THE WORD

When Clive Barker, the 38-year-old British director of “Hellraiser,” came to Los Angeles, he moved straight into a Beverly Hills home once owned, but never haunted, by Ronald Coleman. Not exactly the Overlook, but horror writers seem to find inspiration in the darnedest places:

* Robert (“Psycho”) Bloch has a ranch house in the Hollywood Hills, several miles from the Bates place at Universal. “Coming, Mother.”

* S. P. Somtow (“Moon Dance”) Sucharitkul owns a modest home in Sunland. He refuses to hire a gardener, preferring “an ambience of physical and moral desolation.”

* Splatterpunk David (“Lost Angels”) Schow lives in a tsatske- filled apartment in Hollywood, smack in the heart of the street scene he likes to write about.

* John Skipp and Craig Spector, editors of “The Book of the Dead,” are trading their home in a small Pennsylvania town for one in Pasadena. Small-town living has taught them that “the pathology of modern American life is everywhere.”