Three is a magic number

Or, to quote one of my favorite authors "Three is the number of those who do holy work." Which brings me to my three favorite authors: Clive Barker (quote and image), Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville. Concepts dreamed up by these men have changed my life and more importantly my dreams.

Clive Barker is a fantasy/horror/erotica writer, and also paints some of my favorite work (on the left is tree full of sky). The real reason he is on my list is because of Abarat. Barker took a break from his usual and started a series of intensely personal, vivid oil paintings, which grew into the hundreds, and then became a storyline, and then became a series of the most beautifully illustrated, weirdest, wildest fiction I've had the good fortune to come across, with here and there a glimmer of live, imaginative power, higher purpose and philosophical commentary that makes Disney squirm in their mainstream capitalist pants. And it's about to get even better. The next book is called Absolute Midnight. More information here: http://www.clivebarker.info/yaabaratunpub.html

Neil Gaiman should need no introduction. All of his fiction is enjoyable, and the past year I dove into Sandman, opening floodgates that I did not know existed. I'm still traveling headlong, through dreams, through darkness and all unspeakable, and I have no regrets (except that it's over, but it's never really).

China Mieville is the other side of the moon, an Author, someone to draw down the portals. His writing makes me want to drink coffee and cackle insanely, sit on a roof and burn deep into the night (not that i don't want to do any of these normally, well, everything but the coffee). London, or London as it could be, is alive and brooding, breathing, stinking, fucking, dreaming, behind everything he writes. The only author in a long while to send me searching through my thickest dictionary regularly. Even though there are no illustrations (I allow begrudgingly) there are thousands of composite images evolving organically from the smog and diction. Steampunk, socialism, magic and even stranger perversions of the natural world. Perdido Street Station or the short story the Tain are the best introductions to his work.