Alan Bissett's story about Weaveworld

When I was 14, I started hanging about with a guy called Thomas Tobias (or ‘Toby’, as he was called, since everybody had a nickname), who is still my best mate to this day. We all used to gather around the stairs round the back of our mate Moonie’s house, having a laugh. At the time I was reading stuff aimed at what you’d now call Young Adults, sprightly novels about teen crushes. Being a hopeless romantic, Terry Edge’s Fanfare For a Teenage Warrior in Love was my favourite.

That was, until, Toby loaned me his copy of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld.

It was a novel about (it seems almost ridiculous to say it now!) a carpet into which a world had been woven, but it was created with such care and detail that the whole daft premise of it fell away, felt fresh and utterly convincing. Barker had come to Fantasy through the Horror genre, his classic film Hellraiser and Books of Blood stories. Barker’s take on that most misogynist of genres was particularly smart, politicised and subversive. And very, very gory. So Weaveworld was never going to be Terry Pratchett.

At 600 pages, it was by far the longest book I’d ever read, replete with enough wonderment, creatures and colour to capture the child in me, enough big ideas to stimulate the emerging adolescent, and enough darkness and narrative complexity to satisfy the future adult. I suddenly saw the world in a whole new way. My head seemed to expand at the speed of light. I was energised by the book, and immediately read everything of Barker’s. Toby and I would sit up in his bedroom at night talking excitedly about our favourite characters, the coolest scenes. I still can’t experience Weaveworld without the smell of Lynx Java coming back. Soon, we both admitted we wanted to be writers, and swapped stories which were basic Barker rip-offs. Toby told me he thought my stories had potential though and that I should keep writing them. We dreamed about what it would be like to go into a bookshop and pick up a book with either of our names on it. My surname began with ‘B’. If I became a successful writer my books might go next to his! That was my motivation.

Neither would I have gone to university without Barker. Finding Weaveworld invigorated my reading at just the age when young, working-class males begin to lose interest in books entirely. There was no going backwards then though. I moved quickly onto the writers Barker name-checked: Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, HP Lovecraft, MR James, EF Benson, Bram Stoker, JRR Tolkien, Edgar Allan Poe. After Poe, anything became possible. In fifth year of school, I attempted Moby Dick. Eager to pursue this journey, and to avoid getting a job doing manual labour, I left Falkirk and went to English at Stirling University. That’s when the fun really took off. It’s still taking off.

‘Nothing ever begins,’ as the last line of Weaveworld runs, ‘And this story, having no beginning, will have no end.’