Meeting expectations is not easy, exceeding them is even more difficult.
The Brit Clive Barker managed this effortlessly.
When he published his collection of short horror stories entitled "Books of Blood" in America in the mid-1980s, Stephen King wrote on the blurb: "I've seen the future of horror, her name is Clive Barker."
Maria Wiesner
Editor in the “Society & Style” department.
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The young Brit, born in Liverpool and living on the verge of subsistence after studying philosophy and literature as a playwright, did not rest on his laurels;
rather he took it as a prophecy to be fulfilled.
In 1986 he developed the feature film "Hellraiser" from one of his short stories, which he also directed.
The plot was simple: an adventurer buys a mystical cube in an oriental bazaar.
Twisted in the right combination, its golden ornaments open the door to another dimension.
It is ruled by the cenobites, pale leather-clad figures with rivets and nails in their cheeks and heads, who could be seen as angels or demons depending on your point of view.
The nail-studded main demon tears him to pieces
Barker tells a tale of pain and pleasure whose characters aren't clearly good or evil, because even when the nail-studded main demon (whom audiences nicknamed "Pinhead") says, "I'm going to rip your soul apart," his voice has a gentle undertone that turns the threat into a temptation.
With a budget of just $90,000, Barker designed his horror vision between punk and sadomaso borrowings that would shape generations of filmmakers and genre writers.
From the optics of the virtual noir world in "The Matrix" to the pale leather coat wearers in the science fiction thriller "Dark City" to the electronic implants of the cyborg collective in "Star Trek", Barker's traces can be found.
Four years later, in the film adaptation of his novella “Cabal”, he indicated that he wanted less to disturb than to create worlds from the depths of his imagination, in which the “freaks” are the protagonists Night are the empathic heroes being hunted by fascist cops, Catholic exorcists, and a seedy psychiatrist (David Cronenberg did the honors).
This invention of the world reached its climax in 1991 in the novel "Imajica".
All sorts of eerily beautiful figures
Like Stephen King, Barker draws on the horror genre, but uses its rules only as a framework from which to soar to literary heights.
Where King creates complex characters in the sober language of the American novel tradition, Barker draws poetic influences from his native Britain, from William Blake to Lord Byron to Robert Louis Stevenson.
On more than 800 pages, Barker guides us through several dimensions in "Imajica", which are inhabited by magicians, conflicting powers and all kinds of eerily beautiful characters, where battles are fought in desert landscapes and mystical relics are kept in fantastic palaces, each place a painting whose Details are worked out to the horizon.
Barker also paints real paintings, not just metaphorical ones.
When a reporter from the Los Angeles Times visited him at his Beverly Hills home in 2005, he was amazed at the multitude of images Barker had produced in eight years: Escher-like, branching cities reaching into a dark starry sky, demons out whose mouths protrude sharp teeth, figures of light whose bodies merge into waving seas of flowers.
Barker, who originally wanted to study painting, had put more than 500 pictures on canvas, many of which he used to illustrate his children's book series "Ararat", which he had written for the daughter of his partner at the time.
In 2012, after a visit to the dentist, he fell into a coma from a bacterial infection.
He slowly recovered from the illness and once again threw all his energy into writing.
In 2020 he announced in an interview that he was working on the new book "Deep Hill";
shaped by the political events of his adopted country of America, it should be darker than his other works.
His readers and viewers know that he effortlessly exceeds such expectations.
Clive Barker turns seventy this Wednesday.