Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 2

by Carnell, Thom

  My first thought when I read that was “Well, Frank’s already kicked his ass.”

  You mean in The Dark Knight? Yeah but, he was the antagonist in The Dark Knight. If I did a story where he was the hero, I’d have a whole different slant on it. [laughs] Wasn’t it fun seeing Batman kick the crap out of him?

  It was great! [laughs] Not only that, but taunting him while doing it.

  Yeah [laughs]

  Is the present day a time for heroes? Do you think that we could use more of them in literature and, more importantly, real life?

  Well, that question lends itself to very facile, cheap answers. Cheap answer number one is “Yes, we need someone to show our children how to behave.” Cheap answer number two is “Oh a hero is somebody that makes the rent.” These are clichés that are all false. There’s always room for them, but a good hero isn’t necessarily a role model. In these politically correct times, people have come to mistake art and entertainment for propaganda. It’s not the role of any entertainer, and anyone that is any damn good at the job will tell ya, that if they have to preach a doctrine, they will do a bad job. So as far as heroes go, I feel like I’m writing about heroes all the time, some of them happen to be real crazy, and some of them are more purer of spirit than others, some of them just decided to do one thing right and that makes them heroic in the story, but none of them are little guide books for people to live by. You want to look for heroes in the real world? They aren’t hard to find at all. Look at Stephen Hawking. You want to see heroic? I’m not saying I want to do a Stephen Hawking comic book, but… People are capable of great things.

  Clive Barker

  I first met Clive Barker at a reading in Berkeley in 1986. After he read, I stood on the sidelines and watched him interact with the long line of people who had waited hours to meet him. In each case, he was polite and made a connection with his fans that was palpable. Later, after introducing myself to him, we talked a bit about the link between sex and horror. As he talked, I noticed his hand drifting across the first few pages of my copy of Damnation Game. When I left, I looked inside the book and saw a beautiful drawing he’d made there. I’ve since interviewed Clive many times for Fangoria. True to form, he has always been kind, giving, and an absolute dream to interview.

  Sailing the Seas of Quiddity – Volume II, Issue 3

  I have spent nearly my entire lifetime reading horror novels, watching horror films, and generally reveling in all things deemed “scary”. From the classicism of the early vampire stories and tales of Golems through the archetypical Universal monster movies of the thirties up to the horror booms of recent years, I’ve seen it all. In the early- to mid-eighties, there came a strange time for the horror genre. The books in vogue at the time ranged from the prolific tales of Middle Class America threatened by a fearsome encroacher in the novels of Stephen King, (who would soon become a cottage industry unto himself), to the purple-prose angst of Anne Rice’s romance novel vampires. Every writer who put pen to paper attempted to be original and their efforts only served to illuminate how badly the genre needed a new voice; a voice which was unafraid to step through the mirror of our discontent and act as tour guide to a fantastical world waiting for us, the readers, if only we would dare to take his hand and join him on his travels.

  I was given a copy of Barker’s Books of Blood as a present from a friend and was immediately held under its spell. His writing was tight, his characters fully fleshed (if only metaphorically), and shit could he tell a story. Here was someone who embraced everything I held dear in writing. These tales were not merely allegory or moral melodrama. His so-called “monsters” were thinking and feeling organisms who, many times, were more human than the people who inhabited the waking world.

  It wasn’t until several years later that I met the writer of these wondrous tales. At a reading in Berkeley, California I had the pleasure of coming face to face with Clive Barker. The first thing I noticed was how “normal” he appeared. It’s hard to believe that from this well-mannered, erudite gentleman has sprung some of the most terrifying images in the Horror Pantheon. Rawhead Rex. Pinhead. The Cenobites. Mr. Mamoulian. The Citizens of Midian. Candyman. And now with Lord of Illusions, the ubiquitous Nix. The list goes on and on. He has never shied away from his role as storyteller, nor has he ever courted public opinion. He has merely presented himself as who he is. A writer. A very good writer. He continually lays his soul bare for us to read and enjoy. He’s up front, honest about who he is, and yes I’ll say it again, a really nice guy. He is Clive Barker, and if you haven’t read any of his work, it’s about time you did.

