This club is for fans of Clive Barker, the creator of Hellraiser, Candyman, Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions, Rawhead Rex, The Books of Blood, The Damnation Game, The Inhuman Condition, Weaveworld, Cabal, Imajica, Coldheart Canyon, Mr. B. Gone and many other excellent books.
A true renaissance man, Clive Barker is an acclaimed author of horror and fantasy fiction, an accomplished film director and producer, and a fantasy artist of note. His work has the power to touch us deeply; it can not merely frighten, but also disturb us. His imagination can reveal to us dark parts of ourselves which we try not to see.


"There is no delight the equal of dread. If it were possible to sit, invisible, between two people on any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that subject. Certainly the debate might appear to be about something entirely different; the state of the nation, idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care; but strip away the metaphor, the innuendo, and there, nestling at the heart of the discourse, is dread. While the nature of God, and the possibility of eternal life go undiscussed, we happily chew over the minutiae of misery. The syndrome recognizes no boundaries; in bath-house and seminar-room alike, the same ritual is repeated. With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.
...Nation, family, Church, law. All ash. All useless. All cheats, and chains and suffocation.
There was only dread.
...There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.
...There is no delight the equal of dread. As long as it’s someone else’s."
from "Dread" The Books of Blood -Volume II 1984


"It was coming up to six when Mahogany woke. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle by twilight. The air was about as clear-smelling as it ever got in Manhattan. He stretched on his bed, threw off the dirty blanket and got up for work.
In the bathroom the rain was dripping on the box of the air conditioner, filling the apartment with a rhythmical slapping sound. Mahogany turned on the television to cover the noise, disinterested in anything it had to offer.
He went to the window. The street six floors below was thick with traffic and people.
After a hard day's work New York was on its way home: to play, to make love. People were streaming out of their offices and into their automobiles. Some would be testy after a day's sweaty labor in a badly-aired office; others, benign as sheep, would be wandering home down the Avenues, ushered along by a ceaseless current of bodies. Still others would even now be cramming on to the subway, blind to the graffiti on every wall, deaf to the babble of their own voices, and to the cold thunder of the tunnels.
It pleased Mahogany to think of that. He was, after all, not one of the common herd. He could stand at his window and look down on a thousand heads below him, and know he was a chosen man.
He had deadlines to meet, of course, like the people on the street. But his work was not their senseless labor, it was more like a sacred duty.
He was in a great tradition, that stretched further back than America. He was a night-stalker: like Jack the Ripper, like Gilles de Rais, a living embodiment of death, a wraith with a human face. He was a haunter of sleep, and an awakener of terrors.
The people below him could not know his face; nor would care to look twice at him. But his stare caught them, and weighed them up, selecting only the ripest from the passing parade, choosing only the healthy and the young to fall under his sanctified knife.
Sometimes Mahogany longed to announce his identity to the world, but he had his responsibilities and they bore on him heavily. He couldn't expect fame. His was a secret life, and it was merely pride that longed for recognition.
After all, he thought, does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to its knees?
All in all, he was content. To be part of that great tradition was enough, would always remain enough.
Recently, however, there had been discoveries. They weren't his fault of course. Nobody could possibly blame him. But it was a bad time. Life was not as easy as it had been ten years ago. He was that much older, of course, and that made the job more exhausting; and more and more the obligations weighed on his shoulders. He was a chosen man, and that was a difficult privilege to live with.
He wondered, now and then, if it wasn't time to think about training a younger man for his duties. There would need to be consultations with the Fathers, but sooner or later a replacement would have to be found, and it would be, he felt, a criminal waste of his experience not to take on an apprentice.
There were many felicities he could pass on. the tricks of his extraordinary trade. The best way to stalk, to cut, to strip, to bleed. The best meat for the purpose. The simplest way to dispose of the remains. So much detail, so much accumulated expertise.
Mahogany wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As he stepped in he looked down at his body. The small paunch, the greying hairs on his sagging chest, the scars, and pimples that littered his pale skin. He was getting old. Still, tonight, like every other night, he had a job to do..."
from "The Midnight Meat Train" The Books of Blood -Volume I 1984


"Beneath his feet the ground began to erupt. The stone rolled away from the tomb as if feather light, a second cloud of gas, more obnoxious than the first, seemed to blow it on its way. At the same time the spade came out of the hole and Thomas saw what had hold of it.
