 The first book of Abarat has recently been released in paperback, describing how unlikely heroine Candy Quakenbush, a teenager from Chickentown in Minnesota - "the most boring place in the world" - stumbles upon the Sea of Izabella which carries her to the mystical world. The sequel, Days of Magic - Nights of war, will be available in hardback later this month. Barker credits the success of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books with changing publishers' attitudes, meaning that writers of adult fiction can turn their hands to children's literature without a fuss. He is also delighted that grown-ups now feel they can read their kids' books without feeling ashamed. "I have a theory about this - I think they always have, but it's only recently we've owned up to it. "I've always read and enjoyed children's books even as an adult. The times have changed, it's now perfectly cool for adults to be seen on the train reading a Harry Potter or a Clive Barker children's book," he says. Walt Disney has already snapped up the film rights for the Abarat series and many of the oil paintings are locked away in the company safe. Despite having been involved in making the movie versions of many of his other books, he is content this time to let the producers have their own way: "I'm pretty much ready to pass the books over to them and let them take them as they will. "The screenwriter is a man called John Harrison, who I respect enormously and who has been very respectful of my desires where the book is concerned and he tells me the script is loyal to the books and I'm delighted that's so.
 "I don't want to get too close to the creative process. I still have two more Abarat books to write, though not two more to paint because I'm half way through the paintings for book three. "If I start to get involved in the film I'll be drawn back into the material from books one and two when in fact, as a writer, I should be looking forward. My job is to finish the story I have begun in very a spectacular fashion." Barker is currently working on a number of horror movies as well as a big screen version of his first children's book The Thief of Always. He continues to paint the illustrations for the rest of his Abarat novels and says he has plenty more ideas to come. "I've certainly put a lot of my life into those books. Particularly as a gay man without children of my own, having inherited a child but not having my own kids, I suppose I'm bound to say that the books are like my kids. "There's nothing more gratifying in all the world than somebody coming up to you with a beaten old copy of one of my early books and say 'I've carried this around in my backpack I love this book'. "It pleases me because if you are touching people's imagination you are touching the deepest part of them." * DAYS of Magic - Nights of War, by Clive Barker, is released by Harper Collins on September 21 Extract from Days of Magic - Nights of War >> | 
