Clive on Tonight, Again
"Sure, I fell in love with her right then and there. There was no disguising it. A minute in her presence, I was her slave,
and I stayed that way pretty much for the next thirty years. Even after she divorced me - all the terrible grief she gave me
then - I still would have taken her back in a heartbeat.
"Why? I'll tell why. Because she was the most perfectly beautiful little piece of humanity I'd ever laid my eyes on, that's
why."
from Mr. Fred Coady Professes His Undying Love for His Little Sylvia
Tonight Again collects over thirty of the shorter, erotic pieces of this short fiction that Clive has compiled in recent years.
For comment on the remaining short stories initially coupled with this project, click across here...
...and find comment on a once-proposed Calloway collection of paintings and erotic short stories and poetry here.
"There will be another book, eventually. The problem right now is getting my publishers to agree to let me do short fiction. It's a
troubled market right now. Books are a troubled market. There will be more short stories, for sure. But, my next book is going to be a
book of short stories and they said, 'Please don't do this. You will sell five times more if you write a novel.' It's really tough selling short
stories.
"It frustrates the fuck out of me. I love short stories. I love writing short stories. It's immensely frustrating... my publisher will
pay a lot for a Clive Barker book, no surprise there, and I feel a sense of responsibility to them that if I'm going to write a book,
then they need to sell some copies. They pay me an immense amount of money. So, they tell me, look, we'll sell five times more copies of a
novel than a collection of short stories, I feel I'm bound to listen to them. Now, having said that I've written a new novel [Sacrament],
then all bets are off. They were troubled by the idea of having a gay hero in this novel and I told them that was what they were going
to get, end of story. Having agreed to doing a novel, I'll do what the hell I like. But, there are real difficulties in the market place with
short stories."
Interview
By Amber Black and Tim Trautmann, Review(?), 1996
"I'm also working on another collection of short stories for adults. This should be out after Galilee. You know, it's great fun! I'd forgotten what fun it is to do stories that you can finish in three weeks as opposed to 14 months. It's very gratifying to complete material in that time frame. What I'm trying to do in this collection is really trying to cross back and forth across the generic boundaries . You'll have some horror, some science fiction, fantasy, etc... It's really a reflection of the range of writing that I have been doing in the last few years. I'm also going to be revisiting some of my old mythologies, which will be big fun."
Confessions
By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998
"At the end of the year I will also deliver to Harper Collins a collection of short stories which will collect up a bunch of stuff that has been floating around for a while, there's a Harry D'Amour story which had been published a long time ago [Lost Souls], which has not been collected... There is about 5 or 6 stories which are already around which have not been collected. There is also about 70 or 80 thousand words of new material, which will include, and most importantly actually, the novella, "The Scarlet Gospels," which is giving the title to the book... So I am delivering that the end of this year for autumn the following year."
Confessions
By Craig Fohr and Kelly Shaw, Lost Souls at www.clivebarker.com, 18 May 2001
"There's... a lot of stories that I created for Scarlet Gospels which are very erotic, complete and ready to rock and roll. There's a tale called Jehovah's Bitch, which is one of the most outrageous things I've ever written, and I hope to get into that [short story] collection"
Open Roads... What Price Wonderland?
By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 3 April 2002 (note - full text here)
"We will do the collection of short fiction at a later point, I have got a lot of short fiction, which we have not been published."
Clive Barker On The Phone
By [Thomas Hemmerich], That's Clive!, 29 March 2005 (note - full text online at www.clivebarker.de)
"Yes, the uncollected short stories will be put together into a single volume. I think it's most important right now, however, that I unleash this big thing [The Scarlet Gospels] and then Jane Johnson and I will talk about how we collect the short stories."
You Called, He Came...
By Phil and Sarah Stokes, 2 and 3 June 2006 (note: full text here)
Tonight, Again bibliography
