Bestselling author of books such as Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, Coldheart Canyon and the Abarat series, Clive Barker has taken time out from his next big project to pen a short novel. A return to his horror roots, Mister B. Gone is a meditation on Humanity, Heaven and Hell. Words: Paul Kane

Why did you decide to take time out from Scarlet Gospels to write Mister B. Gone?

Well, Scarlet Gospels is a bloody big book. I have done three drafts on it, each one of which has been 4,000 pages of handwritten material. This is a very dark book, even by my standards, and I wanted it to be my definitive visit to Hell. I also wanted it to be my farewell to what I will always think of as Doug’s Pinhead. Whenever I bring the character to mind, it’s Doug’s face I see. As you know it’s also got D’Amour in, so it’s Scott Bakula’s face I also see in that role.

But I’d been working on it a long time and I’d got into a very, very dark place. There’s a line from Nietzsche that often gets quoted: "If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." And that was what was happening, I had got into a place where I felt as though I needed to take a step away from the work and before I did the final draft, I would take a breather.

Having decided to do that, the Devil finds work for idle hands. I have to write every day; it’s in my bones, I can’t not do it. So the question was, ‘do I start something, do I write a couple of short stories?’ Somehow that didn’t feel right. I’ve had for a long time this idea of writing a book that really addressed the audience, the reader, in a way which was relatively new. I couldn’t find anyone who’d attempted this before. But I thought it’s such an obvious idea in one sense.

It struck me that the book is almost told almost in the second person, where the demon Jakabok is bringing the reader into his confidence…

Yeah. Absolutely right. In a way what I’m doing in the book is sharing secrets, isn’t it? Yes, I wanted the reader to feel as though they have been brought into the confidence of a character who may or may not be lying to them – or at least polishing events a little bit – but who certainly has a tale to tell. And that was the other thing I wanted to celebrate - storytelling. So rather than it simply being a series of events which take us to a conclusion, there would be little fragments of other elements, other characters that would give the reader a real sense that this is a life.

How long did it take you to write?

Five months. Including different drafts. I wrote it in a sort of madness. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. It was strange, it was very strange. I even suspended painting for a while, which I haven’t done for a long time and was not good for me physically. I actually keep fit by painting four hours a day. And it wasn’t good to suspend that. But Jakabok, dammit, called me back to the page. Even when I was weary, I couldn’t shut him up; he was there in my head. I knew what the next sentence was, always, always.

Even though he’s a demon, there’s something very human about Jakabok – would you agree?

Yeah, that was, in many ways, the way I approached the whole endeavour. There was another version of this book that I absolutely didn’t want to write, which was the one which was filled with over the top Grand Guignol scenes and very ripe, salty language – all that stuff. And I’d done that kind of demon before. I’d also done the elegant demon, in Pinhead. I wanted this to be a man with two tails, but the burn marks he receives erase so much of what would have made him demonic. But now his past is making him hopefully a much more accessible character. Because I think if you were to meet him you might feel the kind of pity you would feel for Quasimodo.

There’s almost a playing down of the horrific aspects this time…

Absolutely, and that was a conscious decision because, in the end, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. What was the purpose of going back to that? On occasion, certainly when the nasty stuff starts to happen, I don’t hold back. But, again, you have to look at the voice of the character; the character isn’t going to linger describing innards, that’s commonplace for him. That was one of the places I did cut back, because I realised I was writing in the voice of Clive Barker not in the voice of Jakabok Botch.

Do you think that makes it more frightening, because it’s like an afterthought when he mentions these things?

I hope it does – it’s almost nonchalant. It’s not like he spends a lot of time over it. There it is, there’s the cold truth of it.

Were the relationship aspects of the book based on real life observations?

Yes, there was a lot of stuff I’ve either seen or known…I don’t want to say too much. It’s certainly not my own mother and father. Very far from it. But yes, the cruelty of both father and mother – the cruelty of the world. This is a very dark book in that sense.

How do you feel the character changes as he’s telling his story throughout the book?

In one sense he doesn’t change at all, because he’s writing from a single point of view – and he’s venting. But I think the life itself that he describes…he changes from being a very innocent and trusting creature in a weird way, albeit a burned and maimed creature, into being something entirely other. I mean, he has seen into the secret of Heaven and Hell. How can you ever be the same again?

There are some great names in there – like Pappy Gatmus. How do you come up with these?

I’m a lover of those things. I’ve had Jakabok for a while because it has 'Jack in the Box' in there. And it has ‘Jack in the Book’, you see? So I liked that…But I am also ‘Mr B’, so there was a nice thing going on there. The rest of it is just my love of the sounds of words.

Mister B. Gone is out now from HarperCollins. Click here here to read the review.