Books Projects - Cooler...

Everville - Children's Novel

...The title 'Everville' seems to have been knocking around for, well, ever... Its first plotline as a children's book appears to have disappeared never to be resurrected before it settled down to be just a proud little city in a valley in the State of Oregon where one or two miracles might be just around the corner...

"I'm delivering to Harper [August 1991] a short children's novel called Everville, though I hope it will have crossover appeal."

Boundless Imajination

By WC Stroby, (i) Fangoria, No 109, January 1992 (ii) Horror Zone, No1, August 1992 {Note : interview took place in August 1991}

"[The Art - Book 2] is going to be a little time because I've got Everville, the children's book as it were, to write. And then I'll do my next movie with Universal [Eden USA]. Then I'll start on whatever the next large novel will be. I'm not sure exactly when, but certainly before the end of the century !"

Imajiman

By Jon Gregory, Hellraiser, No 2, 1991

"Everville, a children's book and novel, is halfway finished. It's about the length I suppose of Something Wicked This Way Comes. A novel for children which will hopefully work for adults. I read Something Wicked when I was nine, read it again when I was thirteen, again when I was seventeen and I still go back to it. I think it is a tremendous piece of fantastical writing."

A Pilgrim's Progress Through The Worlds of the Imajica

By [ ], World Of Fandom, Vol 2 No 15, Spring 1992

"It [Everville] will be a short, by Imajica standards, fantasy book. It will probably be about 200-250 pages long. It's set in Middle America and has three young people as protagonists. It is a fantasy set in the past, the present and the future. It has elements of horror fiction, it certainly has elements of fantasy, it even has elements of science fiction. It really is a melange of a book...
"I think we have to be careful with the term 'children's book'. Something Wicked This Way Comes I read as a child. It's certainly approachable as a child. This is no more a children's book than Something Wicked This Way Comes, nor any less. It's a book which I think young adults will be able to read, but people with a sense of wonder at 92 will also be able to read it with pleasure. I've also just done a deal with HarperCollins to publish a short (5000 - 6000 word) fable which I have written for children. [Thief of Always]"

Dread Speaks with Clive Barker

By [Michael Brown], Dread, No 3, December 1991

[Re. writing Everville for children] "[Ray Bradbury] was a guy who truly touched my life as a child in a significant way and had an impact on me right through my years as a teenager. I'd like to approach that kind of continuity."

Profile Horror Writer Makes Pact To Hold Back Nothing

By Valerie Takahama, Orange County Register, 4 September 1991

"It's called Everville and I'm about halfway through it at the moment. It comes out of my enthusiasm for CS Lewis's Narnia books and Ray Bradbury's work; Something Wicked This Way Comes and The October Country. I still enjoy those kinds of fiction and I had an idea which I thought I could do something with. A book for and about children. Something Wicked This Way Comes is both for and about [children], but it's also for adults. I think that, like all great fantasy, Bradbury's books grow with you and you find more things in them as your life experience accrues. The best children's fiction speaks to adults and I' m not saying I'll be able to achieve it without a struggle but it's certainly a high ambition to go in there with."

Barker USA

By David Howe, Starburst Yearbook 1991/92, Special No 10

"There are two books before [Eden USA]. One is a short fable for children [Thief Of Always] (though it will probably dement more children than it will delight), and another fantasy book called Everville. I've just finished the first draft of that. Everville is for the sort of audience who would read 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'. I first read Something Wicked... when I was eleven. When you read it again you find it has glories you didn't even notice the first time around. I think I've read it three times already and I bought another copy of it again yesterday... Everville will make sense to 12 year-olds but it will also make sense to a 92 year-old. I think that was true of Weaveworld. Weaveworld has a lot of young fans... Everville probably won't be published until the spring of 1993."

An Interview With Clive Barker

By Robert Errera, Hecate's Cauldron, Vol 1, Issue 3, 1992

"I'm writing a couple of small books right now for children. Get to 'em young, I say. I said to my publisher, 'If Edgar Allan Poe had written for kids, this is what it'd would be like.' We'll see. That's a whole different area of work. Fantasy fiction is very powerful. And, again, you can get to people while their imagination is still open... One book is for 7-year-olds and one is for 15-year-olds. There's a lot of subversive children's literature, way back to Where The Wild Things Are."

The Interview from Hell

By Christian Gore, Film Threat, Volume 2, Issue 5, August 1992

"I'll probably do these two short books, Everville and the fable book, before I start my work on the next movie... Everville is one book and the fable book will be the other.
"[About Everville?] Only that it's a short book, that it will be illustrated, not by me, but we're talking with a bunch of illustrators at the moment. It has its dark side - it's a short dark fable. I think fable is literally the best word for it, in that it has a moral, and it has a kind of moral underpinning to it, and it's a story which I've wanted to write for a long time. So that's gone along on its merry way. And I'll turn that in to them in the Spring of next year."

A Conversation With Clive Barker

By Tyson Blue, Cemetery Dance, Vol 4 No 1, Winter 1992

Craig Herman : "Clive will have his first children's book published in the fall of 1992, a fable called Everville."