Suddenly there was no sense in heaven or earth.
There was a hand, a living hand, clutching the spade, a hand so wide it could grasp the blade with ease.
Thomas knew the moment well. The splitting earth: the hand: the stench. He knew it from some nightmare he’d heard at his father’s knee.
Now he wanted to let go of the spade, but he no longer had the will. All he could do was obey some imperative from underground, to haul until his ligaments tore and his sinews bled.
Beneath the thin crust of earth, Rawhead smelt the sky. It was pure ether to his dulled senses, making him sick with pleasure. Kingdoms for the taking, just a few inches away. After so many years, after the endless suffocation, there was light on his eyes again, and the taste of human terror on his tongue.
His head was breaking surface now, his black hair wreathed with worms, his scalp seething with tiny red spiders. They’d irritated him a hundred years, those spiders burrowing into his marrow, and he longed to crush them out. Pull, pull, he willed the human, and Thomas Garrow pulled until his pitiful body had no strength left, and inch by inch Rawhead was hoisted out of his grave in a shroud of prayers.
The stone that had pressed on him for so long had been removed, and he was dragging himself up so easily now, sloughing off the grave earth like a snake its skin. His torso was free. Shoulders twice as broad as a man’s; lean, scarred arms stronger than any human. His limbs were pumping with blood like a butterfly’s wings, juicing with resurrection. His long, lethal fingers rhythmically clawed the ground as they gained strength.
Thomas Garrow just stood and watched. There was nothing in him but awe. Fear was for those who still had a chance of life; he had none.
Rawhead was out of his grave completely. He began to stand upright for the first time in centuries. Clods of damp soil fell from his torso as he stretched to his full height, a yard above Garrow’s six feet.
Thomas Garrow stood in Rawhead’s shadow with his eyes still fixed on the gaping hole the King had risen from. In his right hand he still clutched his spade. Rawhead picked him up by the hair. His scalp tore under the weight of his body, so Rawhead seized Garrow round the neck, his vast hand easily enclosing it.
Blood ran down Garrow’s face from his scalp, and the sensation stirred him. Death was imminent, and he knew it. He looked down at his legs, thrashing uselessly below him, then he looked up and stared directly into Rawhead’s pitiless face.
It was huge, like the harvest moon, huge and amber. But this moon had eyes that burned in its pallid, pitted face. They were for all the world like wounds, those eyes, as though somebody had gouged them in the flesh of Rawhead’s face then set two candles to flicker in the holes.
Garrow was entranced by the vastness of this moon. He looked from eye to eye, and then to the wet slits that were its nose, and finally, in a childish terror, down to the mouth. God, that mouth. It was so wide, so cavernous it seemed to split the head in two as it opened. That was Thomas Garrow’s last thought. That the moon was splitting in two, and falling out of the sky on top of him.
Then the King inverted the body, as had always been his way with his dead enemies, and drove Thomas head first into the hole, winding him down into the very grave his forefathers had intended to bury Rawhead in forever."
from "Rawhead Rex" The Books of Blood- Volume III 1984


"That was the look Breer wanted them to find on his face when they broke down the door of this very room and found him suspended up here, pirouetting in the breeze from the hallway. He thought about how they would stare at him, coo at him, shake their heads in wonder at his pale white feet and his courage in doing this tremendous thing. And while he thought, he knotted and unknotted the noose, determined to make as professional a job of it as he possibly could.
His only anxiety was the confession. Despite his working with books day in, day out, words weren’t his strongest point; they slipped away for him, like beauty from his fat hands. But he wanted to say something about the children, just so they’d know, the people who found him and photographed him, that this wasn’t a nobody they were staring at, but a man who’d done the worst things in the world for the best possible reasons. That was vital: that they knew who he was, because maybe in time they’d make sense of him in a way he’d never been able to.
They had methods of interrogation, he knew, even with dead people. They’d lay him in an ice room and examine him minutely, and when they’d studied him from the outside they’d start looking at his inside, and oh! what things they’d find. They’d saw off the top of his skull and take out his brain; examine it for tumors, slice it thinly like expensive ham, probe at it in a hundred ways to find out the why and how of him. But that wouldn’t work, would it? He, of all people, should know that. You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it. No, they’d get nothing from his brain, they’d have to look further than that. They’d have to unzip him from neck to pubis, snip his ribs and fold them back. Only then could they unravel his guts, and rummage in his stomach, and juggle his liver and lights. There, oh yes, there, they’d find plenty to feast their eyes on.
