“All is death, woman. All is pain. Love breeds loss. Isolation breeds resentment. No matter which way we turn, we are beaten. Our only true inheritance is death. And our only legacy, dust.” – Hell Priest (Pinhead)
There are a few things about the horror genre that I really can’t stand. Chopped-up bodies and rivers of blood don’t bother me quite so much as having to watch characters reacting to their own chopping up and blood-letting (The Walking Dead, I’m looking at you here.) So it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for me to enjoy most of Clive Barker’s books. But I do enjoy them. A lot. The Hellbound Heart, The Books of Blood, that Hellraiser comic book anthology, I just keep coming back again and again to the most gruesome of Barker’s writing, with all the scenes of torture and dismemberment and towering evil figures from Hell doing unspeakable things. Which is a pretty good description for a lot of what happens in Barker’s latest book.
Barker first started talking about his plans for The Scarlet Gospels back in 1998, and seventeen years later we have the epic, final story of the Hell Priest – also called Pinhead, but not to his face – and the last case of detective Harry D’Amour, and it’s just as splashy and horrifying as I thought it would be. The story ended up being a very simplified adventure tale, and the characters don’t really accomplish much other than wander haplessly into danger and avoid getting killed by sheer accident. But that’s okay; Barker’s works are less important to me for their substance than they are for their style.
There have been quite a few incarnations of the Lead Cenobite in all the different movies and comic book series. For those of you hoping for a story about a tortured but ultimately sensitive and intelligent soul always at least a little bit aware of his lost humanity…well you can keep hoping because you’re not getting it here. Pinhead is a nasty piece of work. And he doesn’t just stick with lofty things like killing the reigning Order of Hell; some of what he does is worthy of the lowest human thug on Earth. And everything he does is tied into his ultimate ambition…
…which isn’t entirely clear. It doesn’t start out with becoming a new god of Hell. Spiritual re-awakening, maybe? He changes his goal pretty quickly when he finds out he’s been thwarted, but he’s had a very specific plan in place for a long time, so it’s odd that not even he seems to know exactly what he hoped to get out of this in the first place.
Harry and the Harrowers (Yes, that’s what they’re actually called. I don’t like that name, and you can’t make me.) have much more of a concrete goal here: rescue their friend and get safely back to Earth. It’s just that their goal is really short on a plan. Sure, it’s admirable and brave of them to risk their lives to save someone they care about, but this is Hell that they’re marching into. They’re going up against an army of demons and a supernatural mind-controlling villain who can tear people apart with levitating chains, and their protection involves a collection of knives for crying out loud. The entire group is in over their heads for the entire book, and most of the time they’re surviving through luck and a few conveniently timed prophetic visions.
So the story isn’t exactly tightly written, the human characters mostly exist to be an audience for whatever the citizens of Hell do to each other, and with that odd extended epilogue the pacing is just weird. What’s the draw for this novel, then?
The details. The splashy, Gothic, crass, intricate, and sometimes almost elegantly gory details.
Five magicians die in the first few chapters, and the Hell Priest kills four of them in uniquely creative ways (one dies of fear). Harry D’Amour’s investigations take him to a deserted New York sex club and a businessman’s secret sex getaway, and the author doesn’t skimp on the gossipy details about either of them. D’Amour’s early career as a policeman was cut short by a demon who really really enjoyed killing people, and Harry deals with his lifelong problem of attracting demons by having his entire body tattooed with protective sigils by an artist who knows exactly how to make the ink actually do something. Barker also hints at a much larger world of magicians and very dark magic whenever he has the characters scan through a collection of forbidden books and magical ingredients and…tools.
My favorite details would have to be all of the descriptions of the Rome-inspired city in Hell, with its impossibly huge buildings, and structures that defy physics (like the two full-sized pyramids balanced on the point of a third), and the stone statues that look like monuments to a blurry image in a photograph.
“Ah, fuck this!” he said, jumping off the stage and walking straight at the assault. “My tattoos are telling me you’re a threat. But I’m not remotely intimidated by whoever you are, so if you go on throwing shit at me I will spit out a syllogistic that’ll make you wish you’d never died. I promise you.”
Even the style of the writing is a mixture of elegant and earthy, with everything described in purple prose filled with words like “syllogistic” and “glossolalia”, and in between that the dialog is clipped and to the point, mostly profanity. There’s a brief flashback to D’Amour’s first meeting with a powerful psychic when she tries to tell Harry’s psychiatrist that the man’s dead brother is currently in the room. What she says to convince him and the doctor’s reaction, like, of course that’s what he’s doing, was so unexpectedly perfect that I had to laugh.
As I’ve said before in my review of The Books of Blood, there’s a reason why so many of Clive Barker’s books and stories have been made into movies; his writing is almost unbelievably visual. And after reading Pinhead’s final scene in Hell, I not only want to see this book made into its own movie, I need to see it. I think special effects have come far enough along that someone could pull this off. And in case you’re wondering where Barker could go to next now that he’s written the final Pinhead story, the book brings in a new character who’s story he’s only just started to tell.