  Has writing always been something you did or is it something you came to later in life?

  Storytelling is always something I’ve done. I haven’t necessarily always written short stories for instance, they are a relatively late thing. I wrote plays from my twenties. I suppose I was writing short stories when I was a little kid as part of school project and so on, but my earliest recollections are really of oral storytelling around camp fires at scout camp, or frightening the beejeezus out of my brother. (I have a younger brother who was very susceptible to being scared so I would play on that, I suppose, when I was a kid.)

  What kind of a kid were you?

  Pretty introspective. Pretty troubled, I think, living in Liverpool in the fifties, which was not perhaps the most stimulating of cities to live in. I don’t think any of post-war England was particularly stimulating. I was born in 1952. There were still ration books. The city had been very heavily bombed during the war. It was only seven years after the war had finished and the really aggressive urban renewal had not really begun so, it wasn’t a city with a huge number of places of great stimulation for a kid. In retrospect, there were also some good things about it as well as bad. We didn’t have a TV in the house, there weren’t videos, there weren’t video games. We went to the movies maybe once a year. It was a very big deal to go to the movies. I think I first went when I was six or seven, and it was an annual event. So, it was a time where, really, the imagining had to be done without a lot of external stimuli which I think was probably one of the good things about all of them. You were turned upon yourself to create your own entertainment and, in a way create your own world, which is what I’ve been doing ever since.

  Was the oral tradition of telling a story something big in your family? Was it something your parents did?

  I have Irish-Italian blood, Irish on my father’s side, Italian on my mother’s side. Both nations that have a high degree of fantasy in their cultures. I was in Ireland about a month ago, and one of the things that never fails to astonish and actually reassure me is how commonplace the fantastic is in the Irish culture. It’s more likely that somebody is going to sit you down and tell you something slightly off-beat and strange than talk about politics. I’m not talking now about necessarily a fan or somebody who maybe you would think would be predisposed to talk about this type of material. I’m actually talking about somebody who might be putting on your makeup for a TV show or somebody who is a rep for the book company, ordinary people who very casually tell you tales of ghosts or of statues of the Virgin which weep. And so, I think that is very much a part of the Irish nature. As indeed, I think there is a kind of melancholy morbidity. And then of course, the Italian certainly isn’t lacking in a wonderfully full-blooded, shall we say, dark fantasy tradition. I think it influenced me. My paternal grandmother was a fine storyteller and loved to talk about death. Lived to talk about death. So, yeah, I think it’s always been there.

  I know that there has been a shift in your writing. I mean, you are labeled a “Horror” writer, but you are doing more, not really full blown fantasy, but fantasy-type writing. Which do you consider yourself, or do you consider yourself just a plain writer?

  I think I consider myself a plain old imaginative writer. I think I’m less and less labeled a Horror writer. The books tend not to go on Horror shelves anymore and when they do, when I find them on a Horror shelf, I tend to t
ake them off. I mean, certainly, some of them belong there. I agree in a moment that a book like The Damnation Game or the early Books of Blood belong there, of course they do. It would be misleading for them to be anywhere else, but it’s as equally misleading for Imajica, Weaveworld, Everville or The Thief of Always to be on a Horror shelf. I would like to come to the place where we could do away with nonsense descriptions and instead of talking about Science Fiction, Horror Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, what would happen is that we would talk about Imaginative Fiction. It would seem the most mature thing to do.

