Clive Barker: The Essential Stranger

As the BFS celebrates the return of Clive Barker to publishing, George Daniel Lea reflects on the massive impact the author had on him during formative years.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. 

– Weaveworld, Clive Barker

(Pictured above: author George Daniel Lea)

For a nascent queer 1990s boy, born to a working class family in a fairly deprived area of the UK Midlands, the discovery of Barker’s work wasn’t just revelatory; it was, in a very literal sense, life-saving. It’s difficult to describe to younger generations now how concertedly deprived we were as queer individuals at that time: Whilst we had it better than our elders, the spheres of sexual orientation and gender identity were still largely taboo on a cultural level, any deviation from heteronormativity and cisgender narratives punished with ridicule, disgust and social exile. This was still a period when being labelled as “gay” at school or work was the most denigrating and excoriating of stigmas, the thing one could not be (and certainly couldn’t admit to). Most parents of the era would rather their child be exposed as a murderer or rapist than that most deviant and taboo of identities (and were open and voluble about the position). To be a queer child was to be a cuckoo in the nest, an outcast before one even developed the language or contexts to understand oneself. 

Beyond that, there existed nothing in the way of publicly available materials, role models etc to whom we might refer to better understand ourselves, from which to derive the aforementioned contexts and language by which we might articulate that peculiar sense of estrangement from our peers, our family units and society at large. Queer children of the era were concertedly denied their histories; the narratives by which we might’ve come to define, by a culture still sick with mindless, historical hostility, a hatred that transcended all reason or restraint.  

The less fortunate among us never came to realise this; they didn’t survive into adulthood to see the flourishing and license that current generations enjoy. They never happened upon that artefact or icon that provided the necessary anchorage to articulate their inner-worlds and help them understand they weren’t alone. 

I was fortunate (though I will freely admit: it could’ve very easily gone otherwise). It was the most arbitrary chance that brought me into contact with Clive Barker’s fiction (though I’d already developed a taste for the Hellraiser films, I knew nothing at that early age of Clive Barker as a creator, nor was I at that peculiar stage of prepubescent flux and transition where such was required). 

My Mother, an avid reader, particularly of horror fiction, came to me at the age of 11 with a luridly-coloured hardback book (a free gift from the book club she was a member of, that had arrived in the post alongside a particularly impressive copy of Stephen King’s IT). By that stage, I’d already inherited her love of reading, and had ravenously devoured everything from the works of Tolkien to the likes of Dickens and Shakespeare. The words she spoke to me are seared on my memory, coming, as they would, to define so much that would come after: 

“This is a bit weird for me, but I think you’ll like it.” 

At that time, so achingly hungry for any and all new material, I retreated with the book to my room and set to. 

Of course, I had no idea of Barker’s status as a gay man. Indeed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider it (I still lacked the language and contexts to do so, even — or perhaps especially — with regards to myself). All I knew was: Here was Fantasy fiction of an ilk I’d never come across before, in which the mundane cruelties and ambiguities of our waking lives weren’t separate from or antithetical to states of dreaming and miracles; rather, part and parcel of the same grand engine of human experience. Here, there was sex in Wonderland, horror in the streets of Oz, and absurdities to make the more traditionalist fantasies I’d cut my teeth on seem perfectly banal by comparison. 

I recall the experience of first reading Weaveworld as the most welcome trauma; cataclysmic and transformative as rapture and revelation necessarily must be. I closed the book with my mind on fire, the parameters of my assumptions blown wide, new thoughts and imaginings unspooling in the aftermath the like of which I’d never conceived before. The experience literally transformed me, rewrote the topography of my mind. In terms of formative experience, I regard it as analogous to having sex or falling in love for the first time; an expansion of mind that even narcotic or hallucinogenic experiences haven’t equalled. 

Something else was born in that fire.

Another creature closed the book’s final page from the innocent that blithely peeled back the first. While I didn’t consciously appreciate it at the time, Barker’s work had set me on a voyage of self-discovery that was almost Shamanistic in nature (not unlike that experienced by Will Rabjohns, the gay protagonist of Sacrament, one of Barker’s later novels). 

I couldn’t articulate those changes or traumas at the time; all I could do was experience them, let them take and undo and reconstruct me, ride the visceral thrill of being so alien to myself, yet so revealed at my most essential. 

