The Scarlet Gospels

”Demons to some, angels to others” isn't true anymore, the Priest (“Pinhead”) is just straight up looking to take over the world and hell itself. The random mentions and descriptions of various creatures' genitals just felt out of place and in most cases entirely irrelevant to the scene. Barker's worldbuilding is still top notch, thankfully, and the main characters are well written and fleshed out (pun intended). I guess I just expected more ambiguity regarding the Priest

The first third or so of The Scarlet Gospels was highly focused and left me anticipating what was to come.

The rest was lightweight for a Clive Barker horror novel, especially when he has all these iconic characters (Harry D'Amour, Pinhead, Lucifer) to knock together.

I miss the older, more intense Barker.

Like the first, this book cannot compete in any sense with the movies, but it has a great and elaborated plot, for the genre. It does not rely only on fear, it actually had a plot the author wanted to tell, adding some details of hell and the the cenobite's mythology along the way

It felt like a drag during many parts, the human's roles were pretty meaningless, the final battle was epic.

A long time ago, Clive Barker wrote and directed (from his own novella The Hellhound Heart), the classic horror movie Hellraiser, a dark tale of deceit, sexual jealousy and betrayal that introduced us to the Cenobites – otherworldly creatures that relish pain, torment and despair. Their leader, Pinhead, became a horror icon but like Freddy and Jason before him, his original impact has been leached away by a parade of increasingly shoddy sequels. This book is Barker's attempt to reclaim Pinhead, but there's more riding on it. Much like Pinhead himself, after a spectacular start with the Books of Blood and the fantasy epic Weaveworld, both of which marked him out as a writer of prodigious talent and imagination, Barker's work has tailed off into a long nose dive of mediocrity. These Gospels have been promised for years, and there were high hopes attached to them, especially with the news that Pinhead's foil would be another of Barker's long running characters, the occult detective Harry D'Amour. Supposedly, the original manuscript ran to around a thousand pages, before being cut down to this 350 page book. Which begs the question: considering what has been left in, how bad were the two thirds that have been cut? This isn't going to be a glowing review, I'm afraid.

The book starts strongly, with an excellent scene of a magician murdered by Pinhead being resurrected by colleagues, only for them all to be slaughtered anew by the Cenobite. It's a dramatic and cinematic episode with a real sense of building menace. It's all downhill from there, though. D'Amour's sections read like a parody of a hardboiled PI novel, while Pinhead has none of the melancholic grandeur we saw in Hellraiser. The paper thin story is to do with Pinhead attempting to wrest the rule of Hell to himself, while D'Amour does little but watch things happen around him. Ultimately, it's just all so wearyingly adolescent. The first two thirds of the book are a parade of erections and gore, leavened with supposedly tough guy dialogue that just embarrasses. While things pick up a bit when we finally start exploring Hell, it's still no more transgressive or imaginative than a Vertigo comic from twenty five years ago. The story is rushed, the characters are banal, their dialogue worse, and it's just not very good. Pinhead deserved a better send off than this