  What would you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

  Let’s start with the weaknesses because there’s always so many more of those. I have a real passion for the detail. One of the things that I am constantly carving out of drafts before I send them to my editor are details within details within details. It’s particularly true with the fantasy stuff. It’s true with something like Imajica obviously where you’re creating a series of five worlds and they’re interconnected and so on. I could go on forever about what is going on in those things, and I just love it. I have a kind of zoologist’s eye, even though the flora and the fauna that I am describing are only the things that I am seeing in my mind’s eye. I feel like Marco Polo making reports back to Venice about what I’ve seen and I want to be able to detail them as much as I possibly can. I have to cut back on that. I think that, and you can interpret this as a strength or a weakness, maybe it could be a description but, there’s a deeply perverse element in me that flies from anything that I think I found before. In other words, if I feel that a character is moving in a direction that I think I have encountered before, or a situation reminds me too closely of something I’ve read or something that I’ve seen, I will tend to just throw it out, which means that the books very often take extremely strange turns. I think I am much [more] preoccupied with sex, much more than maybe other writers in the fantastic genre presently, more than contemporary writers are, which means that my characters tend to have more actively, and certainly have more vividly described sexual lives. I think that I like to write much more about outcasts than I do about people who are within the mainstream and again, you might say that is a description as opposed to a weakness, I don’t know. It certainly means that by and large I tend not to write about people who are banging the mainstream of American cultural life, or indeed English cultural life or French, whatever I am writing about. The weaknesses keep mounting up. I do really like words. I tend to become, I think, a little delirious on words once in a while. I can write stuff and like it just because I like the sound of it.

  Do you find that sometimes you have to catch yourself from falling in love with sound of your own voice?

  Oh, Lord, absolutely. That’s the great note from Williams. “Slaughtering your favorite children.” Whenever you find a sentence which you’ve polished and devoted hours to, it probably doesn’t belong. Strengths. I have a very vivid imagination and I have a real passion to communicate what’s going on in my head to other people.

  Since you’ve brought up sex, I want to ask you about that. I’d like to get your thoughts on the relationship between Sex and Fear. You seem to plumb that with a journeyman’s ability.

  Well, the truth is, sex is more fearful than perhaps it has ever been before, that’s the first thing to say. As a gay man, with a lot of gay friends, some of whom I’ve lost, that certainly sharpens the edge of one’s knowledge more than you would like, really, but there’s something else, something even if AIDS were not such an important and tragic element of our lives right now: the issue of sex stirs us up because it’s a control issue. We, as personalities, tend to like to be in control of ourselves. We don’t like to relinquish control. Sex demands that we relinquish control. Chemicals flow in our bodies which say “Oh, well, you don’t want to get a hard-on? Too late, guy.” [laughs] You are not master of your own anatomy. Speaking to my women friends, it seems that, even though the manifestations may be not quite so obvious, nevertheless, they feel the same kinds of demands and psychological changes and they’re as every bit as inevitable for a woman as they are for a man. There’s also the issue that we feel closer to something which is erasing part of our personalities. By which I mean, our personalities are constructs, the masks we put on and take off. I think it’s fair to say that if root elements remain a constant nevertheless change. One of the things that sex does is it makes us less ourselves. There’s something wonderful about that. There’s something wonderful about the fact that we are being transformed, in a way, in the grip of sexual feeling. That, as we move towards greater and greater intimacy with somebody our personalities become less important to us. In fact, in the height of love and the height of lovemaking one of the things we want is to be erased, to be subsumed by the other person. To become, in a way, blocked and so identified with the other person that maybe both personalities disappear. There’s something transformative and extraordinary.

  I wanted to ask you about The Advocate article that’s just out. I don’t really want to dwell on this, but I think that it’s important. Why did you choose now to come “out”?

  The truth is, I didn’t choose now. I’d done articles in The Advocate, I did a big piece in The Advocate about four years ago, nobody gave a flying fuck about it, but I did it. I’ve read at gay book stores. If anyone ever asked me the question, I gave them the answer. It’s just that no one has really been interested in the question. The truth is, I don’t quite know why suddenly everybody was. I don’t mind at all. I’ve written a lot about gay people in my novels, Imajica has a gay relationship which is cherished in the context of the novel and becomes a very important part of the novel. I’m writing about another gay character right now. It’s never been an issue, really. I guess maybe because I’ve always thought it was so obvious and I’ve had many letters from gay men and women saying “Well, we love the fact that you write about gay characters and we love the fact that you’re gay” and so on. And I always thought, “Well, there you go.” It’s not even an issue. So then, I was a little startled, but not unhappy, just startled. I mean I did a piece in Out, I did a piece in Ten Percent Magazine around the same time which was a function to some extent that I have a wonderful publicist whom I’ve just taken on, who said “Well, why don’t we do all these things?” I said “Well, sure.” It’s just fine. It’s just surprising that anybody would be surprised.

