
"With my nose being so much to the grindstone, I'm writing the Hellraiser stuff during the day and at night I am painting Abaratsģ and 4, there isn't another minute during the day to think about anything else at all. Half-a-million words and 500 oil paintings, and I want that four-book world to read like one enormous, incredibly colourful,īy Joe Nazzaro, Fantasy Worlds, No 5, February 2005 At the end of four books there are going to be Very predestined, because I pretty much know where this narrative is heading. To an extent with the second book, although I started to become more of a shaper of the world. Quite as passive - in the sense that, with the first book I was letting the paintings tell me what was going on. "I want Book Three to build to something fairly dramatic, and Book Four to be on a whole new level of excitement, so I'm not Get the climax that my audience deserves. I've really got to break it, otherwise I'm not going to It can't be the unruly stallion any longer. Now that I'm into the third book and starting to think about the climax of this narrative, I "I have plot outlines for part three and some notions for four, based on the 270 paintings that I haven't used so far, but I mayĭevelop some new paintings as well. Something which is going to be apocalyptic, but it's going to be a private apocalypse - it's going to be played out on a grand scaleīut also played out on a very localised, very intimate scale."īy Brein Lopez, LA Festival of Books, 25 April 2004 "The third book is called Absolute Midnight - which suggests it won't be a happy book! But the idea is that we are aiming for Where there had been calm there was panic and terror.


Where there had been calm there was now chaos and violence. Everywhere Mater Motley sent her remote gaze, it was the same triumphantly desolate story. The Midnight Empire she had planned for, laboured for, lived for, now owned the Abarat from horizon to horizon, with the exception of the Twenty-Fifth Hour though it was only a matter of time, she was sure, until that most perverse of Hours fell to her. In the map-mosaicked room at the top of the Needle Tower, Mater Motley surveyed her creation, and was satisfied.
