Clive Barker

Clive Barker (born 5 October 1952 in Liverpool) is an English writer, film-maker and visual artist who made his name in the mid-1980s with the Books of Blood horror stories and later moved into dark fantasy.

The six volumes of Books of Blood appeared as paperbacks from Sphere in 1984 and 1985, and his first novel, The Damnation Game, followed in 1985. The novella The Hellbound Heart (1986) became the basis of Hellraiser, the 1987 film he wrote and directed, which opened in London in September that year. Later fiction shifted towards large-scale fantasy: Weaveworld (1987), Cabal (1988), The Great and Secret Show (1989), Imajica (1991), the illustrated children's fable The Thief of Always (1992) and Abarat (2002), the first book of a series. His work has also been adapted for the Candyman films, and he has worked in theatre, comics and games.

For collectors

The Books of Blood began life as British paperback originals from Sphere, and the first American edition carried Stephen King's much-quoted line, "I have seen the future of horror and it is named Clive Barker." The Hellbound Heart first appeared not as a book of its own but in Night Visions 3, an anthology issued by Dark Harvest in November 1986; it was not published as a standalone book until HarperPaperbacks did so in 1991, after the film's success, so the Dark Harvest volume is the true first appearance. Barker is also a prolific painter who often illustrates his own books, The Thief of Always among them.