We've written quite a bit regarding Clive Barker in the last week, with both "Books of Blood" and "Nightbreed" series currently in the works, and we now have some details on a new novel that's on the way. We've learned this week that Barker's Deep Hill is currently halfway complete!
Over on the official Clive Barker website, Barker gave a few details on the upcoming novel.
“The new novel, Deep Hill, is a little over halfway typed now,” Barker said in the chat. “I am still working on it and am very excited about it. It’s a rather larger book than I thought it was going to be but, as you know, that always happens with me! It is not a book for the very young readers of Thief of Always, say, because it has some very dark, fantastical material in it. It does not, however, contain any sexual material and any cursing you may hear is nothing you wouldn’t hear on the nightly news, but it is scary and I won’t try and water that fact down. In fact in some ways I think it’s one of the scariest things I’ve done, because it mingles both imaginative scares (that is to say strange creatures and the like) with very threatening issues about the world we live in.”
“Deep Hill involves a world of waste, how we deal with waste," Barker continued. "I was moved to come at the book with a much more serious intent than earlier drafts had contained because I came close to dying a few years ago, and nothing concentrates your mind more forcibly than the proximity of a permanent goodbye! I’m sorry to sound a rather grim note at this point but I want to be honest: when I started this book in this form I wasn’t sure I was going to live long enough to write another book after this. I no longer have that fear, but nevertheless my anxiety about voicing my profoundest concerns about the way we treat each other and the planet we live on had to be stated in this book because I might not ever have a chance to state it again. And really this book is driven by the fact that we are doing some terrible things to the world we live in and to each other that seem to me even more terrible than the things that used to terrify me when I was ten and I want, very much, to put those concerns into a book.”