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Overview
Clive Barker: a modern myth-maker, explorer of our darkest instincts and ultimate fears, the writer who — more than any other contemporary figure — has shaped our nightmares through diverse media. Novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, artist and director, he is a master at twisting the mundane to make it fantastic, frightening and ultimately meaningful.
Douglas E. Winter's detailed and highly literate biography, made possible by unprecedented access to Barker and his closest friends and family, offers readers a privileged insight into Barker's own story: his Liverpool childhood and adolescence; his forays into the world of theatre, mime and direction; his meteoric rise to fame as the author of the Books of Blood and Weaveworld, and the director of Hellraiser; his move to Hollywood to pursue a film career and his growth as an artist in many different media, which has taken him from theatre — the first form of human expression — into the digital age.
Interwoven with this revealing and personal journey into Barker's life is a grand tour through all of his fiction and film, from his earliest unpublished work — including the short story "The Wood on the Hill," which is published here for the first time — up to his most recent novel, Coldheart Canyon and beyond, giving a tantalising glimpse of things to come.
Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic unlocks the beating heart of a polymath, a creator, a true artist, and reveals at last a man with one of the twentieth century's most phenomenal imaginations, and the vision to lead us on many strange and fabulous journeys in the years ahead.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewDouglas E. Winter's Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic is a detailed, admittedly partisan assessment of a protean career that has encompassed theater, films, painting, and an astonishing variety of fiction. An effective hybrid of traditional biography, oral history, and literary analysis, The Dark Fantastic follows Barker from his supremely normal Liverpool childhood through his post-university career in fringe theater to his eventual success as a short story writer (The Books of Blood), novelist (Weaveworld, Imajica), and filmmaker (the Hellraiser series). Winter documents Barker's constantly evolving aesthetic in a series of closely reasoned chapters that illuminate the deepest concerns of Barker's idiosyncratic fictions and locate the points of intersection between his life and his work. Winter's analyses are invariably acute and his assessments uniformly generous, though never entirely uncritical.
The Dark Fantastic succeeds as a closely observed account of the evolution of an artist, and as a cogent explication of Baker's dominant -- and recurring -- themes. Among the central notions Winter isolates and explores are Barker's ongoing fascination with the Faustian myth, his lifelong affinity for the monstrous and grotesque, and his belief in the need for a reconciliation of opposing forces: flesh and spirit, reality and dream, the magical and the mundane. The result is a vital, deeply considered look at one of the most potent imaginations of recent years. Bill Sheehan