What was the first thing that fluctuating newborn did, shed of its previous skin and assumptions? Why, pick up the book and read it again, of course. 

Yet the stories moved her. She couldn’t deny it. And they moved her in a way only *true* things could.

– Weaveworld, Clive Barker

Since then? Transformation upon transformation. Without that original input, without that window into a wider world, there’s no doubt in my mind I wouldn’t be here now to reminisce on the period. What Barker did when he blew that window wide open is reveal another world to me, connect me to conditions deliberately veiled and hidden. At the time, it was tradition’s earnest intention for queers to die quietly so that we might not live to challenge it. We were unwanted elements; grit in the machine, anomalies in the system. Better for all concerned if we were left to succumb in exile. Barker provided the possibility of better, of more: For me, his work was a window into both external and internal worlds I didn’t know existed, let alone were so inextricably connected. 

Perhaps something else might’ve come along; some other point of identification, but there’s no doubt in my mind it would’ve been much later, likely after a significant amount of damage had been done (damage I’m not sure I could’ve survived). 

The truth is: There was so little for us at the time, particularly young or nascent queers, who were deliberately insulated against any and all input that might help us define and understand our experience of ourselves, each other and the world. Barker went out of his way to provide solution to that in genres of fiction that innately appealed to the outcast and the exile; souls forced outside of the fishbowl then punished for straying. The language and subject matter of Weaveworld isn’t directly or explicitly queer by any measure: All of the romantic and sexual relationships in the story are straight. And yet, the story seethes with subtextual queerness; a sense of removal from the prescriptions and parameters of tradition and a celebration of those transgressions that powerfully appeal to queer sensibilities (such Dionysian transgression being manifested in our inalienable natures, our relationships to ourselves and each other). 

What Barker provides is a playground of possibilities; dreamscapes where all ambiguities and contradictions aren’t denied, but acknowledged as essential to humanity’s experience of itself. Weaveworld speaks to a sublimated yearning that transcends the concerns of any one tribe or demographic; that unspoken desire to rip open the world and step into another condition, a place where tangible reality and dreamed desire are one and the same. 

A condition of pure rapture. 

Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn’t reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest; in the system of the Weave and the evocations of the melody: all mind. 

-Weaveworld, Clive Barker

Of course, following that original experience, I consumed everything the man had created with insatiable appetite, from films such as Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions to his early short story collections, The Books of Blood. In every new artefact, I found fresh revelations: The short story, In The Hills, The Cities, taught me that we had right and license to write openly and explicitly gay characters in works of horror and genre fiction (a notion that, having grown up on the work of heterosexual, cisgender writers who predominated such markets, had never occurred to me). Later, the novel Sacrament would blow my mind open all over again, demonstrating that not only could queer characters occur in such genres, but that they are perfect vehicles for exploring queer concerns and subjects (indeed, in Sacrament, Barker establishes a species of metaphysical horror peculiar — but not exclusive — to his fellow queers, deriving from that aforementioned exile from traditional narrative and structure that leaves us as lost souls, desperately seeking some place and definition in a world intent on denying them). 

And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers – however loving, however liberal – would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were self-invented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies which they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.

-Sacrament, Clive Barker

Beyond that, Barker exquisitely elevates the conversation via his work. By this point, I’d come to consciously understand myself as a queer man, but understanding isn’t enough. Nor is simple engagement with the prescribed narratives or arguments of the day. Barker chooses to forego the arguments prescribed by our would-be enemies, effortlessly ignoring the parameters and platforms of “debate” they insist upon and instead talking directly to us, his tribeless tribe, of our experience, our understanding, in all of their ambiguity. 

The manner in which he actively ignores the discussions culture would mire us in and instead explores a largely sublimated area of queer experience is nothing less than revelatory. 

And, while that comes burdened with all manner of dangers and damage, Barker argues: It also provides an expanse of potential arguably denied to our straight counterparts. Yes, we are lost, yes, we are transient. But we are also free in ways most of our straight siblings can’t imagine. Even the more insidious impositions and traditions of gender are broken by us (which underlines a significant amount of the hostility we face from certain quarters). We represent a metaphysical anarchism, a chaos from which art is born, and by which the pervasive myths of humanity are rewritten. 

