CONTENTS:
PART ONE: Personal life and Film news
PART TWO: Literature and Art

More coming soon
 

PART TWO: Literature and Art

TT - Tony Timpone, Editor, Fangoria Magazine
CB - Clive Barker, Imaginer

TT: “Let’s switch gears to the literary now.”

CB: “Sure!”

TT: “First. what’s the status of the Scarlet Gospels?”

CB: “Can we get some water out here, Tony?”

TT: “Sure!”

CB: “Can somebody bring out some water?”

Tony Timpone vanishes backstage

CB: “Meanwhile, I’ll do my song and dance!”

Laughter

CB: “Good question! I was hoping [inaudible].”

Tony Timpone returns with a bottle of water.

CB: “Thank you, excellent!”

Tony Timpone looks to the audience.

TT: “Anybody else want one?”

CB: “Yeah, water anybody?”

Clive tries to open the water bottle while wrestling with his notes, and the microphone.

CB: “Where were we? The literary. Yeah, I don’t know how many of you know, I was doing a [theme?] novel called the Scarlet Gospels, which is my farewell to the Hellraiser mythology, and I had done three drafts of it. As you know, I handwrite everything. So that was, 3 drafts, that’s like 17,000 handwritten pages. And about to start on the final draft, and next thing I get kicking and screaming from all around the world, really, for another Abarat book.”

Audience applause.

CB: “Thank you! That’s another one! The Abarat books are in 42 languages, and they’re very close to my heart. I’ve been painting the pictures for the Abarat books for about seven or eight years, I’ve got three more to write (actually two more to write, because I’ve almost finished the middle one.) There’s five in the series, and I kind of had to put Scarlet Gospels down to do an Abarat book, which I’m doing, and I will come back to Scarlet Gospels and do the final draft when I’ve finished, probably, with Abarat. I feel as though… It’s interesting, I wish I could clone myself. I’ve come to a place in my life where there’s just a lot of… possibilities, a lot of ways to go. I never thought I’d be able to reach the size of audience that I’ve been lucky enough to reach. It amazes me that I can have school kids reading stuff and at the same time making THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN.”

Clive takes a drink of water.

TT: “How about that short story collection that you were toying with over the years.”

CB: “Well… excuse me…”

Clive clears his throat, looks at the water bottle.

CB: “Oh, it’s poisoned.”

Laughter

CB: “That’s ready, that’s finished and, really, it’s a question where we schedule these things. There’s a lot of literary things waiting in the pipeline, but the Abarat stuff is the [pride?] stuff, because boy those paintings are important to me, and the stories. When I’ve finished all five, it’ll be about 800,000 words and about 1,000 paintings. So, it’s a big project, it’ll be the single biggest project of my life. And I’ll then go back to Scarlet Gospels and I’ve still got a Nightbreed story I want to do, and then I have one humongous book, along the lines of Imajica, which is a big novel that I wrote when I was 39 for my 40^th birthday (I gave it to myself for my 40^th birthday) and I want to do a humongous novel that mingles horror and fantasy… and sex.”

TT: “Did the wonderful Mister B. Gone achieve what you hoped it would?”

CB: “Yeah! You know, you said something, and thank you for this, you said something wonderful in your editorial which mentioned Mister B. Gone. You likened it to The Yattering and Jack, which is a story from the Books of Blood. Now that was exactly what I was going for, and you were the only person who noticed, so thank you.”

TT: “Do I win anything?”

CB: “Yeah, I’ll send you a copy of the book. But it was great that you saw that that was what I was going for. I was going for this combination of… I don’t want to say ‘comedy’, because it’s not a funny book. I almost want to say ‘satire’, in a way. It’s a grim, dark book with a little [inaudible].”

TT: “Back in NY, before I came out here, I was lucky enough to go to the Sloan Fine Arts Gallery, where they have a lot of your paintings on display, including a lot from your designs for THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN. It’s just wonderful. I was wondering if here, in LA, maybe at the Pacific Design Center, are they going to do a similar [viewing?] of your artwork soon?”

CB: “We had a huge exhibition here in LA last year at the Bert Green Gallery, we’ll do another one next year, so we will have an LA exhibition probably every two years. I’d like to get exhibitions going in Chicago, I’d like to get something going in the South, too, so these paintings are… I like to paint big, so it’s hard to get people galleries to [inaudible] pictures—“

[inaudible, because at this point, I realized that I had left my “Mother Theresa In Space” giclee (#12/50!) unattended several rows back, so I had move about for a bit. –JK ]”

CB: “He has a lot of my stuff, constantly so [inaudible]… Bert Green is downtown and always has paintings and drawings of mine available.”

TT: If you've never seen one of Clive's paintings on a wall, it's a totally different experience than seeing it in a book, or even on a website. On the Fangoria website, we have a bunch of your artwork, touting the gallery. It's just so different, standing there in front of it, letting your worlds just blow over you. It's an incredible experience, so If you've never seen his stuff hanging up on a wall in one of these galleries, you should definitely make a point of it."

CB: "Yeah, head downtown and get Bert to show you some pictures. You know, it is a bit of a frustration, because I'd like people to see the paintings in the flesh, and you're right: however good a reproduction is, you're never going to be able to get what the painting feels like as an experience, face to face with it."

(PART 3: Video games and more, coming soon...)