 "You have to, in a sense, be taught the pleasure of reading. You need somebody to say 'look this is a wonderful experience' because reading is a path of experience. "You're using the words of the author as a jumping off place for your own imagination. "I learned what I know about the good, the bad and the ugly from books." You would expect someone with an imagination that summons such gruesome brutes as stitchlings, sown from skin, leather and fabric filled with a living mud, which inhabit the darkest island of Abarat, to appear at least slightly unhinged. Yet Barker manages the compelling combination of thoughtfulness and charm that pervades even the darkest of his books. He has spent the past two decades of his life in the US, finding it easier to work close to Hollywood after the success of Hellraiser, which he converted from his original novel to film script and directed himself.
 He admits he is fortunate to have been given the freedom to write different genres of literature, moving first from horror to fantasy and now into children's books, though he was forced to show his editor around 100 of his haunting Abarat paintings before they would agree to publish the series. "It's been to some extent a product of the time in which I was being published. When I was first published, almost 20 years ago, Stephen King was coming out and he made some very nice comments about my early fiction which helped sell the books - no question. "The first half of that 20 years were very confident times in publishing and I was able to pretty much have support for whatever book came along, as long as I didn't write children's books," he joked.. "But when I wrote Weaveworld, when I changed from writing horror to writing fantasy, I got tremendous support for that change. "I'm not sure that an author these days, in these heightened times, would get the same amount of support." His partner David Armstrong, who he refers to as "my husband", Armstrong's daughter Nicole, 16 - who share Barker's house with four dogs, five goldfish, 15 rats, innumerable wild geckoes, a cockatiel and a parrot - are among the handful of people Barker allows to read his manuscripts before they are published. | 