  Did the media behave in a way that you expected or was it a complete shock? Were you surprised that people jumped on it?

  I was surprised that people jumped on it.

  I would think that we as a culture had moved well beyond that.

  I would have thought so, too. I was somewhat startled. I didn’t, again, mind. It’s the truth and certainly nothing I am unhappy about. I think it’s very important right now, perhaps more important than it’s ever been, with so much negativity being directed towards gay men. So much disinformation is being passed around by people who want to get political headway out of it. People in my position, if you will, whatever you want to call them, media people, celebrities, whatever, say “Oh yeah, by the way, me, too.”

  I find it interesting when someone like Stephen King says “I’m married,” people aren’t saying “Oh, really? Let’s talk about that!”

  I’ll tell you what I think it is to some extent. People who exercise influence on the culture, in some way or another, particularly if it’s a relatively mainstream influence, (I make movies and I paint pictures and I write books which hit the bestseller lists, so I am a relatively mainstream presence,) are not, by and large, identified as gay. There are a few exceptions to that. Elton John would be one, I suppose. But when you actually think of mainstream authors for a moment, I mean, people who write thrillers or science fiction, (Sam Delany would be one in science fiction, the late Patricia Heissman would have been one, though I don’t know whether she liked to be called lesbian in her life,) but now, keep adding to the list and it’s not that long a list. I think, cu
riously, it’s more understood that people who work behind the scenes, in some way or the other, either because they are movers and shakers like David Geffen, or because they are people who make things look amazing, like the costume designers who work in Hollywood or the amazing scenery designers or the people who work on Broadway, that kind of thing, I think people accept. But people who are bang in the middle of things, actually you are going to be reading my words tomorrow, or you are going to be looking at my paintings tomorrow, or you are going to be seeing my movies tomorrow, I mean how many gay filmmakers do you know who don’t make gay films?

  I think the other thing is that you are not a stereotype. Using your example of Elton John, people can say “Well, you know, he’s flamboyant, blah blah blah.” The whole idea that I am reading articles and I’m looking through the Internet and people are making such a big deal about it kind of bothers me.

  Yes, they are making a bigger deal of it then I think any of us would have thought. By and large, they are not making a negative deal of it, which I think is very reassuring. Maybe you have been reading different entries on The Internet than I have, I don’t get a look at these things, but I get reports from people, people tell me the response has been “Oh, how cool.”

  What I am also hearing a lot of is “Who cares?”

  Which I think is absolutely great. I mean, one of the things that I said in The Advocate article and I think is true, there is such a thing as a “gay sensibility”. There is something about my fiction which is shaped by, influenced in a significant way by the fact that I have always been an outsider to mainstream heterosexual life. I think that informs my fiction and I think it makes my fiction more potent curiously. I think that I sort of look at mainstream life from the outside. I look at my brother’s wonderful marriage with wonderful kids, amazing wife, or my parents’ wonderful marriage over many decades now, and say “How cool” just very different from what I am. There’s a part of me that feels like an alien, feels like somebody dropped me on the planet and one day they’re going to tell me how to unzip my skin. I think it’s a good thing to feel that sometimes. I think it’s very good for a writer. It means I look at the world, not necessarily dispassionately, but I certainly look at it in a different way to the way than if I was Steve [King]. Steve writes from within the status quo and he is constantly validating the status quo. I mean his fiction is very often, not always, but very often, a brilliant defense of the status quo, right?