The shortlisted works across all 13 categories of the British Fantasy Awards have been announced! Find out who’s in the mix over on our blog. Winners announced at Fantasycon in October.
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Announcement:
Clive Barker: A Once-In-A-Lifetime Deal
As the BFS celebrates the return of Clive Barker to publishing, British Fantasy Award-winning horror writer James Bennett reflects on the enduring influence of the British Master.
Clive Barker is a giant. It’s hard to remember the exact moment that I read The Books of Blood. Some time in the late 80s/very early 90s, I believe. I’d recently moved into a shared house in my last year of teenagerhood and a friend turned me onto those stories because he knew I liked Stephen King. Well, the stories in those six slim volumes with the gnarly, phantasmagorical covers (illustrated by the author himself, no less) were certainly on a par with King while being entirely their own thing. In fact, they were like nothing I’d read before.
(Pictured above: author James Bennett)
I was enraptured – and appalled – from the start, thrilled by the framing device of a man etched in the words of the dead and the many dark highways on which the tales travelled. “In the Hills, the Cities” was probably the first story I read that featured explicit queerness and I can definitely recall how shaken I was by it, both as an anxious young man in the closet and its visceral titillation.
“You can do that?” I thought, or sentiments much like it.
And thus began a love affair with Barker’s fiction that has lasted till this day. I lay on my bed in my tiny room in Penzance, Cornwall, and devoured “The Damnation Game”, “Weaveworld”, “Cabal” and “The Great and Secret Show” back-to-back. A veritable grotesque feast. Somehow, here was a voice in the dark, speaking directly to me. Telling me that I wasn’t as alone as I thought. That I wasn’t weird. And even if I was, that was OK. Those are all books that stay with you, the ideas innovatory, the scope multiversal and the prose exquisite. Poetic and metaphysical. Adrip with sex, thrills and gore. The real deal.
When “Imajica” came along in ’91, my friend and I must’ve been among the first to read it, a great, sprawling, epic wedge of the dark fantastique that presented notions of desire and identity that remain groundbreaking for the 90s and groundbreaking even now. Who can forget Pie ‘Oh’ Pah and their inherent fluidity, an assassin-slash-whore who can assume the physical shape of ones’ deepest desires? “Imajica” is a novel about human limitations and smashing through them on a cosmic scale, an original mythology for queer folks and for any lucky reader alike. It’s both way ahead of its time and timeless. A recent re-read only confirmed the matter. A masterpiece like that changes you. Inspired, my earliest attempts at adult fiction took a darker, more sensual turn. That was down to Clive Barker.
Hope was down to Clive Barker too.
Believe me, those weren’t great times for queer folks. The long shadow of AIDS. Section 28. No equal rights. Widespread social exclusion and oppression. They were calling us demons in the papers. Mocking us on TV. And when they weren’t doing that, they were pretending that we didn’t exist while thousands suffered and died. It was the environment in which the author delivered his fables and the grain against which his fables went. A hand on the shoulder. Light. I came out to all and sundry in 1996. I lost friends. I didn’t speak to my Dad for months. But I’d decided that a life in which I couldn’t be myself, come what may, wasn’t a life worth living. I no longer wanted the burden of it, the secrets and the lies. Like most of us, I faced abuse. Violence. The Midlands, where I’d happened to wind up during that era, wasn’t exactly the best ground for such flowers to grow. But I was still writing. Still dreaming. Still reading, as always. 1996 was also the year that saw the publication of “Sacrament” by Clive Barker, which I naturally devoured. And devoured again. More so than any of his other books, it had a profound effect on me. I wouldn’t say it was my favourite Barker novel, you understand, but it will always be special for that reason. Here, for the first time in modern genre fiction (in my experience, anyway), we had an openly gay protagonist, Will Rabjohns, and a still-timely tale of extinction, loss, love, despair, self-acceptance, sacrifice and ultimately hope. “Sacrament” reached me. It showed me the way. It told me to never pull any punches when it comes to being who you are and what you want to express. That you may be out there with the Lost Things, sure. But you’re yourself. You’re whole. No one can take that away from you.
“Sacrament” is Barker at his most personal. I’m not sure that this courageous novel, how it shone as a beacon for so many of us, has yet been fully acknowledged and appreciated in the annals of genre classics. And that’s just it – Barker is a true visionary. A bona fide artist. A Renaissance Man when one considers the vivid oeuvre of his prose, his poetry, his movies, his games, his paintings, his photography, his erotica et al. His work traverses many boundaries – often provocatively – and can be read on a multitude of levels. As avant garde Horror. Transcendental Fantasy. Body shlock. Carnival peep show. Chimerical noir. Punk scripture. You name it. And yes, as beacon. As a light to every soul on the margins of “normative” society to show us what’s possible, what can be done and what can be achieved. He tells us to take the risk for the sake of our selves. Clive Barker meant that to me then. He means that to me now. I’ve been reading and re-reading his stuff on a regular basis ever since I first cracked open the first slim volume of The Books of Blood and alighted upon the highways of the dead.
That isn’t going to change.
How my little queer heart leapt with joy to read the news that there are brand new Barker works in the offing.
It was always going to be an instant purchase for me – bills be damned – but when I read that Library of the Dead will serve as the spiritual successor to The Books of Blood, I couldn’t help but feel that my appreciation of the author was coming full circle. Moreover, I was both pleased and moved to learn that Mr Barker has made a full recovery from his health issues and is returning to the genre fold. Because we need him. We’ve always needed him. We need him now as much as ever.
And we’re still here.
And yes, it turns out that you can do that.
I’m no longer the anxious young man in the closet that I was. I don’t live in a tiny room. I’m stronger now. I know who I am. I even have my own published works to my name and I like to think that a lot of that is down to those rare voices and those lights in the darkness that led the way. Clive Barker shines among them as the brightest.
Look, there is no one like Clive Barker. He is unique. A once-in-a-lifetime deal. A giant.
Welcome home, Mr Barker.
I can’t wait to read Library of the Dead.
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