(Reprinted from The Nightbreed Chronicles, 1990)
Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.
At such times we all become like changeling children, at odds with our friends and peers, looking to distant horizons for fresh comprehension of ourselves.
The fiction of the fantastic brims with metaphors for this condition: tales of people whose cells are protean and souls migrant, people called by mysterious forces to a place they’ve visited in other lives or states; a place never understood—at least until the moment of crisis—as their real home.
There, perhaps, they may enjoy the company of their own tribe.
Welcome, then, to the people I feel particularly at home with: the Nightbreed. They are a colony rather than a family. A collection of survivors of what were once small nomadic nations: werewolves, vampires, demons, shape-shifters …
In conventional Western mythology these are the villains; creatures who possess little more than an appetite for destruction and evil. But in cultures less brutalized by dualism these dream nations are as much celebrated as feared; they are the spirits of our darker natures which healthier theologies don’t seek to repress.
CLIVE BARKER
Pinewood Studios, England
September 1989