Scary as hell: horror superstar Clive Barker's first published collection of paintings is a perverse stained-glass window into his fractured soul.

"I started out wanting to be a painter," says Clive Barker, "but my parents dissuaded me, saying, 'No one makes money as a painter.'" They urged him to go to university instead. "I studied philosophy out of sheer perversity, because no one makes money as a philosopher either."

The rest of the story is history. Barker's third career choice, writing, earned him a fortune, won him Stephen King's papal blessing as "the future of horror fiction," and made him the genre's first out superstar. Dozens of books, plays, films, comics, action figures, and related projects later, Barker says his work and life have finally come together in the pages of his first major art book, Visions of Heaven and Hell (Rizzoli, $50). "It's been a long time coming," he says.

As a painter and a writer, Barker points to influences as diverse as William Blake and Dante. "Part of my education in understanding the paradoxical heavenly and hellish visions came from Blake, who gave us a devil who was terribly smart and full of wise perversities," he says. "That's something I hope I've been able to give to the villains in my books over the years: [an understanding] of their own conditions and their own evil."

Barker also references the homoerotic work of the 19th-century French artist M.G. Darre. "They're sort of like 19th-century S/M illustrations, full of beautiful naked bodies writhing and suffering," he says gleefully, "and it's very obvious the artist had a fun time drawing them. Whenever you are offered a more complex vision of religion than the simple 'good and bad,' something sexual is allowed to emerge."

A glorious stained-glass window into the depths of his psyche, Visions of Heaven and Hell also serves as a visual memoir, Barker says. "The paintings, much more so than the writing, are statements of how I feel at a given time. Writing obligates you to get up on Monday morning and go to a place in the narrative where you left off Sunday night, and it may not be what you're feeling."

Like a diary, he adds, "I hope that this is a book of pleasures and perversities side by side. There are pictures that are there to entertain and others that were painted on some very dark days that declared exactly how I felt at that moment."

If all human beings are made up of multitudinous solitudes, the artist is ideally gifted to give them each a voice. It's a particularly fitting task for Barker, who writes sexually explicit horror, children's books, and sprawling novels that explore the very nature of faith. "This may be the first book in which the extremes have been allowed to coexist," he says. "And they coexist because each page is a different part of my mind."

Rowe is the editor of the Queer Fear short-fiction anthologies and author of Looking for Brothers, a collection of nonfiction.