Clive on Everville

At the crossroads Buddenbaum stared down into the ground, into the dark where the medallion lay, gathering power.
The end's almost here, he thought. The end of the stories I've made and the stories I've manipulated, and those I wandered through like a bit player and those I've endured like a prisoner. The end of all my favourite cliches: tragic mismatches and farcical encounters; tearful reunions and deathbed curses. The end of once upon a time and now shall we see and can I believe my eyes? The end of final acts; of funeral scenes and curtain speeches. The end of ends. Think of that.
He would miss the pleasure of stories - especially those in which he had appeared in some guise or other - but he'd have no need of them very soon. They were solace for the rest of humanity, who were mired in time and desperate to glimpse something of the grand scheme. What else could they do with their lives but suffer and tell tales? He would not be of that tribe much longer.


"Unless I get an excellent idea for a new horror novel, I'm going to stick to metaphysical fantasy, the area which, to me, is the most appealing. For example, Everville, which is a sequel to The Great and Secret Show, takes the original story's elements to new extremes and is about a dream quest into the collective unconscious of humanity. I think it'll be a fun book."

Lord Of Illusions - A Fable Of Death And Resurrection

By Simon Bacal, Sci-Fi Entertainment, Vol 1 No 5, February 1995

"I have The Great and Secret Show's sequel, Everville: The Art II (Return to Quiddity) under way. It is going to be a very elaborate, a very big book, and a very challenging book because I realised when I came back and looked at the characters again and the worlds again and the metaphysics again that in its way The Great and Secret Show opened a lot of metaphysical doors, as Imajica did...The genesis for Show was Everville US limited edition cover always very difficult because it was the most difficult book I ever wrote in one sense because halfway through it I realized that the metaphysic I was attempting here was larger than the narrative I had constructed to contain it and that the only way I could possibly write about what I had started was to expand the narrative scale. One of the weird things about going back to The Great and Secret Show and reading through it again is how, unconsciously, I seem to have left lots of hooks for myself - some of which I can't talk about because it would really give away what I am doing next in the next book. The very obvious one is that the Iad are coming. But there are also all kinds of linguistic things that I did. Things that were dropped into the choice of names or words which seem to suggest that somewhere in my subconscious I knew what the whole arc of the story was going to be...
"I left Show not really sure of what I had done. Never having the focus on it really. I went back to it realising it was actually pretty cool. A lot of people are going to be surprised at who survives from the first book, who you think is dead, and a few people are going to be surprised at who dies in the second, which is going to lead to a massive conclusion in the third book. The whole thing is a very interesting challenge."

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

By Michael Brown, Dread, No 11, September 1993

"It starts in 1848 in Oregon and begins with the founding of a town called Everville, then takes the narrative off in a fresh direction, but folds in a number of characters from the first book, a whole group that you thought were dead."

Monster Invasion

By Mark Salisbury, Fangoria No 133, June 1994

"Women in fantasy are either goddesses or whores. Maeve is both. She is named after a Celtic goddess and she ends up running a brothel. Everville is founded around the best bordello in Oregon. I was researching 19th-Century American history and I discovered that women were most powerful as madams. They couldn't become sheriff, but they could be a madam.
"The fact that Maeve is the founder of Everville is obliterated, because history represses things we don't want to know about. It is the old story: the founding mothers are forgotten while the founding fathers are enshrined."

Hard-Working Fantasy Man

By Katie [ ], The Irish Times, 30 May 1995

"It's my pleasure to introduce you to this very special edition of Everville.
"The Art. I first wrote about it in The Great and Secret Show where its true nature, and purpose, remained unrevealed. Is it a force for good, or evil? Will it turn us into divinities or madmen? The omens are by no means clear.
"Now, in Everville, the second volume of The Art trilogy, the journey towards revelation continues, and takes us across the divide between the waking world and the shores of Quiddity, the dream-sea. For it's in the depths of our imaginations that these mysteries will be solved, in the place where all we ever were, all we are and all that we will be, meet.
"Welcome, then, to the next stage of our dream-quest. Welcome to Everville."

Everville

Introduction by Barker, UK Limited Edition of Everville, 1994.

"There is a sense in which any author is surprised by what finds its way onto the page, I suspect. But I think this is particularly true of authors who, like myself, travel into our unconscious, into our dream lives, for our inspiration. I am constantly astonished by what my mind discovers, inside itself...I don't have evidence of influences by other beings through dreams, but I certainly don't discount the possibility. If they exist it seems likely to me they will be both good and bad, as that certainly seems to be true of our species...
"The dream-sea appears only in two books--The Great and Secret Show and Everville--but it is very much a theme I want to explore and develop. It goes back to something we were discussing earlier the idea that our dreams are in some way doorways to our inner and most secret lives. There is one more book about the Dream-sea in me. Then I'm going to shut up about it. "

AOL Appearance

Transcript of on-line appearance, 1 September 1995 (note : online at the Midian site - see links)

"Everville was an interesting challenge because it's the middle book of a trilogy. The danger with the middle book of a trilogy is that it is just a recap of the first book and a warm up to the third. The thing I promised myself and the readers as I stepped into the writing of Everville was that it would be a book unto itself; that by the end of the book the characters who entered it would be unrecognisable. That it would genuinely be a journey. It would not be a recapitulation, but a further exploration of the themes and ideas that motivated me to write The Great And Secret Show. It was sort of fun going back to characters I had written about five years previously and changing their lives out of all recognition. It was a real pleasure to be able to go back to these characters and just screw with them."

Shades Of The Illusionist

By Geoff Sweeting, Ex Cathedra, No 4, May 1995

Everville bibliography...

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