Archivists And Authors Phil And Sarah Stokes Examine Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds

Given the fact that there’s so much of Clive’s artwork and other material assembled for “Dark Worlds,” how difficult was it to determine what makes the cut and what doesn’t?

Phil: You’ve hit the nail on the head. We started out planning a book of 300 pages, and that was too much of a challenge. The publishers very kindly granted us another 50 pages to squeeze a bit more in. We’ve clearly had to make a balance, and what we were attempting to do was to balance the visual with the text, the familiar with the new, the unknown, to balance fact with a little bit of commentary, but really to showcase all of the media. We tried not to leave anything behind. Some things have justified four pages in the book. 

Some things have got a passing message in a paragraph to remind us that we might need to go back and say more about it at some point, but we’ve tried to be comprehensive, to dwell on the areas where we think there’s a story to tell or there’s something that people might not know, or there’s a fact to uncover, which helps illuminate how all of this really fits together. 

Clive had a lovely expression many years ago, that he didn’t know how all this connected together, but it was a little bit like a patchwork bedspread. Sooner or later, you could see the way that the patchwork connected together and made it one single covering. You couldn’t hop from one to the other because it would look random. What we tried to do is take some of that randomness and say, “There’s a method behind this.”

Sarah, did your ideas of what should go in the book differ from Phil’s ideas? How does that process work as two creatives putting your work into one book?

Sarah: We had a lot of those conversations, and to be honest, it threatened to derail us a bit. At the beginning, it was a real challenge. We then went back, and we said, “If we’re the average reader, whoever that might be, they’re going to expect certain things.” There’s “Hellraiser,” “Candyman,” the “Books of Blood,” “Weaveworld” — all of those things. 

We put those in as way points and then looked at what Clive have been doing in between them. How can we show the journey? What was going on in the background? How can we fill in, if you like, between these big sort of milestones, creative milestones for him? We both had things we wanted in, and we both had things that there wasn’t room for.  

Phil: We both fight for things and when it really comes to an impasse, Sarah wins. [laughs]

Given the fact that there’s so much of Clive’s artwork and other material assembled for “Dark Worlds,” how difficult was it to determine what makes the cut and what doesn’t?

Phil: You’ve hit the nail on the head. We started out planning a book of 300 pages, and that was too much of a challenge. The publishers very kindly granted us another 50 pages to squeeze a bit more in. We’ve clearly had to make a balance, and what we were attempting to do was to balance the visual with the text, the familiar with the new, the unknown, to balance fact with a little bit of commentary, but really to showcase all of the media. We tried not to leave anything behind. Some things have justified four pages in the book. 

Some things have got a passing message in a paragraph to remind us that we might need to go back and say more about it at some point, but we’ve tried to be comprehensive, to dwell on the areas where we think there’s a story to tell or there’s something that people might not know, or there’s a fact to uncover, which helps illuminate how all of this really fits together. 

Clive had a lovely expression many years ago, that he didn’t know how all this connected together, but it was a little bit like a patchwork bedspread. Sooner or later, you could see the way that the patchwork connected together and made it one single covering. You couldn’t hop from one to the other because it would look random. What we tried to do is take some of that randomness and say, “There’s a method behind this.”

Sarah, did your ideas of what should go in the book differ from Phil’s ideas? How does that process work as two creatives putting your work into one book?

Sarah: We had a lot of those conversations, and to be honest, it threatened to derail us a bit. At the beginning, it was a real challenge. We then went back, and we said, “If we’re the average reader, whoever that might be, they’re going to expect certain things.” There’s “Hellraiser,” “Candyman,” the “Books of Blood,” “Weaveworld” — all of those things. 

We put those in as way points and then looked at what Clive have been doing in between them. How can we show the journey? What was going on in the background? How can we fill in, if you like, between these big sort of milestones, creative milestones for him? We both had things we wanted in, and we both had things that there wasn’t room for.  

Phil: We both fight for things and when it really comes to an impasse, Sarah wins. [laughs]