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Clive Barker

Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, at 1:00 am on the morning of 5 October 1952. He grew up there and went to Dovedale and Quarry Bank schools - the same schools that John Lennon of the Beatles had been to a few years before Clive! He then studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University. Whilst at school he wrote - stories, comic strips and plays - and together with his friends formed a fringe theatre group which mounted productions both in Liverpool and, later, in London. His first books, The Books of Blood, were published in 1984 in England and Clive began to concentrate on writing fiction rather than plays. Publishing both short stories and novels for adults, he moved to Beverly Hills in Los Angeles in 1991 where he next wrote his first published book for 'all ages' – The Thief of Always. Clive has directed and produced films, written for television and exhibited his paintings in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, as well as working on comics, models, video games and toys. The first volume of the Abarat series was published in 2002 and made the New York Times' bestseller lists, as well as winning a number of awards.Abarat II followed in 2004, winning a Bram Stoker award. Clive is currently working on both volume three of The Abarat Series for all ages and his next novel for adults, The Scarlet Gospels. –from www.clivebarker.info/youngfaq.html

Some thoughts about Abarat

Doodling

Remember how Candy doodled wavy lines on her notebook? And she kept thinking about them as she was leaving school? I love the description of the lines, and how in her mind they changed from being black lines on gray, recycled paper to being bright, and then moving: "The wavy lines were rolling across the darkness inside her skull, rolling and breaking, the brilliant colors bursting into arabesques of white and silver."

 

Destiny

When Candy is trying to decide whether to help John Mischief, to risk drawing the attention of the horrifying Mendelson Shape, she thinks about destiny and fate. "In a curious way it made sense that she was here because she had to be here...Why else, after living all her life in Chickentown, should she be here - in a place she'd never been before - today?"

More about Doodling

On page 52, Candy "thought of the doodle she'd made on her workbook; the way it had seemed to brighten in her mind's eye, inspiring her limbs to move. It was almost as though the doodle had been a sign, a ticket to this adventure." And then on page 63, we come across the symbol again, on the surface of the turquoise-and-silver ball Candy finds in the tower: "And elegantly engraved on its blue-green surface was a design she knew! There it was, etched into the metal: the doodle she'd drawn so obsessively in her workbook." There's a lot in this book about fate. Clearly, Candy was fated to have this adventure. How do you think the wavy-line doodle fits into this? Was it put there purposely (by someone?) as a clue to help Candy know what to do, a sign for her to follow? Or is it just a detail that is present in certain places, that Candy somehow tunes into?

Mendelson Shape

So what did you think of the first bad guy in the book, Mendelson Shape? I'm not sure which is scarier, the description of him ("…there was something spiderish about his grotesque anatomy. His almost fleshless limbs were so long, she could readily imagine him walking up a wall.") or the picture. I haven't encountered many scarier images than that of Shape climbing up the tower in pursuit of Candy, singing his horrid little nursery song.

Clive Barker

“In 1995 Clive began painting huge dream-images which were wholly unlike his previous paintings. He began to think of them as the illustrations for a collection of 25 tales; a 'Book of Hours' which would describe all the emotions of a day, hour by hour (with an extra, mystical 25th hour). The Book Of Hours became a whole world - The Abarat - and as the paintings kept coming, so the story grew and grew into a series of four, and then five books..”

To read more about Clive Barker and how he wrote the Abarat series, check out his website http://www.clivebarker.info/youngabarat.html

This month’s book: Abarat by Clive Barker

This book is the first of author/illustrator Clive Barker's promised four book series: The Books of Abarat. It took him 4 years to complete the original artwork (100 astounding, disturbing paintings) for this book, and the second book, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War, contains another 100 equally bizarre original paintings. I don't want to say much about the plot of the book because I feel that half of the fun is trying to figure out what the heck is going on. But I do want to give those of you who haven't started the book yet a piece of advice: skip the prologue and jump right in to the main part of the book. The prologue will just confuse you and possibly make you think you're going to hate the rest. I promise, it's nothing like the prologue. Clive Barker's genius is his imagination, and he shows it most in his characters. Take for instance the Lord of Midnight, Christopher Carrion. The lower half of his head is surrounded by a translucent collar filled with blue fluid, in which swim bright, flickering forms, which he clearly takes pleasure in, smiling if one of them grazes his face. The shapes? "Carrion had found a way to channel every nightmarish thought and image out of the coils of his brain and bring them into this semiphysical form. He breathed the fluid, the flickering forms ran in and out of his mouth and nostrils, soaking his soul in his own nightmares." Whew! Wait until you see the picture - page 125, by the way. Anyway, it's not really a horror book, despite the grotesque bad guys. The heroine is Candy Quackenbush, who is destined to save the Land of Abarat, an archipelago of 25 islands, each existing in one distinct hour of the day, and one for "the time outside time." That's enough for now. Start reading!