and H.P. Lovecraft exposed the dark side of fantasy sta- ples such as gods and sorcerers as far back as the 19th century and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was lousy with monsters, but the genres had gone their separate ways by the time the ’80s horror literature boom rolled around. In 1987, Clive Barker’s Weaveworld – now available in an illustrated 25th anniversary edition from Earthling Publications – simultaneously took horror back to its fan- tastic roots and paved the way for today’s popular fan- tasy/horror hybrids. According to Barker, Weaveworld is a “story about sto-
N
rytelling.” Throughout the course of the novel, people be- come words and words become objects – a coveted book even plays a pivotal role in the narrative. “The opening of Sacrament says we are animals who
tell stories,” the author explains, referring to his 1996 novel about a wildlife photographer who confronts an an- cient evil bent on the extinction of every animal on the planet. “And then it goes on to say why we tell stories: if we didn’t, we wouldn’t understand ourselves. I would have put that in Weaveworld had I known it at the time. But that is essentially what Weaveworld portends.” Barker’s dark fantasy epic concerns a race of super-
natural beings known as the Seerkind (the original in- habitants of Eden), whose magical abilities drove humans to immortalize them in myth as fairies and demons – and to systematically hunt down and murder them. To escape genocide, the Seerkind use magic to secret themselves in the Fugue, a world that is concealed in the threads of a rug. When the rug’s human guardian is felled by old age, the Fugue is left vulnerable to Immacolata, an evil
RM50 T H E N I N T H C I R C L E
OW THAT HORROR AND FANTASY ARE SUCH COZY BEDFELLOWS, IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER THAT, 25 YEARS AGO, THE GENRES WERE BARELY ON SPEAKING TERMS. Arthur Machen
Seerkind witch who conjures a seemingly unstop- pable entity called the Scourge to eradicate her own race. Though it may sound tame for the author who
brought us the gory, sado-masochist shocks of the Hellraiser universe, Weaveworld is very much a work of horror – demon-wraiths graphically ex- plode; young men are raped by a lustful, bloated hag who, hours later, gives birth to their monstrous offspring; eyeballs and genitals are scorched away. At one point, astute Barker fans will even catch a reference to Hellraiser’s Cenobites (re- ferred to here as the Surgeons) when Immacolata conjures the Rake, a former lover who has been filleted by the inter-dimensional demons, reani- mated and sent back into the mortal world as an assassin. Those gruesome images, coupled with the
Earthling Publications marks the 25th an- niversary of Weaveworld, with a special il- lustrated edition of Clive Barker’s demented magic-carpet ride.
Anguish and Alchemy by Michael Mitchell and April Snellings
ink illustrations for Earthling’s new edition. “Throughout the book there are these moments, such as the appearance of the Rake, Immacolata’s reconstitution from the bones and dust in the crypt, and the Scourge’s garden...[that] form ex- tremely powerful illustration opportunities be- cause by their nature they are extremely visual, and still allow a lot of room for interpretation. Clive leaves these interstices within the text like pock- ets of oxygen in a fire, where the reader’s imagi- nation fills and fuels the scene. As an illustrator, I fill some of these spaces with my own ideas and hopefully create something that is a three-way ex- perience between author, reader and illustrator.” Unlike Barker works such as The Books of
book’s unwieldy length (the mass-market paper- back edition clocked in at 720 pages), have made Weaveworld a tough sell for the screen. Rumours of a television adaptation have persisted for years, but networks have so far refused to commit to the ambitious project. With this new edition, though, Weaveworld’s monstrous denizens will finally take form – on paper, at least. “The parts I like the best are the lushly created
emanations of fantastic power,” says artist Richard Kirk, who provided 30 original pen-and-
Blood and The Damnation Game, Weaveworld dabbles as much in the sublime as in the horrific. Throughout the novel, characters are given fleet- ing glimpses of Paradise, whether in the form of the original Garden of Eden or the world woven into the rug, only to find that memory is a fragile thing that slips away all too easily, like something conjured up out of air. “Art is magic,” says Barker. “Art is a transfor-
mative act. It’s lead into gold. It takes the basest stuff of our natures – egotistical, fearful, self-pro- tective and so on – and by the alchemical system, kills them dead. Art is not something to be taken lightly.”
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