![]() ![]() It’s ridiculous that it’s taken me this long to get into Barker, but I’m seeing my glass as half full - there can’t be many horror fans at my age who can jump in fresh to his oeuvre.Īs they say, it’s never as good as the first time. Good as the film Candyman is, it doesn’t quite manage that. It was as if he had stepped off the page into my reality, and I got a tremor in my gut that is the absolute holy grail of any horror fan. It was as if Candyman was transcending his fictional status by owning it as his chief characteristic. To live in people’s dreams to be whispered at street-corners but not have to be. When I got to that famous line in The Forbidden. They were also much more frightening than I expected. So I opened my first ever Clive Barker book.Ĭlear, cool and lyrical, with riveting and stunningly relevant plots, they could have been written yesterday, or even in ten years time. ![]() ![]() Barker 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. ![]() I felt I should at least read The Hellbound Heart and The Forbidden, on which they are based respectively. Clive Barker (born 5 October 1952) is an English writer, film director, and visual artist. Then I was preparing for my YouTube show Title Fright 10: Curious Cruelty, which pits Hellraiser against Candyman. I denied myself a lot of wonderful horror writing for years because of this and I’m only now catching up.įirst came Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House, which I've blogged about here. I’ve been saying for a while that if loving horror is an orientation, I’ve only just come out of the closet. ![]()
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