User blog comment:CrashingCymbal/Who Is Your Favourite Author?/@comment-6862307-20140309120110

That's a hard pick. I'm going to have to put it up to a tie. And the winners are: Neil Gaiman & Clive Barker.

Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy always enraptures me as does his fluid and vibrant style of writing. He does often build off of old, established ideas, but think of him like Tim Burton in reimagining mode but if he could actually reimagine old concepts and ideas without taking a huge shit on them (I will say, I did like Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow," but otherwise when it comes to him re-imagining things, he sucks.  Hard.)  while still having enough of an imagination to stand out. "American Gods" and his graphic novel series "The Sandman" are two of my most beloved things in this known universe.

Then there is Clive Barker, who is a sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, author - and that's precisely what makes him fucking brilliant. His horror lies in my favourite sub-genre of horror, "Body Horror" - and he takes body horror to its maximum by creating horror out of sexuality. He blends disease and debauched and demoralized sex so perfectly in my eyes, and next to "American Gods," his anthology series "The Books of Blood" stand as my favourite books of all time - but if I had to really split hairs, "The Books of Blood" would win. I think that the stories contained within "The Books of Blood" should be required reading for anyone with any interest in horror - especially when writing it. "The Books of Blood" also stands in my eyes as the greatest anthology ever written as well if not solely for the fact that the frame story is, in itself, an amazingly imaginative and disturbing story. Usually frameworks are thin ways to pose narrative, but Barker could have took the frame story - the prologue being titled "The Book of Blood" and the epilogue "On Jerusalem Street" - and written it as a solitary short story without all the others and it would have been just as delicious.