscars, I know what the parties are like, I know what the drug problems are."
PW's Cevin Bryerman, in attendance, leans forward to ask a question about Coldheart's actin hero. "Who does Tom represent in the real world?"
Barker laughs, as he often does; he has a wicked sense of humor. "Well, you actually said 'Tom,' but you meant 'Todd.' I can't say, Cevin, I can't say. I am literally forbidden by an arrangement made with HarperCollins to name names. All I can say is I think it was a very interesting slip.
"I don't think I could deal with this town and its insanity and its inanity," Barker adds, "if I didn't know that my real life lay elsewhere, with literature and painting."
Then why does he choose to live in L.A.?
"Because it is the only place to do the other thing. I used to commute from London. I hate flying, it was ridiculous. In terms of an environment to live in, this house is hard to beat. The sun shines, it's lovely up here, we are away from things. I'm not really a part of the community. On the other hand, when I need to pitch something, as I have been doing a lot of recently, I am a 25-minute drive away from any of the studios. "
LONDON: HarperCollins UK
| A PARTIAL BARKER BIBLIOGRAPHY Books of Blood (Sphere Books, 1984, 1985) The Damnation Game (Putnam, 1985) Weaveworld (Poseidon, 1987) Cabal (Poseidon, 1989) The Great and Secret Show (Harper&Row, 1989) Imajica (HarperCollins, 1991) The Thief of Always (HarperCollins, 1992) Everville (HarperCollins, 1994) Sacrament (HarperCollins, 1996) Galilee (HarperCollins, 1998) Coldheart Canyon (HarperCollins, 2001) A PARTIAL BARKER FILMOGRAPHY |
Jane Johnson, publishing director of HarperCollins Publishers, London, was appointed Barker's worldwide editor in 1992, at the writer's request. Barker expresses unbounded faith in Johnson, who's also a novelist (she writes supernatural romances as Gabriel King). He dedicated The Essential Clive Barker to her, and told us, "She is an incredible lady. She's given me the confidence, over and over again, to push the boundaries of my own creativity."
To plumb Johnson's thoughts on Barker, we reach her via e-mail at her London office.
"Why do you think Clive trusts you so?"
"Right from the start," Johnson replies, "we had tremendous intellectual chemistry.... Like Clive, I have always been a voracious reader, and that appetite had carried me through an academic career in literature, which gave me an understanding of the touchstones that had inspired Clive's work--Blake, medieval dream visions, Shakespeare and Revenge Tragedies, sagas and romance cycles; and then all the great early sf and fantasy novels that, like Clive, I had read in my teens--Eddison and Lindsay, Morris and Lewis and Tolkien....
"In addition, Clive and I often feel we are fighting in the same corner, against the easy prejudices of an industry in which sameness is prized, and anything with a touch of imagination to it is regarded as weird and outré...."
And in what ways is Barker an important artist?
"He's a writer who makes no concessions to external influences--to the marketplace, to readers, to his publishers. He writes what he wants to write when he wants to write it, and is in that way alone one of the most genuine and honest writers I know.... When you enter Clive's novels, you are entering a world in which literally anything may happen in front of your eyes, and that is both a terrifying and a thrilling prospect."
NEW YORK CITY: PW
Outside
the skies are dirty gray and dripping warm rain. Douglas Winter is nice enough,
however, to make his way over to our offices from a lunchtime meeting near Union
Square.
Winter knows a lot about Barker and he's put much of what he knows into Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, which HarperCollins will release in the U.K. this fall and in the U.S. next spring; Cemetery Dance will issue a limited edition in between. An intensely researched biography of Barker melded with critical response to his work, the book, which Winter has toiled on for years, has proved invaluable in our explorations of Barker. Recently retired from the legal profession, Winter is the nation's most accomplished critic of horror, dark fantasy and dark crime, as well as a novelist (Run, published to strong reviews by Knopf in 2000). Winter has known Barker since 1985; Barker contributed a wrap-around novella to Winter's 1997 anthology of original horror fiction, Revelations.
Winter shakes out his umbrella and takes a seat opposite our desk. He's a big guy, neatly dressed. As we talk we drink coffee out of paper cups.
"Why," we ask, "is Barker so important as to warrant your writing an entire book about him?"
"People like Clive and Stephen King," Winter says, "reach an extraordinary number of readers and television viewers and moviegoers, far more than the number reached by the very talented writers who are considered 'literary' but who publish to a much smaller audience. There clearly is something important in what they do. We're talking about novels that have ideas, that echo current anxieties or fantasies or metaphysical dilemmas, and that hopefully do so while telling a good story. That makes these people very powerful influences on our social, political and metaphysical thought."
Winter considers Barker a friend. He describes him as being "very shy. But you know I've seen him hold audiences of hundreds of people. He once said to me, 'It's like I put on this little man when I go out and do that.' Because he is very shy."
He is also, according to Winter, very kind. Barker had done original art work for Revelations, including the cover. Winter first saw the book with Barker in California. "I said, 'Clive, this cover is absolutely beautiful.' He said, 'I'm glad you like it.' A few weeks later, my wife and I were working in the yard and a truck pulled up with a huge box. Inside it was the six-by-nine-foot oil painting that was the cover, framed. He's that kind of person. He knew one of my dogs was dying, and he called to ask about it and to comfort me."
