Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic: The Authorized Biography [Hardcover]

Douglas E. Winter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 2002

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and personal journey into Barker's life is a grand tour through all of his fiction and film, from his earliest unpublished work -- including the short story "The Wood on the Hill," which is published here for the first time -- up to his most recent novel, Coldheart Canyon and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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Douglas E. Winter, author of Stephen King: The Art of Darkness and editor of two major dark-fiction anthologies (Prime Evil and Revelations), may be the reigning expert on modern horror. If his book Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic is not the definitive biography of that polymathic author-playwright-auteur, it is only because the volume appeared when its subject was still in his late forties.

At 501 pages, plus 50 pages of endnotes and nearly 100 pages of Primary and Secondary Bibliography, The Dark Fantastic is an impressively thorough document. It covers Clive Barker's life from before birth (giving background on his parents, grandparents, and the hometown he shares with the Beatles) through the early years of struggle to his successes as an internationally bestselling author, Hollywood screenwriter-producer-director, and family man. The biography makes it clear that Barker has always had exceptional talent. (The Dark Fantastic includes, as an appendix, a previously unpublished story, written in Barker's early teens, "The Wood on the Hill." This uneven but fully developed fable of hubris is a tale authors twice as old would be proud to have written.)

Readers expecting a tell-all biography will be disappointed. A good portion of The Dark Fantastic is devoted to summaries and assessments of Barker's creations in many media. However, Winter's critical examinations are interesting, sympathetic, and honest. The Dark Fantastic is a must for all Barker fans and all serious scholars of horror and the fantastic. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

Since his advent as the enfant terrible of horror fiction in the 1980s, Clive Barker has adopted nearly as many guises as his polymorphic Nightbreed: novelist, playwright, illustrator, screenwriter, director, producer and actor. Like his restlessly creative career, this comprehensive critical biography is ambitious if a bit unwieldy. Winter takes the same tack he followed in his exemplary Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (1984), interweaving detailed critical study of his subject's work with appreciative biography and cultural critique to fashion a portrait of the artist. The book's structure is dictated by Barker's primary texts in fiction, film and theater. Winter evaluates each in chronological order, as successive steps in Barker's ongoing evolution as an artist of "the fantastique." Though there are many illuminating insights on how Barker's fiction has been shaped by his private life including his childhood in Liverpool, his homosexuality and his love-hate relationship with Hollywood the book's obligatory biographical content reads mostly like an addendum to the critical analysis. Hyperbole is inevitable in some estimations the transgressive tales in Barker's groundbreaking Books of Blood are credited with "redeeming the literature of the dark fantastic from the confines of mass marketing" but Winter's explication of a coherent vision that unifies Barker's work and elevates it above much in the genres to which it is pigeonholed is persuasive and corroborated by an abundance of Barker's own articulate observations ("All horror heals. It opens some wounds and shows you how to close them again"). Barker, who will turn 50 this year, is himself still a work in progress. At the very least, this rewarding book offers an attractively posed snapshot of his creative life to date.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 688 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (July 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066213924
• ISBN-13: 978-0066213927
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #71 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Reference & Collections

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read., April 4, 2003

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic: The Authorized Biography (Hardcover)

Reading about Clive Barker's polymathic inclinations, one recalls a scene from his book, The Great and Secret Show. In that tale, postal worker Randolph Jaffe, assigned to the dead letter room, unwittingly finds himself at a spiritual crossroads of America. Uncovering hidden truths by exploring the ramblings of the lost, the lonely, and the mad, Jaffe gets a glimpse of other worlds just under the surface of the "real" one.

Clive Barker has also glimpsed other worlds, but rather than driving him mad, these visions have compelled him to communicate what he has seen to others. This compulsion has led him to express himself in a multiplicity of media, including the sketches he drew as a child (and indeed, throughout his life), the plays he wrote in his twenties, the short stories he penned as he matured, the movies he directed, or even now, in the portraits he paints. It is this impulse that Douglas Winter, a polymath in his own right (lawyer, journalist, editor, author, book critic, public speaker), attempts to chronicle and explicate in The Dark Fantastic.

The book is arranged chronologically, following Barker from his early life in Liverpool, to his years on the London theatre scene, culminating in the present day, where we find him in Hollywood at work on his latest undertaking, the multimedia project known as The Abarat Quartet. Winter seems to have had unrestricted access to his subject and to those around him, as he cites knowledge gained from interviews with Barker and a plethora of Barker's family, friends, lovers, ex-lovers and business partners. Although Winter makes no claim of objectivity, he maintains a respectable distance from his subject, providing valuable insights into both the man and his work. Doing so, he makes a convincing case for Barker's inclusion in the pantheon of the leading creators of fantastic literature.

Perhaps the most important revelations are found near the end of the book, where Barker becomes more comfortable with his sexuality, finding true love with photographer David Armstrong. There also, he deals with the death of his father and his subsequent descent into depression. Barker's latest epiphany is the most fascinating, as he comes to realize that hundreds of paintings, seemingly created at random to combat his depression, all contained common themes, themes that eventually coalesced to form the basis of his Abarat Quartet project. The fact that he unconsciously worked his way towards mental health, even while breaking new barriers, is both inspirational and awe inspiring.

The book's upbeat ending" (Barker's only fifty as of the publication date) bodes well for the future. Barker, it seems, will continue to receive messages from other realities, filtering them through his artistic sensibilities to make them more palatable to us lesser mortals. We, the audience, merely have to open our minds, experience his work, and learn. By allowing Barker to take us to other worlds, we can more easily absorb the lessons he has to teach us about our own.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the man and his art, January 8, 2003

By 

a. (CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic: The Authorized Biography (Hardcover)

I do not often read biographies, but since Clive Barker is one of my favorite authors and I enjoy his writing so much, I figured I would give this book a shot. First off, if this book were just about the life of Clive, it would be at probably only half as long. Winter uses much of the book as an in-depth critical analysis of Barker's fiction. At first I didn't like this method, and if you are not familiar with all of the works he discusses, the respective sections may not be as informative. However, as I read more and more of the book, it became clear that Winter was not only analyzing Barker's fiction, but Barker himself as well. At times this works wonderfully, shedding light not only on Barker as a writer and person, but on the process of creating art and literature. I learned a lot about writing and many times discovered things in his fiction that I had not seen before. Thus, if one was rereading Barker's works, Winter's book could be an insightful commentary. The only problem that I had with the book was that at some points if felt not like a biography but only a critical interpretation of certain pieces. The in-depth analysis of most pieces of Barker's work seemed a little overboard for a biography. Otherwise, this is a very well-written, insightful, and overall entertaining book. A must for any fan of Barker, fantastic fiction, or an interest in creativity in general, since Barker seems to leave very few creative endeavors unexplored.

5.0 out of 5 stars Insert witty title here., September 30, 2004

By 

Jamie Rosen at work (at work) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic: The Authorized Biography (Hardcover)

I took this book out from the library because I was in the mood to read non-fiction about fantastic fiction. I hadn't actually read any Barker, except for two false starts on Sacrament. I now intend to rectify that situation, as I've gone out and fetched myself a copy of Weaveworld and intend to get to it forthwith, followed by his other books. This is the best biography I've read (although that's a limited number) and certainly a fascinating look into an author I knew very little about beforehand. I wish Mr. Winter's look at King was as recent, because then it would be high on my list of priorities as well.