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"Everybody is a book of blood," writes Barker. "Wherever we're opened, we're red." Apparently Barker takes great pleasure in playing out his dark fantasies. Homicidal monsters with hooks for hands and demons who delight in tearing humans to shreds populate his books. Yet the flip side of Barker's yen for butchery is his equally macabre exploration of sexual ecstasy. It's a link that's existed in earlier efforts such as the 1987 novel, "The Hellbound Heart" (which inspired the movie "Hellraiser"). There, murderous creatures known as Cenobites exist in a dimension where pleasure and pain are indivisible.

Think of the misshapen Cenobites as sort of over-the-top stand-ins for sadomasochists, and you can begin to grasp the nature of Barker's literary eroticism. His work introduces readers to a vast torture garden of forbidden delights. In one of his best short stories, "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament" (included in the recently published "The Essential Clive Barker"), the main character's telekinetic power over men's bodies allows her to rearrange their anatomy at will. As a result, a male chauvinist doctor is disemboweled during an office visit, Ess' patronizing husband is painfully transformed into a bloody suitcase of flesh and a wealthy lover is morphed into a grotesque, four-legged beast.

Toward the end of the story, Ess ends up in Amsterdam, naked and bound to a mattress on the floor of a squalid apartment, where she acts as a prostitute before killing her sated johns. When Oliver Vassi, the only man she truly cares for, tracks her down, she makes a spear of his penis and commits suicide by making love to him, simultaneously killing him with her knife-like breasts. "Tangled in a wash of love," writes Barker, "they thought themselves extinguished, and were."

For Barker, the Ess story offers a perfect example of the imaginative connection between the erotic and the horrific, a connection he sees as characteristic of the human psyche.

"I would say, wherever we are using our imaginations to think about the world differently, there are similarities in process," explains Barker, placing his feet on the edge of a coffee table in his large, sunlit Spanish-style home. "Otherness and removal into otherness are very much a part of what we want from eroticism. We want the erotic experience to remove us from the mundane, the banal. We want eroticism to transfigure us, actually.

"In 'Jacqueline Ess,' there's both the desire for fatal reconfiguration and at the same time, the fear of death," continues Barker. "That's very much about the momentary erasing of the self. The French have the 'petit mort,' the idea of the 'little death' which follows orgasm. It's the idea that in sex we're in the grip of something much larger than us that we don't have much control over. But we actually like not having control."

Dark and handsome, with short brown hair, gray eyes and a toothy grin, Barker could easily pass for one of Hollywood's many buff, aspiring actors. Certainly there's nothing terrifying about him. Chatty, with a slight English accent, he's intelligent, charming and witty. He wears a white shirt with an open collar and corduroy pants the color of gun-metal; the only remotely Gothic accoutrements to his wardrobe are a silver cross around his neck and black leather belt studded with small animals. A white-gold wedding ring represents his fidelity to longtime partner David Armstrong.

But if Barker's appearance seems conventional enough, the art on the walls of his yellow Beverly Hills house contradicts this rather firmly. All around him, hung salon-style from floor to ceiling, are his much sought-after paintings -- monstrous, Bosch-like projections of his fantasy life. Humans with the heads of birds, ragged bipeds that only vaguely resemble men and golem-like creatures with horns and wings. These are just a few of Barker's creations, though hardly the most explicit or the most frightening of his oeuvre. Barker says that they are meant for a children's book.

There are, however, many explicitly erotic paintings to be found at Barker's Web site. Huge, half-penis, half-kangaroo animals throttle attacking humans; long, thin, elastic pricks sprout from the heads of male critters who milk themselves into bowls; purple and red demons force their hands up the genitals of bald women; and so on. The imagery is at once absurd and repulsive, humorous and salacious, with thick, crude brushstrokes that call to mind the work of German expressionists.

"I've done two exhibitions at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, and three or four in New York," says Barker, glancing at the paintings to his right. "The first exhibition at La Luz was called 'One Flesh,' which speaks for itself, and the second one was called 'The Weird and the Wicked.' So yeah, there's a lot of erotic material in both the books and the paintings, and to a lesser extent in the movies."

Next page | In horror, how can you avoid sex?