SOURCE: Barker, Clive, and Paul Wells. “On the Side of the Demons: Clive Barker's Pleasures and Pains.” In British Horror Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley, pp. 172-82. London: Routledge, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Wells presents highlights from his conversations with Barker in which the author summarizes his literary preoccupations.

Clive Barker, novelist, artist, writer and director, has already achieved considerable success in two major aspects of the horror genre. First, he has resurrected a notion of ‘British horror’; previously mainly understood as a phenomenon of Hammer Films (see Hutchings 1993), the maverick talent Michael Reeves (see Pirie 1973) or exploitation auteurs like Pete Walker (see Chibnall 1998). Barker, with his self-conscious re-working and re-configuration of the British horror tradition, has simultaneously progressed the tradition but also called attention to its neglected backwaters, and re-engaged with the centrality of ‘Englishness’ at the core of the genre.

Second, Barker has...