He has since written many novels and other works. The creature is named Coker Ammiano, and his involvement with Maeve O’Connell, a young orphan in the wilderness party, leads Maeve to found the city of Everville upon a sort of fault line that exists between our world (herein called the Helter Incendo) and that which stands upon the shores of the dream-sea Quiddity.Barker at the Science Fiction Museum in 2007Īuthor, film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, playwright, painter, illustrator, visual artist, game producer, comic writer and comic artistĬlive Barker (born 5 October 1952) is an English novelist, playwright, author, film director, and visual artist who came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories, the Books of Blood, which established him as a leading horror writer. My second came when a bestial entity resembling the eponymous spirit of Algernon Blackwood’s classic The Wendigo turned out to be a mere emissary from a parallel world.

Their battles against fatigue, starvation, religious differences and an early winter make this hardy band a dead ringer for the Donner Party, and for a while I had high hopes of their reverting to cannibalism and other entertaining depravities. Everville is an addition to Barker’s impressive canon of fantastic literature, but it’s probably not the best place for a new reader to start.īecause the road to Everville begins in The Great and Secret Show, readers unfamiliar with that work are likely to find this new novel rough sledding.Įverville opens in 1848, with a group of pioneers making their way from Independence, Mo., to the Oregon wilderness. Weaveworld, Imajica, Cabal and The Great and Secret Show all have roots planted in the rich soil of British fantasy, and owe as much to Lord Dunsany, Charles Williams and even E.

More recently, Barker has chosen to foray a little further from the fields we know, into the eldritch realms of dark fantasy. He is also the creator of Hellraiser, among other films, which brought the whole Modern Primitives movement of fashionable mutilation to new sartorial and speculative heights. Clive Barker first made his reputation in the 1980s with The Books of Blood, three volumes of stylish, cutting-edge and cutthroat horror tales that laid waste to the genre’s few remaining taboos on sexuality with graphic depictions of trepanation, evisceration, and mental suffering.

Everville by clive barker