Maybe that was the best confession then, he mused as he retied the noose one final time. No use to try to find the right words, because what were words anyway? Trash, useless for the hot heart of things. No, they’d find all they needed to know if they just looked inside him. Find the story of the lost children, find the glory of his martyrdom. And they’d know, once and for all, that he was of the Tribe of the Razor-Eaters.
...Most of the men and women in whom Mamoulian had placed his trust had betrayed him. The pattern had repeated itself so often down the decades that he was sure he would one day become hardened to the pain such betrayals caused. But he never achieved such precious indifference. The cruelty of other people- their callous usage of him- never failed to wound him, and though he extended his charitable hand to all manner of crippled psyches, such ingratitude was unforgivable. Perhaps, he mused, when this endgame was all over and done with- when he’d collected his debts in blood, dread, and night- then maybe he’d lose the terrible itch that tormented him day and night, that drove him on without hope of peace to new ambitions and new betrayals. Maybe when all this was over he would be able to lie down and die.
...Mamoulian picked up the card and studied the picture. The leering face of the shit-eating fool brought the bitterest of smiles to his bloodless lips. This was surely the definitive human portrait. The other pictures on the cards, with their pretensions to love and physical pleasure, only hid this terrible truth away for a while. Sooner or later, however ripe the body, however glorious the face, whatever wealth or power or faith could promise, a man was escorted to a table groaning under the weight of his own excrement and obliged, even though his instincts might revolt, to eat.
That was what he was here for. To make a man eat shit.
...Fear could make the world go round if its wheels were efficiently oiled. Marty had seen the system in practice at Wandsworth (Wandsworth Prison): a hierarchy built upon fear. It was violent, unstable, and unjust, but perfectly workable.
Seeing Whitehead, the calm, still center of his universe, so changed by fear, so sweaty, so full of panic, had come as an unwelcome shock. Marty had no personal feelings for the old man- or none that he was aware of- but he’d seen Whitehead’s species of integrity at work, and had profited by it. Now, he felt, the stability he had come to enjoy was threatened with extinction. Already the old man was withholding information- perhaps pivotal to Marty’s understanding of the situation- about the intruder and his motives. In place of Whitehead’s previous plain talking, there was innuendo and threats. That was his prerogative, of course. But it left Marty with a guessing game on his hands.
One point was unarguable: whatever Whitehead claimed, the man at the fence had been no conventional hired killer. Several inexplicable things had happened at the fence. The lights had waxed and waned as if on cue; the cameras had mysteriously failed when the man had appeared. The dogs had registered this riddle too. Why else had they shown such a confusion of anger and apprehension? And there remained the illusions- those air-burning pictures. No sleight of hand, however elaborate, could explain them satisfactorily. If Whitehead knew this ’assassin’ as well as he claimed, then he must know the man’s skills too: he was simply too afraid to talk about them."
from "The Damnation Game" 1987


"Too late, he murmured to himself, hoping to quell his rising fear. Lemarchand’s device was undone, the final trick had been turned. There was no time left for prevarication or regret. Besides, hadn’t he risked both life and sanity to make this unveiling possible? The doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more than a handful of humans had ever known existed, much less tasted- pleasures which would redefine the parameters of sensation, which would release him from the dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment that had dogged him from late adolescence. He would be transformed by that knowledge, wouldn’t he? No man could experience the profundity of such feeling and remain unchanged.
The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened, brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in the room became utter, it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb would burn so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into the street, and a window through which- had he but the will (or strength) to tear the blinds back- he might glimpse a rumor of morning.
With each peal the bulb’s light was becoming more revelatory. By it, he saw the east wall flayed; saw the brick momentarily lose solidity and blow away; saw, in that same instant, the place beyond the room from which the bell’s din was issuing. A world of birds was it? Vast black birds caught in perpetual tempest? That was all the sense he could make of the province from which- even now- the hierophants were coming- that it was in confusion, and full of brittle, broken things that rose and fell and filled the dark air with their fright.
And then the wall was solid again, and the bell fell silent. The bulb flickered out. This time it went without a hope of rekindling.
