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Linda Badley (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: Badley, Linda. “Clive Barker Writing (from) the Body.” In Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice, pp. 73-104. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Badley applies contemporary cultural theory, including feminist theory, to an analysis of representations of women in Barker's fiction.]

With Books of Blood, an obscure playwright and illustrator named Clive Barker launched the “post-King era of horror fiction,” as William Gibson has called it (“Introduction” xv). “You read him with book in one hand and an airsick bag in the other,” King joked in 1986, adding “That man is not fooling around” (qtd. in Kanfer 83). Perhaps more importantly, Barker was as intellectual and politically subversive as King was not.

Barker challenged the modern horror genre as King had exemplified and defined it. “A lot of...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Michael Morrison (review date 1985)
   2. Michael A. Morrison (review date 1985)
   3. Chris Morgan (review date 1985)
   4. Fleming Meeks (review date 1986)
   5. Douglas E. Winter (review date 1986)
   6. Ken Tucker (review date 1986)
   7. Michael A. Morrison (review date 1986)
   8. Don D'Ammassa (review date 1986)
   9. Don D'Ammassa (review date 1986)
   10. Cosette Keis (review date 1987)
   11. Elizabeth Gleick (review date 1987)
   12. Laurence Coven (review date 1987)
   13. Don D'Ammassa (review date 1987)
   14. Science Fiction Chronicle (review date 1989)
   15. Ken Anderson (review date 1989)
   16. Craig William Burns (essay date 1993)
   17. Gary Hoppenstand (essay date 1994)
   18. Linda Badley (essay date 1996)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright