From 1982 to 1983, he also created three plays, including Crazyface, for the Cockpit Youth Theatre. Later he moved toward modern-day fantasy and urban fantasy with horror elements in Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, the world-spanning Imajica, and Sacrament.īarker was born in Liverpool (5 October 1952), the son of Joan Ruby, a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm.īarker co-founded the avant-garde theatrical troupe The Dog Company in 1978 with former school friends and up and coming actors, many of which would go on to become key collaborators in Barker's film work.

He was also an executive producer of the film Gods and Monsters, which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.īarker began writing horror early in his career, mostly in the form of short stories and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game. His fiction has been adapted into films, notably the Hellraiser series, the first installment of which he also wrote and directed, and the Candyman series. He has since written many novels and other works. (Feb.Clive Barker is an English novelist, playwright, author, film director, and visual artist who came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories, the Books of Blood, which established him as a leading horror writer. 100,000 first printing $125,000 ad/promo Preferred Choice Book plan main selection author tour. This is the first book of a projected trilogy. Though diverting, the novel is something of a potboiler, and despite its pervasive horrific imagery, it fails even to frighten us-or invite us to suspend disbelief.

To enlist allies, each sires offspring (using the seed of mortal men), and their spiritual children help to carry on the bizarre battle. Later understanding the corrupting nature of his creation, Fletcher rebels against Jaffe, and the two, now demigods, engage in a cosmic struggle. Reading through the mass of mail, he finds clues to an alternative reality, the laws of which are called ``the Art.'' Mastering these principles, he becomes powerful but evil, and presses into service a man named Fletcher, who synthesizes a transforming drug, the Nuncio. Down-and-outer Randolph Jaffe works in the dead-letter office in Omaha. Early in his new epic novel, Barker describes the thoughts of one of his characters as ``barbaric and baroque''-and the words fairly sum up the book.

The great and secret show book