He stood in the darkness, and said nothing. Even if he could remember the words of welcome he’d prepared, his tongue would not have spoken them. It was playing dead in his mouth.
And then, light.
It came from them: from the quartet of Cenobites who now, with the wall sealed behind them, occupied the room. A fitful phosphorescence, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold, charmless. It struck Frank that he never once wondered what they would look like. His imagination, though fertile when it came to trickery and theft, was impoverished in other regards. The skill to picture these eminences was beyond him, so he had not even tried.
Why then was he so distressed to set eyes upon them? Was it the scars that covered every inch of their bodies, the flesh cosmetically punctured and sliced and infibulated, then dusted down with ash? Was it the smell of vanilla they brought with them, the sweetness of which did little to disguise the stench beneath? Or was it that as the light grew, and he scanned them more closely, he saw nothing of joy, or even humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.
’What city is this?’ one of the four enquired. Frank had difficulty guessing the speaker’s gender with any certainty. Its clothes, some of which were sewn to and through its skin, hid its private parts, and there was nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its willfully disfigured features that offered the least clue. When it spoke, the hooks that transfixed the flaps of its eyes and were wed, by an intricate system of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through the lower lip, were teased by the motion, exposing the glistening meat beneath.
’I asked you a question,’ it said. Frank made no reply. The name of this city was the last thing on his mind.
’Do you understand?’ the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy- the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. ’Do you even know who we are?’ it asked.
’Yes.’ Frank said at last. ’I know.’
Of course he knew; he and Kircher had spent long nights talking of hints gleaned from the diaries of Bolingbroke and Gilles de Rais. All that mankind knew of the Order of the Gash, he knew.
...’I expected-’ Frank began.
’We know what you expected,’ the Cenobite replied. ’We understand to its breadth and depth the nature of your frenzy. It is utterly familiar to us.’
Frank grunted. ’So,’ he said, ’you know what I’ve dreamed about. You can supply the pleasure.’
The things face broke open, its lips curling back: a baboon’s smile. ’Not as you understand it,’ came the reply.
Frank made to interrupt, but the creature raised a silencing hand.
’There are conditions of the nerve endings,’ it said, ’the like of which your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke.’
’...yes?’
’Oh yes. Oh most certainly. Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.’
’Will you partake of them?’ said the second Cenobite.
Frank looked at the scars and the hooks. Again, his tongue was deficient.
’Will you?’
Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he’d known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat, only sweat. No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference. he had turned his back on such dissatisfaction. If in doing so he had to interpret the signs these creatures brought him, then that was the price of ambition. He was ready to pay it.
’Show me,’ he said.
’There is no going back. You do understand that?’
’Show me.’"
from "The Hellbound Heart" 1986.


"She stepped over a clutter of furniture and toward the short corridor that joined living room to bedroom, still delaying the moment. Her heart was quick in her: a smile played on her lips.
And there! At last! The portrait loomed, compelling as ever. She stepped back in the murky room to admire it more fully and her heel caught on the mattress that still lay in the corner. She glanced down. The squalid bedding had been turned over, to present its untorn face. Some blankets and a rag-wrapped pillow had been tossed over it. Something glistened among the folds of the uppermost blanket. She bent down to look more closely and found there a handful of sweets- chocolates and caramels- wrapped in bright paper. And littered among them, neither so attractive nor so sweet, a dozen razor blades. There was blood on several. She stood up again and backed away from the mattress, and as she did so a buzzing sound reached her ears from the next room. She turned, and the light in the bedroom diminished as a figure stepped into the gullet between her and the outside world. Silhouetted against the light, she could scarcely see the man in the doorway, but she smelled him. He smelled like cotton candy, and the buzzing was with him or in him.
’I just came to look,’ she said, ’...at the picture.’
The buzzing went on- the sound of a sleepy afternoon, far from here. The man in the doorway did not move.
’Well,’ she said, ’I’ve seen what I wanted to see.’ She hoped against hope that her words would prompt him to stand aside and let her past, but he didn’t move, and she couldn’t find the courage to challenge him by stepping toward the door.
’I have to go,’ she said, knowing that despite her best efforts fear seeped between every syllable. ’I’m expected...’
