Incarnations — Clive Barker

There has never been a storyteller quite like Clive Barker an erudite classicist who has created some of the most potent cinematic nightmares of our time; a prolific bestseller who combines a contemporary sensibility with the literary elegance of an earlier age; a confirmed populist whose obsessions first surfaced in paintings and works for the theatre.

Here, published for the first time, are three of those dramas. Intensely readable and characteristically outrageous, they present us with vital and compelling portraits of unforgettable characters: among them, the revolutionary painter Goya, the Frankenstein monster as never glimpsed before, and the Prince of Darkness the Devil himself.

For readers already familiar with Barker's dark, passionate vision, these plays are invitations to a new kind of reading experience. For those who have not shared his world, they will be a revelation.

In this extraordinary trio of plays, the same unique imagination that created Everville, Imajica, Hellraiser, Weaveworld, Candymari, The Thief of Always, and the Books of Blood is a work bringing wild new worlds to life.

Created as epic spectacles for the stage, these immensely readable dramas burst with extraordinary characters, apocalyptic images and violent, often erotic, encounters.

In Colossus, the subject is the great Spanish painter Goya. Deluging us with an overpowering stream of stage pictures, Barker evokes a world where love, art, cannibalism, and sudden redemption are interwoven.

In Frankenstein in Love, Barker's homage to Mary Shelley's masterpiece and the shockingly graphic tradition of Grand Guignol theatre, we are invited to a wedding the likes of which the world has never seen.

In The History of The Devil, Lucifer himself is brought to trial and, clue by clue, we piece together the mystery of Evil Incarnate.

Dim the lights. Raise the curtain. The stage is set for three journeys into the dark heart of the imagination.