In late 1992 I picked up the Pocket Books paperback edition of a new novel by a writer I’d never read before, Clive Barker. The book in question was called Cabal, and I remember the cover quite clearly, for it featured a dark, looming face superimposed on the night sky with the tagline “At last, the night has a hero” situated beneath the bright red letters of the main title.
Within the pages of that slim volume I was introduced to both an amazing world and an amazing writer. The tale of Boone and Midian and the creatures known as the Nightbreed instantly captivated me, drawing me into their dark embrace and never letting go. Cabal engaged my love of the dark fantastic in a way that few books before it ever had, turning me into a lifelong fan of Clive and his work.
Just a few months after I had picked up that book, in the spring of 1993, I had the pleasure of attending the first public solo showing of Clive’s art at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York City. Paintings and drawings with names like Cenobite and Books of Blood and Frank hung on the walls, places and characters and worlds that are familiar to any fan of Clive’s work but about which, at the time, I was just learning. I bought a print of one of the pieces (Books of Blood: Volume 1) and was pleased to have a few moments to speak with Clive as he signed it for me. It was a short but memorable conversation because we discussed the life of a writer and what it meant to be able to bring one’s visions to life on the page for others to experience.
Fast-forward eighteen years to the fall of 2012. My own writing career had taken off at this point, with more than a dozen novels to my credit, and I was casting about for a new project to begin when I came upon a battered copy of that original print edition of Cabal in a used bookstore. Wouldn’t it be fun to play in that world? I thought to myself. I imagined picking up where Clive had left off, with the tribes of the moon scattered to the four corners of the globe, waiting for their savior, Cabal, to restore their sanctuary and call them all home again. What would their lives be like? What beauty and wonder and misery and madness would they have found, tossed out into the world like so much flotsam and jetsam, at the mercy of the monsters known as mankind? In that moment Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed was born.
It took another three years and the help of many people—my coeditor Del Howison (owner of the world’s best horror bookstore, Dark Delicacies), editors Jim Frenkel and Melissa Singer at Tor Books, the twenty-three writers who penned the stories that appear herein, and, of course, Clive Barker himself—to turn that dream into a reality.
You hold in your hands the fruits of that effort, the physical embodiment of fantasy made flesh and blood, and within its pages you will find the Nightbreed in all their glory as they dance and sing and feast and yearn and hope and dream under the light of the moon.
I hope you find them as intriguing as I have.