 THE macabre face gnashing his pointed teeth from the canvas could have slipped his chains in the most ghoulish of nightmares. Conjured up in the imagination of one of the world's best-loved horror and fantasy writers, he is just one of hundreds of terrible creatures painted in oils in a luxury Los Angeles pad. Together they populate the enchanting world of Abarat, a vast archipelago where every island is a different hour of the day, created by Liverpool-born author Clive Barker for a series of children's books. Compared to CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia by critics, the stories are dreamt up as he paints, and written down only after the plot has been committed to canvas. "When I paint the Abarat paintings there are really no rules. I don't plan them, I just start to make marks on the canvas and see where it goes. "What happened was I have a house here in Beverly Hills, and the house next door to me became available. I thought, 'I really should buy this or I'll have neighbours'. "I put in a large painting studio and the freedom that came with having this new space was that I could be as messy as I liked with nobody to tell me to clear it up. "It's now the most chaotic space you ever saw. It's filled with hundreds of half-finished canvasses but it's my space and it's been very good to me," Barker explains in a gravelly voice that you could listen to telling stories for an eternity.
 Born on Oakdale Road, Allerton, the author enjoyed "long, sunny times" at Dovedale Primary before experiencing his own private, hormone-charged hell of adolescence at Quarry Bank, in Woolton. But despite suffering almost continuously at the hands of spotty-faced bullies, Barker, now 51, would not erase the past. For it was there he met the men he calls his "two guardian angels", English teacher Norman Russell and art teacher Alan Plent who encouraged him to develop his talents. "I think we're almost finished as human beings quite early in our lives. All our responses are set and probably by the age of 10 a writer has already got plotted in his head all that he is going to write about. He just doesn't realise it," hypothesises Barker, with the slightest hint of Scouse creeping into his American accent. With no television at home, his father Len, who died four years ago, encouraged his son to become a voracious reader and Barker soon found his imagination awakened by the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and other classic children's fantasies. | 
