Books by Clive Barker Galilee Forms of Heaven Sacrament Incarnation Everville The Thief of Always Imajica The Great and Secret Show The Hellbound Heart The Books of Blood, Volumes I-III In the Flesh The Inhuman Condtition The Damnation Game Weaveworld Cabal �THE FIFTH DOMINION� IMAJICA I CLIVE BARKER http://www.clivebarker.com ATTENTION: ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATIONS Most HarperPaperbacks are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, or fund-raising. For information, please call or write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. Telephone: (212) 207-7528. Fax: (212) 207-7222. HarperPaperbacks A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book." This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. HarperPaperbacks A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022 Copyright � 1991,1995 by Clive Barker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollinsPublishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1991 by HarperCollins Publishers. A single volume edition of Imajica was published in 1992 by HarperPaperbacks. First HarperPaperbacks printing: June 1995 Cover illustration by Jim Burns Printed in the United States of America HarperPaperbacks and colophon are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers 1098 Back and back we go, searching for reasons; scrutinizing the past in the hope that we'll turn up some fragment of an explanation to help us better understand ourselves and our condition. For the psychologist, this quest is perhaps at root a pursuit of primal pain. For the physicist, a sniffing after evidence of the First Cause. For the theologian, of course, a hunt for God's fingermarks on Creation. And for a storyteller�particularly for a fabulist, a writer of fantastiques like myself�it may very well be a search for all three, motivated by the vague suspicion that they are inextricably linked. Imajica was an attempt to weave these quests into a single narrative, folding my dilettante's grasp of this trio of disciplines�psychology, physics, and theology�into an in-terdimensional adventure. The resulting novel sprawls, no doubt of that. The book is simply too cumbersome and too diverse in its concerns for the tastes of some. For others, however, Imajica's absurd ambition is part of its appeal. These readers forgive the inelegance of the novel's structure and allow that while it undoubtedly has its rocky roads and its cul-de-sacs, all in all the journey is worth the shoe-leather. For my publishers, however, a more practical problem became apparent when the book was prepared for its paperback edition. If the volume was not to be so thick that it would drop off a bookstore shelf, then the type had to be reduced to a size that several people, myself included, thought less than ideal. When I received my author's copies I was put in mind of a pocket-sized Bible my grandmother gave me for my eighth birthday, the words set so densely that the verses swam before my then healthy eyes. It was not�I will admit�an entirely unpleasant association, given that the roots of Imajica's strange blossom lay in the vlii CLIVE BARKER poetry of Ezekiel, Matthew, and Revelations, but I was well aware, as were my editors, that the book was not as reader-friendly as we all wished it was. From those early misgivings springs this new, two-volume edition. Let me admit, in all honesty, that the book was not conceived to be thus divided. The place we have elected to split the story has no particular significance. It is simply halfway through the text, or thereabouts: a spot where you can put down one volume and�if the story has worked its magic�pick up the next. Other than the larger type, and the addition of these words of explanation, the novel itself remains unaltered. Personally, I've never much cared about the details of one edition over another. While it's very pleasurable to turn the pages of a beautifully bound book, immaculately printed on acid-free paper, the words are what count. The first copy of Foe's short stories I ever read was a cheap, gaudily covered paperback; my first Moby Dick the same. A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Duchess of Malfi were first encountered in dog-eared school editions. It mattered not at all that these enchantments were printed on coarse, stained paper. Their potency was undimmed. I hope the same will prove true for the tale you now hold: that the form it comes in is finally irrelevant. With that matter addressed, might I delay you a little longer with a few thoughts about the story itself? At sign-ings and conventions I am repeatedly asked a number of questions about the book, and this seems as good a place as any to briefly answer them. Firstly, the question of pronunciation. Imajica is full of invented names and terms, some of which are puzzlers: Yzorddorex, Patashoqua, Hapexamendios, and so forth. There is no absolute hard and fast rule as to how these should trip, or stumble, off the tongue. After all, I come from a very small country where you can hike over a modest range of hills and find that the people you encounter on the far side use language in a completely different way to those whose company you left minutes before. There is no right or wrong in this. Language isn't a fascist regime. It's IMAJICA ix protean, and effortlessly defies all attempts to regulate or confine it. While it's true that I have my own pronunciations of the words I've turned in the book, even those undergo modifications when�as has happened several times�people I meet offer more interesting variations. A book belongs at least as much to its readers as to its author, so please find the way the words sound most inviting to you and take pleasure in them. The other matter I'd like to address is my motivation for writing the novel. Of course there is no simply encapsulated answer to that question, but I will offer here what clues I can. To begin with, I have an abiding interest in the notion of parallel dimensions, and the influence they may exercise over the lives we live in this world. I don't doubt that the reality we occupy is but one of many; that a lateral step would deliver us into a place quite other. Perhaps our lives are also going on in these other dimensions, changed in vast or subtle ways. Or perhaps these other places will be unrecognizable to us: they'll be realms of spirit, or wonderlands, or hells. Perhaps all of the above. Imajica is an attempt to create a narrative which explores those possibilities. It is also a book about Christ. People are constantly surprised that the figure of Jesus is of such importance to me. They look at The Hellbound Heart or at some of the stories in The Books of Blood and take me for a pagan who views Christianity as a pretty distraction from the business of suffering and dying. There is some truth in this. I certainly find the hypocritical cant and derisive dogmas of organized religion grotesque and oftentimes inhumane. Plainly the Vatican, for instance, cares more for its own authority than for the planet and the flock that grazes upon it. But the mythology that is still barely visible beneath the centuries-old encrustation of power plays and rituals�the story of Jesus the crucified and resurrected; the shaman healer who walked on water and raised Lazarus�is as moving to me as any story I have ever heard. I found Christ as I found Dionysus or Coyote, through art. Blake showed him to me; so did Bellini and Gerard x CLIVE BARKER Manley Hopkins, and half a hundred others, each artist offering his or her own particular interpretation. And from very early on I wanted to find a way to write about Jesus myself; to fold his presence into a story of my own invention. It proved difficult. Most fantastique fiction has drawn inspiration from a pre-Christian world, retrieving from Faery, or Atlantis, or dreams of a Celtic twilight creatures that never heard of Communion. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it always left me wondering if these authors weren't willfully denying their Christian roots out of frustration or disappointment. Having had no religious education, 1 harbored no such disappointment: I was drawn to the Christ figure as I was to Pan or Shiva, because the stories and images enlightened and enriched me. Christ is, after all, the central figure of Western mythology. I wanted to feel that my self-created pantheon could accomodate him, that my inventions were not too brittle to bear the weight of his presence. I was further motivated by a desire to snatch this most complex and contradictory mystery from the clammy hands of the men who have claimed it for their own in recent years, especially here in America. The Falwells and the Robertsons, who, mouthing piety and sowing hatred, use the Bible to justify their plots against our self-discovery. Jesus does not belong to them. And it pains me that many imaginative people are so persuaded by these claims to possession that they turn their backs on the body of Western mysticism instead of reclaiming Christ for themselves. 1 said in an interview once (and meant it) that the Pope, or Falwel...
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