I remember, as a child, seeing the character of Pinhead on the cover of some magazine devoted to horror books and movies. Intrigued, I flipped through the pages of the magazine, only to be repulsed by some of the pictures they were showing inside. Much later, I found out that Pinhead is a character in the famous Hellraiser movies, and soon thereafter I discovered that Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart was the source for that series. As an older reader, I wasn't as turned off by the grotesqueries as I was as a boy, but Barker's novella is still not fit for weaker stomachs.

The Hellbound Heart is a very different kind of horror from that of, say, Stephen King. Barker's prose evokes a much more dream-like atmosphere, and a lush sensuality pervades the story's sense of dread. The book reads like rotting apples smell (and it often produces the same visceral reaction). In a way, Barker reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft, without the archaic English. For instance, "Now the third spoke. Its features were so heavily scarified--the wounds nurtured until they ballooned--that its eyes were invisible and its words corrupted by the disfigurement of its mouth." The careful, almost poetic word choice (scarified, nurtured, corrupted, disfigurement) is a feature of almost every passage in the book. As a result of Barker's prose and descriptive powers, I was much more afraid of Barker's creations than I was of, say, Pennywise in King's IT. I think the best way to make the comparison is this: King is a master of suspense, but Barker is a true master of horror.

The story here is fine as well, though, to be honest, the plot isn't the most compelling thing I've ever read, nor are the characters particularly interesting. The real reason I kept on reading was that I was entranced by the atmosphere and, also, by the grotesque Cenobites. I'm not sure if I could read Barker's longer works of horror--the descriptions in his book were starting to make me feel sick by the end--but this shorter novel was just enough to be memorable. I'll never listen to bells the same way again.

Copyright © 2001 Steven Wu