That was not entirely untrue. Tonight they were all invited to Apollinaire’s for dinner. But that wasn’t until eight, which was four hours away. She would not be missed for a long while yet.
’If you’ll excuse me,’ she said.
The buzzing had quieted a little, and in the hush the man in the doorway spoke. His unaccented voice was almost as sweet as his scent.
’No need to leave yet,’ he breathed.
’I’m due...due’
Though she couldn’t see his eyes, she felt them on her, and they made her feel drowsy, like that summer that sang in her head.
’I came for you,’ he said.
She repeated the four words in her head. I came for you. If they were meant as a threat, they certainly weren’t spoken as one.
’I don’t ... know you,’ she said.
’No,’ the man murmured. ’But you doubted me.’
’Doubted?’
’You weren’t content with the stories, with what they wrote on the walls. So I was obliged to come.’
The drowsiness slowed her mind to a crawl, but she grasped the essentials of what the man was saying. That he was legend, and she, in disbelieving him, had obliged him to show his hand. She looked, now, down at those hands. One of them was missing. In its place, a hook.
’There will be some blame,’ he told her. ’They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say what’s blood for, if not for shedding? And in time the scrutiny will pass. The police will leave, the cameras will be pointed at some fresh horror, and they will be left alone, to tell stories of the Candyman again.’
’Candyman?’ she said. Her tongue could barely shape that blameless word.
’I came for you,’ he murmured so softly that seduction might have been in the air. And so saying, he moved through the passageway into the light."
from "The Forbidden" "In the Flesh" 1986

"'Move and I gut you.'
With the threat, a second arm slid around his body, the fingers digging into his belly with such force he had no doubt the man would make the threat good with his bare hand.
Boone took a shallow breath. Even that minor motion brought a tightening of the death grip at neck and abdomen. He felt blood run down his belly and into his jeans.
'Who the fuck are you?' the voice demanded.
'My name's Boone. I came here... I came to find Midian.'
Did the hold on his belly relax a little when he named his purpose?
'Why?' a second voice now demanded. It took Boone no more than a heartbeat to realize that the voice had come from the shadows ahead of him, where the wounded beast stood. Indeed from the beast.
'My friend asked you a question,' said the voice at his ear. 'Answer him.'
Boone, disoriented by the attack, fixed his gaze again on whatever occupied the shadows and found himself doubting his eyes. The head of the questioner was not solid; it seemed almost to be inhaling its redundant features, their substance darkening and flowing through socket and nostrils and mouth back into itself.
All thought of his jeopardy disappeared; what seized him now was elation. Narcisse had not lied. Here was the transforming truth of that.
'I came to be among you,' he said, answering the miracle's question. 'I came because I belong here.'
A question emerged from the soft laughter behind him.
'What does he look like, Peloquin?'
The thing had drunk its beast-face down. There were human features beneath, set on a body more reptile than mammal. That limb he dragged behind him was a tail, his wounded lope the gait of a low-slung lizard. That too was under review as the tremor of change moved down its jutting spine.
'He looks like a Natural,' Peloquin replied, 'not that that means much.'
Why could his attacker not see for himself, Boone wondered?
He glanced down at the hand on his belly. It had six fingers, tipped not with nails but with claws, now buried half an inch in his muscle.
'Don't kill me,' he said, 'I've come a long way to be here.'
'Hear that, Jackie?' said Peloquin, thrusting from the ground with his four legs to stand upright in front of Boone. His eyes now level with Boone's, were bright blue. His breath was as hot as the blast from an open furnace.
'What kind of beast are you, then?' Boone wanted to know. The transformation was all but finished. The man beneath the monster was nothing remarkable. Forty, lean, and sallow-skinned.
'We should take him below,' said Jackie. 'Lylesburg will want to see him.'
'Probably,' said Peloquin. 'But I think we'd be wasting his time. This is a Natural, Jackie. I can smell 'em.'
'I've spilled blood...' Boone murmured. 'Killed eleven people.'
The blue eyes perused him. There was humor in them.
'I don't think so,' Peloquin said.
'It's not up to us,' Jackie put in. 'You can't judge him.'
'I've got eyes in my head, haven't I?' said Peloquin. 'I know a clean man when I see one.' He wagged his finger at Boone. 'You're not Nightbreed,' he said. 'You're meat. That's what you are. Meat for the beast.'"
From "Cabal" 1985




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