mewsings in September 2025

Conceived of while writing his previous novel, Barker’s children’s fantasy The Thief of Always came out in 1992, a postprandial belch after the massive banquet that was Imajica. As this was in the days before the Potter-powered YA boom, and Barker was very much considered an adult author, he licensed the book to HarperCollins for a dollar (a silver dollar in one telling, half a sovereign in another); it not only sold well, but has been widely translated, and has several times been touted for a film adaptation, either animated or live action.

It starts with ten year old Harvey Swick bored in his bedroom, wishing away the dull month of February, when the grinning Rictus (with a smile “wide enough to shame a shark”) flies in through the window Peter Pan-style. He offers to take Harvey to the Holiday House, “where the days are always sunny… and the nights are full of wonders”. This House, hidden behind a magical wall of fog, offers its guests the best of each season every day: spring-like mornings, sunny summer afternoons, Halloween each evening, and Christmas every night, complete with the perfect gift (on his first night, Harvey gets the wooden toy ark his father made for him years ago, which was at some point lost). There are two other children there: Wendell, with whom Harvey spends his days making a treehouse, and the more retiring Lulu who, after she shows Harvey her dolls’ house populated with tiny lizards, seems to spend most of her time hanging around the gloomy lake at the back of the House, with its strange, darkness-dwelling fish.

There are a few hints that everything is not so perfect. The man behind all this, Mr Hood, is never seen, though Rictus and his colleagues (the jittery Jive, and the sluggish Marr), and the cook Mrs Griffin, often refer to him, making it clear he not only knows everything that goes on in the House, but “every dream in your head” too. And Mrs Griffin warns Harvey that Hood “doesn’t like inquisitive guests”. Rictus, on first flying through Harvey’s bedroom window, invited him to ask all the questions he wanted, but as soon as he did, accused him of being “too inquisitive for your own good”. “Questions rot the mind!”, he warned—a telling echo of The Prisoner’s “Questions are a burden on others.” Harvey, though, quite naturally wants to know all there is about this evidently magical place.

After Wendell plays a Halloween trick on him, Harvey is determined to get his own back, and with the help of Marr, who can change people’s shape, allows himself to be turned into a bat-winged vampire monster, to swoop down on Wendell and give him a real scare. Rictus and Marr egg him on, to turn it into a real attack; Harvey fights the temptation, but genuinely frightens the boy. The next day, Wendell tries to leave, but finds he can’t get through the wall of fog. Meanwhile, Lulu, who has been hiding away for some time, calls goodbye to Harvey from behind a tree, saying she doesn’t want him to look at her. He realises she has slowly been transforming into one of the fish that haunt that gloomy lake, and has now gone to join them. Is this the fate awaiting all of them—those, that is, who aren’t claimed by the fourth of Rictus’s colleagues, Carna, who seems to be quite capable of killing children who try too hard to leave the House?

The basic idea, of being in a place that seems like paradise but is in fact not just a trap, but a downhill slope to losing one’s humanity, is as old as the Lotos Eaters episode in The Odyssey—and is quite often paired, as here, with something of the Circe episode, too, as for instance when Pinocchio starts turning into a donkey on Pleasure Island, or Chihiro’s parents transform into pigs in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It has always felt a familiar plot-line, but when I come to list examples, I usually can’t find as many as I’d expect. There’s elements of it in Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, and it’s the plot of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I always feel there’s some major examples out there I’m not thinking of. (And it would be quite instructive to compare Gaiman and Barker, though I’d consistently come out on the Barker side as a deeper and more artistically authentic creator.)

The uber-example, for me, though, is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and there are a few resonances between Lindsay’s Crystalman and Barker’s Mr Hood. Both, for example, are explicitly called thieves (Krag calls Crystalman “a common thief”, while Hood is the most obvious subject of the novel’s title), and both are seen at least once as enormous faces (Crystalman under one of his many aliases, Faceny, who is “all face”, Hood in the House’s attic), with an implication that this is because, like Hood, there is “a terrible emptiness inside” them, and the face is, ultimately, all there is. And Hood accuses Harvey of having “brought pain into my paradise”, just as the one fly in Crystalman’s ointment is the presence of pain, as embodied by Krag—the one reminder that pleasure is only a part of human experience, not the whole of it, and so anything that excludes pain must be a lie. Barker has expressed his admiration for A Voyage to Arcturus (calling it “a masterpiece… an extraordinary work, if deeply, deeply flawed”), and I was pleased to hear a perhaps unintentional Lindsay quote from him in an interview, where he says “The most important part of me [is] the part which dreams with his eyes open”—echoing the “I dream with open eyes” line from Arcturus.

The Thief of Always wasn’t Barker’s first foray into children’s literature. He’d actually made a couple of unpublished attempts before The Books of Blood (something called The Candle in the Cloud in 1971, and The Adventures of Mr Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus with some friends a few years later), and he’d written some plays for a youth theatre. Two of his inspirations were Peter Pan (which Barker has called “the book of my childhood”), and CS Lewis, but I was pleased to find that, unlike Lewis or, say, Roald Dahl, Barker doesn’t pick on one of his kids to be a moral lesson for the others, as with Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the many sticky ends met with in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wendell, who is evidently a little more greedy, gullible and cowardly than Harvey—though all within acceptable child limits—seems the perfect set-up for this, but Harvey and he turn out to be genuine friends, and there was no feeling from Barker of an adult tut-tutting when Wendell couldn’t quite see things through in the ultimate confrontation with Hood.

The Barkerian touch, here, is that Harvey wins in the end thanks not to his moral goodness, but because he’s found a little of Hood’s darkness within himself, and learns how to turn it on this “Vampire Lord” and his deceptive House. There are echoes of other Barker works here too, such as the overall feeling of a Faustian pact; the quartet of Rictus, Jive, Marr and Carna feeling a little like the four Cenobites (both are sets of unnaturally altered humans with supernatural powers, both are three men and a woman, and both feature one member with a ridiculously fixed grin); Rictus, in addition, has the salesman-like patter of Shadwell from Weaveworld; and Mr Hood is first met in a dusty attic, giving it the feel of the lurking supernatural presence of the resurrected Frank in Hellraiser. Barker himself has said that The Thief of Always has some of the same themes as Imajica: “The concerns about the darkness, the secret self; the ideas about some ultimate enemy who is in fact quite close to one’s self.” There’s no sense at all that, in writing for children, Barker is being less Barker.

(He was often, at this time, saying in interviews from Weaveworld on that he’d moved on from horror to fantasy, but there’s a lot of darkness in The Thief of Always, and I have to say it’s in the darker fantastic that his power as an imaginative writer lies.)

The risk with a children’s fantasy about the dangers of escapism is that it might turn into a critique of the genre it’s written in, but Barker, very much a pro-imagination writer—and also, as already said, not of the finger-wagging type—here presents a much more holistic view: “if we embrace Neverland too strongly, we are forever sucking our thumbs, but if we die without knowing Neverland, we’ve lost our power to dream…”, as he’s said in an interview. Harvey is an imaginative lad, and ultimately his imagination is part of the solution, not the problem. Being lured in by the apparent pleasures of the Holiday House is more like a refusal to grow up than a retreat into one’s inner world, and the best children’s literature is usually about learning to open up to the wider adult world. And Barker, a self-confessed “inclusionist” in all his writing, sees imagination, and darkness, as part of the wider, adult world, too.