Books of Blood

Again, I'm going to split it for two if I could.

I would give them one of Clive Barker's books of blood.

It would be the one with the short story, but it's whichever one has a story in the hills, the cities.

which when I read as a young man made me sort of like laugh with the glee of what was happening because I don't want to spoil the big reveal, but it's essentially these two rural European towns have this ritual of battle, but in just this crazy imaginary way that only Clive Barker could come up with.

Mm.

Around the mid-'80s, he got this huge publishing contract off the back of the success of the Books of Blood, and yeah, I remember it being this multimillion dollar deal, and it was in the press, and you know, it was sort of, you know, "Here's the next Stephen King." And I don't think there's been anything quite on that scale since then.

I mean, part of that-

Mm

Well, so this one is kind of interesting because as I was doing some research, I don't think that it's actually based on a Clive Barker short story.

You know, this is one of the few films where it was not like adapted from Books of Blood.

It is actually just, I think, an original screenplay by Clive Barker.

Working also, for some reason, there's an additional writer credited, James Kaplan, whose really only credit is this movie.

Hellraiser has a screenplay by Clive Barker and was directed also by Clive Barker.

And Clive Barker has been a prolific horror writer since the mid-1980s with his short story collections Books of Blood, which when published in the US got the seal of approval from Stephen King, who was quoted on the book covers saying, "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker." High praise indeed.

Barker wrote the screenplays for the George Pavlou directed films Underworld and Rawhead Rex, which were both based on his own novellas.

But he was unhappy with the way his material was handled, so he decided to take control of his own destiny and moved into filmmaking with Hellraiser, which was based on his novella The Hellbound Heart, published by Dark Harvest in the third volume of its Night Visions anthology series.

As a filmmaker, Barker had also made two non-sync sound shorts, Salome and The Forbidden, the latter of which featured the visual of a bed of nails that had been hammered into a grid pattern.

Barker didn't make much money from his experiments with film, theater, or illustration.

He realized the money was in writing, and Books of Blood became a success with The Hellbound Heart published in 1986.

Clive Barker's admitted to working as a hustler in the '70s and found sex to be a great leveler.

the man who...

Yeah, but he wrote the story, though, didn't he? Yeah, it's in the Books of Blood.

Yeah.

Volume three.

I'm not sticking them up my arse.

Who knows with you? No.

Especially the books of blood.

They were quite thick.

But if Stine gives us the safe, structured childhood template, Clive Barker takes the adult template and completely rips it to shreds.

We have to finish our specific series deep dive with Barker's Books of Blood.

Published in six volumes between 1984 and 1985, Books of Blood is technically a collection of short stories rather than a continuous novel sequence.

But the source includes it here because it functions as a series in the way that matters most.

It provides a sustained, intoxicating world feeling, a recurring, wildly original imagination, and a title that readers faithfully return to volume after volume.