Clive Barker: 'This town can make you crazy. But I can always walk away'

Liverpool-born Clive Barker has made the strangest trip of any British writer - from avant-garde actor-playwright to king of horror, master of fantasy, painter, director-producer in LA, and now the creator of a new world for young readers, with Disney's backing. Roz Kaveney meets him in Hollywood

Years of California sun have gradually carved the smooth matinee-idol looks into the beginnings of a craggy maturity. Clive Barker, at almost 50, both is and is not the wittily experimental playwright who worked with director Jude Kelly on pieces like Colossus (the life of Goya) and The Secret Life of Cartoons, and the angry iconoclast who revolutionised horror fiction with his Books of Blood.

Hollywood, a place which can be both heaven and hell, has brought him fulfilment and a row of three pink houses – houses that are old enough Hollywood to mean that one of them belonged to both Loretta Young and Ronald Colman. "I came out of Liverpool frustrated – but what do I have to be angry about?" he asks. "I have a husband, David, and 28 animals, and work that I love. Of course, this town can make you crazy. I hate it when people fumble an opportunity or when they lie to me, but I can walk away from those things to this quiet little canyon ... The life of the two-week-old naked wild brown rat that we found abandoned by its mother in a drawer is more important to me than any of those things."

Six or seven films based on his work are in production or development: the television movie of his novel Weaveworld starts filming in January. He hopes to do a couple more biopics in the tradition of Gods and Monsters, which he co-produced, and at least one more vast fantasy project, though that too he would want to produce rather than direct. One past project with which he was dissatisfied, Lord of Illusions, has been rescued into a preferred version by DVD. He hopes that, one day, he can do the same for his butchered "fantastique" epic, Nightbreed.

One of the three pink houses, the one in which we are talking, is home for a while to the gallery of paintings that are part of his current project, The Books of Abarat. The paintings vary from a vast impressionistic, yet peopled, triptych of 25 islands to intimate sketches of grotesques that leer out at the audience and challenge it not to empathise with their distortions and predicaments.

"I love the way much painting has come back to the figurative – I was never an abstract expressionist kind of guy," he says. "Painting has always been for me like what Klee said about drawing being taking a line for a walk. I make a mark, and then the second mark it demands, and I see where they lead me."

The paintings emerged when he was working on what he thought would become another sequence of erotic paintings (he has exhibited two already) but they acquired a life of their own – every artist's dream and nightmare. "At first I thought that perhaps each of them had its own story, and that there was a book right there. And then I realised that what I was painting was a world, and that they all fitted, sooner or later, into my mythology of that world."

Instead of starting with a story and finding strong visual imagery to tell it, he had found visual imagery that demanded a four-volume sequence of "fantastique" novels for children and young adults in order to give them shape.

But Abarat (HarperCollins, £17.99) is more than just a new and major contender in those particular stakes. It is, for one thing (and like his earlier children's book, The Thief of Always), full of a level of beautiful terror that children are still just able to bear. "I don't need to use explicit language or sexuality," he explains. "I did those already."

And Abarat is also The Deal. Disney is committed to filming the first two books once Barker has finished the second, and is considering turning some aspects of the paintings into a theme-park ride – "one of their dreamier rides, like the pirate islands".

Clive Barker is a man who always pays his artistic debts. When he was young, one of his favourite books was Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry; he had always wanted to make a Book of Hours. The fact that when he has, it is a heavily illustrated fantasy set in a world with 25 islands (one for each hour of the day and the space between) is among the many conceptual puns in the sequence. And the patronage of two huge corporations – Disney and HarperCollins – means that he has been able to make books that are not only viscerally exciting adventures, but gorgeous objects in the hand as well.

He is fond of that term "fantastique" as a way of getting away from the preconceptions involved with standard publishers' categories – science fiction, horror, children's books – which have more to do with helping people find their way around bookstores than with the actual work.

"People say that they don't read horror, or fantasy, and ignore the fantasy in horror fiction, the horror implicit in fantasy fiction." The logic of the situation is that people end up only reading novels set on Tuesday and featuring purple monsters.

Using the term "fantastique" is a way of signalling inclusiveness, not only across genres but across forms. "I grew tired of the way people knew everything about Stephen King and nothing about Brueghel or Goya," Barker says. "I like work that leads me to make connections. Recently, I started listening to Elgar and from him I found myself moving into a whole new sense of the poetry of Englishness. And then you find yourself re-reading – suddenly The Wind in the Willows is this passionate hymn to rural placidity with a Dionysiac figure at the centre of it."

One thing that has changed Barker is being parent to David's daughter, Nicole. "She is a coolly confident 2002 14-year-old, but she still searches fiction, music and art for clues to how things work. I had not realised how important the late [singer] Aaliyah was to her as a young black woman until she asked me to take her to the big poster that was acting as a shrine, and cried as she lit candles there. At first I was sceptical – but then I realised how much this mattered. Grief is the performance of grief. The important thing is that the young go on being able to find all of the work they need to make sense of things."

When Clive Barker moved into the pink house, he found a portrait of Jean Cocteau tucked away in a back office and knew he would be happy there. Cocteau is one of his heroes, just for his versatility; another is Noël Coward. "David Lean once asked him, 'Master, how do you keep the critics from growing tired of you?' and Coward said, 'M'dear, the important thing is always to poke your head out of another hole.'"

That joy in virtuosity is the key to Clive Barker's work at its best, and also the key to his contentment.

Clive Barker: biography

Born in Liverpool in 1952, Clive Barker studied literature and philosophy at Liverpool University. Then he moved to London to work in theatre: he acted, directed, and wrote plays such as Colossus, Subtle Bodies, Frankenstein in Love and The Secret Life of Cartoons. In his late twenties, he started writing the horror fiction that soon gained him global fame. These early tales became the six-volume Books of Blood. Two of them were turned into unsatisfactory films, which prompted Barker to direct his own work in Hellraiser (1987); he also directed Nightbreed (1990) and Lord of Illusions (1995). Hellraiser, like the screen version of his story Candyman, has spawned two sequels. His full-length novels include Weaveworld, Imajica, Everville, Sacrament, Coldheart Canyon and a children's tale, The Thief of Always. He has also illustrated comic-books. His paintings of a fantasy archipelago inspired a new novel for young readers, Abarat (HarperCollins), the first in a quartet that has secured an $8m deal with Disney. Clive Barker lives in Hollywood with his partner.