dead-mans-house

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i think the fact that clive barker knows what to hold back & when is a big part of what makes him a master of short fiction. like he straight up refuses to describe frank in hellbound heart until frank starts reassuming more and more physical form & in the refusal to describe him until that point, he becomes indescribable. and in cabal all you get of these lush beautiful monstrous creatures is little glimpses, little tantalizing descriptions that give just enough that you want to fill the gaps with your imagination

i've only read weaveworld as far as his longer stuff goes & i love the richness & indulgence & worldbuilding, but i think the short stuff is more impressive from a skill standpoint. there's times when that technique of refusal to engage is a cop-out & times when it's perfect, and i always feel like it's perfectly executed w/ him

#this is true! #even though my favorite of his works are some books #in terms of writing his skill lives in short fiction #In The Hills The Cities is I think his best short work but he has so many that are fantastic #the technical skill in those is really tight and strong it is like stephen king said all those years ago #clive barker makes everyone else look like they have been asleep #but I would still encourage fans of his short stuff to try his novels for funsies

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happy halloween but especially to clive barker and his diseased mind

#i wish he was wearing the weird vest in this interview #but i always wish that

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He says he's gonna work on WRITING!!! And he mentions Abarat 4 & 5!

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saw a thing on the dash that reminded me of something. ✨ My first visceral reaction to an art style ✨

There used to be this book in my childhood home called "Abarat" by Clive Barker. A fantasy novel that had illustrations also by the author within it.

I was still a kid and learning english, so I didn't really read books that often. I liked looking at the pictures though. At the time, I the only visual art I was familiar with were cartoons, kid's books illustrations/diagrams, and "common" paintings like the Mona lisa.

and Abarat. oh Abarat was something else for my tiny kid brain.

Clive Barker's art is already pretty surreal and striking (and even scary) on its own. but with little me's developing brain? it felt revolting; like there was a deep sense of wrongness when looking at it. It actually made me physically sick lol. but it was captivating in a way that I hated too. I thought that it was what "grown up art" was supposed to look like for a while

And now I'm a grown up, and I can properly appreciate the skill and intent behind the Abarat illustrations. I honestly still feel a bit physically sick looking at them (whether it's carrying over from childhood or something else, who knows), but I don't mean that as an insult--quite the opposite! You know a picture is powerful when it has such a strong effect on you.

Idek why I wrote this out. The power of Images™️ is just cool to think about I guess. I don't ANYTHING about what Abarat is about but it's part of my core memory now because the pictures fried my brain at age 10

#really thoughtful interesting post about art #I think horror artists and authors especially excel at making things which are so intense that we have physical reactions to them #OP's attitude about art--even art that upsets them physically--is so refreshing #too many people just assume that any upsetting art has a negative moral value because it makes them feel icky

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Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover's work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good.

Clive Barker, Abarat

Ten years ago, I was in high school, doing an art-focused program. This was my response to the assignment of making a work of art based on a poem. I did not really engage with poetry at the time but I was a fan of Clive Barker's Abarat books, which featured poems he had written mostly within the universe of the story, including the first poem I ever memorised and also this one. I think it stuck with me for the easy structure, the sort of visual aspect of it.

Anyway, about a year ago, my basement was flooded. It happened while I was away and it was not discovered until many months of summer warmth had passed and things had started to get really nasty. That's the easy retelling; the full story is much more frustrating and infuriating. The end result remains the same - almost all of my art from 2018 and before was severely water damaged. I threw away what could not be saved and set myself to the exhausting task of drying out the remainder and beginning efforts to stabilise and sanitise it.

Most work from my high school years looks something like this. Usually worse. The pink and purple flecks are from pigment bleed of some printwork, the black is mostly mold. It was heartbreaking going through it all, so perhaps it is just the Stockholm syndrome speaking, but there is a sort of beauty in these stains.

I enjoy this work a lot. I look back at my teen self and think, man, you really did see something here. It is not the type of work I would do today - I have accepted that it is not my destiny to make the kind of clean and precise inkwork my teen self admired so much. But it is the type of work I still enjoy. I might frame it one of these days, but for now, I'll just leave it here on tumblr.

#hey this is really good! #I'm so sorry that your stuff got flooded and water damaged but I'm glad that I get to see it #it does look interesting #and it's interesting that a lot of abarat is also about the sea and about flooding #so maybe that's destiny? #I'm also glad you were able to get into poetry through the books #it's hard to find the right poems as a kid

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I was watching Hellbound and for some reason thought of this scene from "The Road to El Dorado". I have no idea why but it consumed me and I had to make this. It was fun trying to put them in 2D Dreamworks style.

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Clive Barker and Danny Elfman behind the scenes of Nightbreed. ❤

Pretty sure that's Danny's daughter Lola on the right as well.

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Mike Mignola “Robot” Clive Barker's Nightbreed (undated)

Source

#i loooove this era of mignola art

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can people who have never read the hellbound heart stop pretending that hellraiser 2022 was somehow more accurate to the hellbound heart

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Pavonine: of our like a peacock. Pretty funny that the quote used as an example is the quote that made me look it up. (From Imajica by Clive Barker.)

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The tonal shift between abarat 2 and 3 is huge for a lot of reasons such as Barker almost dying and I wish we knew what the tone for abarat 4 is gonna be

#abarat

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Frank and Julia Cotton in Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

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She lament my configuration

she configure my box till my hell is raised

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headcanon that Christopher Carrion owns

a piece of some kind of a furniture, a small one that just always keeps coming in the way no matter where he’d put it. It’s decorated with kingwood inlays in that centric, rorschachian manner that just sucks the eye into it, but there’s a wicked twist to it, so the pulsation of the pattern seems to do unspeakable things to your mind.

It survived the fire.

#i do imagine him as something of a hoarder of sentimental objects #but not having many of them

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some brave soul made an abarat feed on bluesky and it's basically empty :(

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Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart are kind of amazing. It's just so interesting seeing a movie adaption that was written and directed by the original writing, and are 100% their vision.

Same goes for Nightbreed and Cabal.

#completely true

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GRAIL FIND AT THE THRIFT BOOKSTORE

Hardback baby!!! I refuse to let my partners read the paperback version of the first book I already have because Clive Barker's art is such an important part of the whole, having someone read it with just plain text feels like cutting off my arm and asking me to sign my name. I'm genuinely ecstatic, this is such a fantastic find!!

#excellent find! #I'm a lil jealous