“We’re not going anywhere,” Will said with unshakeable conviction, “because we don’t come from anywhere. We’re spontaneous events. We just appear in the middle of families. And we’ll keep appearing. Even if the plague killed every homosexual on the planet, it wouldn’t be extinction, because there’s queer babies being born every minute. It’s like magic.”

-Sacrament, Clive Barker

In Barker’s purview, acceptance is not — and has never been — the holy grail, the point or prize of our struggles. We exist to upset the balance, to question the function of the sick and sorry machine into which we’re born. At our most essential and ascended, we exist not to accord with its standards, but to demonstrate there’s life and potential beyond the blood-slicked wheels, the endless, bone-grinding, soul-shattering systems. 

Sacrament is the gospel of this creed, essential reading for queer audiences, particularly those early in their journeys or not knowing where they are or might be headed. In typical Barker-ian fashion, it serves to elevate the conversation into realms and arenas that our self-fancied enemies can’t perceive and where they can’t follow. In so doing, Barker commits to an act of defiance more powerful than even the most cultivated and exquisite counter-argument: 

He simply removes himself — and, by extension, the rest of us — from their purview, quietly proclaiming:

This is not yours. You have nothing to say on these matters that’s of any worth, and we are under no obligation to listen or engage.

And, in the same subtle gesture, he reclaims those abstract territories that have been stolen from us and so blithely colonised: In Sacrament, the point is not to explore the place of queerness in a straight world (though that is part and parcel of the conversation). Rather, it’s to explore the phenomena of queerness in and of itself, in all of its startling and lurid ambiguity. Barker refers to prescribed cultural and political argument only tangentially: He has bigger, wiser fish to fry. 

In Will Rabjohns, we’re presented with a man on an unspoken Shamanistic journey; a journey that consists of sex and violence, disappointment and despair, love and confusion and all of the worldly, fleshy, abstract and ascended phenomena that make up human experience, but that queer characters — certainly at the time of publication — had been historically denied. There is no reductionism here, no synthesis for the sake of scoring a socio-cultural point or making incisive political commentary. Barker is simply beyond that as a creator, and doesn’t do his characters or imagination the disservice. He wishes to speak to us — and specifically us, his tribe, his fellow queers — on a level that’s almost coded, in a manner that we innately understand but not in a directly articulable manner. The experiences describes are more visceral and poetic than that (and more fundamentally, exquisitely true because of it). 

By this point in my own pilgrimage, I was a self-defined, out gay man, but still so young; still lost and confused and seeking for something, anything; some place or purpose or poetry by which to ratify my existence. 

Cue yet another life-changing revelation: 

The lessons and enlightenments of Sacrament helped me to understand that seeking such from the world I was born to was an error. All it could provide was limitation and parameter in the guise of wisdom, and always with an eye to curbing or containing, diminishing through shame or reference to heteronormative narratives. 

Barker dares to say: Fuck that.

Tradition seeks to make exiles of us? Then so be it! That is the beginning of our stories, the first word of the opening sentence of our self-authored mythologies. As Will Rabjohns learns before story’s end: Part of that pilgrimage, an essential outcome, is learning to look inward, to define one’s own place, parameters and assumptions of self. In so doing, we defy the impositions and assertions of those who seek only to denigrate and demean us, but also provide a more profound defiance against the sick and sorry engines of history that proclaim us unwanted, unnecessary and unwelcome by-product. 

Looking back not only at Barker’s work from a 2026 perspective, but at the person I was and became as a result of my exposure to it, I can say without fear of hyperbole that I would be a different, lesser human being without it (might not, in fact, have survived to this point at all). 

It’s a strange phenomena, to be so intimately and profoundly connected to someone you’ve never met (nor are likely to), for an essential stranger to have had such apocalyptic — in every sense of that term — impact upon the state of one’s identity and imagination. 

If there’s anything I could say to that essential stranger here and now, it’s simply: 

Thank you. Thank you so much for saving the life and sanity of that long-gone, 1990s, working-class queer boy, and opening up a world of such delirious possibility to him, it changed who he was and who he presumed he might be forever. 

George Daniel Lea
21-08-2026