Coldheart Canyon
At Barker's
compound, we've been joined in the Abarat map room by David Armstrong, a
soft-spoken man with muscles that out-bulge Barker's. With him is his and
Barker's lovely 13-year-old daughter, Nicole, fruit of Armstrong's first
marriage. Barker met Armstrong on Easter Sunday 1995. They've been married six
years.
The family talks, then Armstrong watches our conversation with Barker for a while as Nicole plays. After they leave, Barker says, "Nick has two dads who dote on her."
We note that Barker wears a wedding ring. "We both wear rings," he says. "We had two little ceremonies: one in the bathtub up here and one in Hawaii, just between ourselves and God. David is an extraordinary powerful force in my life. There is a very dark streak in my nature. I once wrote about depression coming and finding me. It felt like I had been hunted down by this thing that turned everything to ash. That was about the time that I met David. It was great because David was the antidote. It's almost as though I'd been given the poison and the antidote at the same moment."
Armstrong is 11 years younger than Barker. Most everybody around Barker is younger than him.
"I'm 48 going on 49 very quickly," Barker reflects. "I am very conscious of time passing because I am fearful that I won't have done all the things I want to do. I am a pretty vain sort of guy, and I work out as gravity takes its inevitable toll. I think I am a healthier guy than I would have been had I not been so preoccupied with having solid abs." Barker exercises in his home gym every evening. He gets up around 8 a.m., immediately goes to work writing, breaks at 1 p.m. for "a siesta," then returns to work.
We've been talking with Barker for a long time now and need to move around. Barker offers to show us the house in which he, David and Nicole live. With its turrets and balconies, tiles of rust and white, its dark wood, smooth plaster walls and high ceilings, the house, shaded everywhere by palms and ferns, is at once homey and imposing. Its secluded grounds run green and lush, with lawns and pathways and a swimming pool hidden within a tranquil glade.
The house shelters not only the Barker-Armstrong family but also four dogs and, Barker says, "seven rats." One of the dogs barks at us as the writer leads us around. He scolds it. We pass a large living room crowned by a chandelier with a toy bat dangling from it. Barker doesn't invite us in there but we note an antique carousel horse, a large sofa and TV and, on the walls, erotic paintings obviously painted by the author.
Barker takes us to a library that's a writer's dream, with high shelves accessible only by a ladder that runs along a rail. Suspended from one wall is a huge crucifix he retrieved from France. It's not the first crucifix we've seen in the house, and Barker wears one around his neck. We venture that the story of Jesus must mean a lot to him.
"There is no escaping it," he says. "I mean, Imajica is a book about a man who turns out to be the half brother of Jesus Christ. The Christian myth holds me fast, as it held Blake, but like Blake, who said to one of his enemies, 'We both read the Bible day and night, but I read black where he reads white,' I feel that what has been done with the stories, the great body of legend and historical reality, is unspeakable. And while Christ is a very important part of my life, so are the pagan goddesses."
We walk to Barker's writing room, painted red. Barker works by hand at a big wooden table. He has never learned to type and eschews e-mail and computers; writing by hand seems to connect him more easily to his imagination, and to its mysterious source. "I don't believe that I am the only creative part in the system," he acknowledges. "True creativity cannot be about ego, cannot be about, 'I did this.' There is a wonderful print by Goya that's signed, 'I saw this.' That's different than 'I created this.' I don't think I create a lot, I think I witness a lot. I witness a lot that is being put into my mind's eye by...I don't know what.
"I can give you an example of how this happens. I get up in the middle of the night, and a poem is in my head, and I pick up a pen and I write it down: 'Brother Plato right or wrong/ Says the tribe where I belong/ Is a family of souls in two/ Me a half, another you/ Let's stay together as one tonight/ And prove our brother Plato right.' I had absolutely nothing to do with it."
Barker mentions that he wrote 60, maybe 100 pages yesterday. "I literally just throw the pages down. Sometimes it feels as though I am not in existence. There are large passages in every book that I cannot recall writing. Last night I came to bed about nine o'clock and wrote. I wrote 20 pages and it was bliss. I had one of my dogs at my feet, I had my naked husband beside me. What can be more perfect? I was writing, and I was in the zone."
His eyes grow dreamy, his gaze turns inward. "This great body of myth and story and folklore and fairytale is the sea of our imaginations, into which we plunge regularly and emerge with some new thing to carry into our waking lives. It is my job to confuse anybody who figures out that they have got me cornered and packaged. 'Oh Barker, he is the guy who....' No, I am never 'the guy.' I am just an imaginer. I think the heart of what I do lies in the shamanistic instinct to be a walker between worlds."
As the afternoon wears down we go outside and ascend a winding metal staircase to a high balcony. There a smiling Armstrong takes shots of us with Barker. Back down and readying to leave, we notice one of the McFarlane toys on a table. Barker asks someone for a silver pen. He leans down to inscribe the toy to us. It's a curious moment, watching a literary superstar autograph a toy, a moment deepened by the concentration Barker brings to this simple act and by the kindness of the gesture, an instant heightened by the ferocity of the figure being signed. It's a moment that exemplifies the seeming paradox in Barker's work, the displaying side by side of the sacred and the profane, the blessed and the damned. Yet both dwell within the human condition, we know, and so perhaps there is no paradox at all, but only the expression of a man familiar with both heaven and hell, two among the many worlds that spin within his protean imagination.