Imajica - Press Release

By Craig Herman, HarperCollins Press Kit, August? 1991

Made In Heaven

...Due to have been illustrated by his then Crouch End neighbour, now award-winning artist, Jane Ray, reasons for this one falling by the wayside are unknown...

"I'm at present working on a selection of projects. A large novel, the subject of which I have to keep under wraps for a while, but which will take my work in another direction entirely to the Books of Blood. Also, an illustrated book for children which I've been shaping up for the past eighteen months, returning to it whenever deadlines allow."

Clive Barker

By William J. Grabowski, The Horror Show, Vol 4 Issue 2, Spring 1986

"I've got a book coming out which is being illustrated by a lady friend of mine which I really like, which is about the creator deciding that the world should be boxed up and put away. Everything. And about a girl and her iguana who managed to escape this fate with hilarious results. It's a very strange little book, actually. I don't know what the kids are going to make of it but I'm having a good time."

An Interview with Clive Barker

Transcript of an interview on KPFA, San Francisco by Richard Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky and Lawrence Davidson, (i) Science Fiction Eye, No 4, August 1988, (ii) Masters of the Macabre II (as "A Talk with the King")

The Everything (Olio)

...Tight-lipped on the plot, only the title of this one has surfaced...

"The Everything is a book to come... That's all I'm tellin'!!"

IRC Online

Transcript of on-line appearance 26 November 1995

"That's still very much there... not finished, but [I've] certainly continued to put detail on it... These are not abandoned children, they are just children who wandered away for a while... Well, what have I got? Olio - which is actually The Everything, Olio was my first pass at the title of The Everything."

The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 June 2005 (note: full text here)

The Droolies

...While it may be true that very few things are as bad as you fear, we fear that The Droolies will be staying tucked up in Clive's house for the foreseeable future rather than invading ours. A colour illustration and text was published by Steve Bissette in Taboo. Adding to the list of children's projects that never materialised, this looks to have been a manifestation of the monsters-under-the-bed story...
Sketch for The Droolies by Clive Barker Sketch for The Droolies by Clive Barker

Very few things are as bad as you fear they'll be. This the Droolies knew. So they were expert at making you believe the worst. Huge eyes, that seemed in the dark to belong to a much bigger and more ferocious animal; teeth that were made for gnashing, but were bad at gnawing; fingers that felt, when they touched the back of your neck, as cold and as deep-sea slimey as an octopus' kiss. But it was all in the mind. The Droolies, when seen in daylight, were pale, thin, apologetic creatures, whose worst trait was a nervous and insipid giggle.

from The Droolies by Clive Barker

The Droolies by Clive Barker, 1989

"Ah, the Droolies! That was a joke, really. I sent it along to John [Totleben] and Steve [Bissette] to prove I have an extremely ludicrous side.

Clive Barker

By Chris Brayshaw, Discorder, 1990

Other Books of Blood

...As far as "outtakes" from the volumes of the Books of Blood waiting to be discovered go, the short story Coming To Grief was the "finished" story that failed to make the out-and-out horror grade when putting the final running order of the first three books together (but was later published in Douglas Winter's Prime Evil). One or two more, however, existed in draft and we'll leave them here in "Books that got away" until we find out whether any of them subsequently became standalone short stories...

"There was nothing to select really, as I only had fifteen stories. We did reject one, however, which was too mild, and there was a great argument as to whether we should include In The Hills, The Cities."

The Author Of Blood

By David J Howe, Starburst Winter Special 1987/88

"I have a couple of short stories from the early Books of Blood which I finished but didn't ever get into a second draft. I got to a first draft and then I came up with an idea I preferred. But they're in a very rough-and-ready state."

Clive Barker : Trust Your Vision

By WC Stroby, Writer's Digest, March 1991

"There were a few and there's a couple of things which in the course of time I may publish, having gone over them again. There wasn't anything which was finished, polished, and done. There were things which I had either abandoned or felt that I wasn't ready for, or occasionally there were ideas which found their way into novels, subsequent things which I knew would brim over if I tried to do them as short stories."

Riding The Waves With Clive Barker

By Carnell, Carpe Noctem, Vol 2 No 3, 1995

The Comedy Of Comedies

...Between 1977 and 1979 Clive scripted a 14 act, 17 hour Commedia dell'Arte piece, designed to be performed in three segments over three consecutive nights. It had one read-through, but was never staged.
This one has been picked up in volume two of our illustrated history of Clive's early works including the plays - see this page for details of our Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy project with Clive...

"I have long contemplated an edition of my plays, including the fourteen-act, and consequently unproducible, Comedy Of Comedies. "

Shadows In Eden: Afterword

By Clive Barker, Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden, 11th June, 1989

"There is also an unpublished play which I'm thinking of putting together as a book, probably illustrated, called The Comedy of Comedies. It's probably unproducible because it's 14 acts long! It's about the Commedia dell' Arte, which has always been an interest of mine. I'm very interested in Fools: fools obsess me and always have, clowns too. "

Transcript of talk at UCLA 25 February 1987

Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden

Pete Atkins : [On the read-through] "It took us an entire day, and it was extremely good."

London Calling

By Douglas E. Winter, Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, 2001

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