I can’t imagine he was too thrilled about the later Hellraiser sequels, but what can ya do. He hates being called Pinhead, and you get the feeling that Barker does too. Or, as his proper title is, the Hell Priest. While this has the potential of being a gory re-envisioning of Dante’s Inferno, it … never quite gets there. The basic gist of the plot is that Pinhead has decided he’s going to take over Hell, and he wants Harry L’Amour to follow him around to honestly chronicle his exploits. Not ’cause of all the floppy demon-dongs, mind you, but rather because … it was boring.

To be honest, I didn’t even finish this book. Nearly every horrible demon in The Scarlet Gospels whips it out at some point or another, which … well, I get that it’s supposed to be shocking mix of horror and sexuality, but after so much repetition it just starts being unintentionally amusing.

There’s disembowelment and rape and an evil demon-baby and dismemberment and it’s all pretty much Barker just leaning over your shoulder going “oh, poor baby, you don’t need a barf bag, do you? Is my story TOO SHOCKING for your tender sensibilities?” So, uh, I guess at least he’s got an aesthetic.īarker finds more ways to be creatively sadistic over the course of the book, though one thing that the book keeps on going back to is dick. Right off the bat, in the first couple of chapters, Pinhead shows up and gruesomely tortures a bunch of occultists to death. Possibly even Splatterpunk, to get genre-quibbly. If anything can be said about The Scarlet Gospels, it’s certainly a Clive Barker novel. Should I make a Star Trek joke, or a Quantum Leap joke? It brings together Pinhead (er, the Hell Priest, from The Hellbound Heart and/or the Hellraiser movies) and another of Barker’s characters, one Harry L’Amour, a hard-drinking paranormal investigator with a trenchcoat and magical tattoos and he’s totally not a John Constantine ripoff you guys. Published in 2015, The Scarlet Gospels is a crossover of sorts. Which brings us to Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels.

Gone, though I wound up listening to that on audiobook, which kinda threw a different spin on things. I haven’t read much Barker in the past, to be honest– like, I think I may have read a random volume of the Books of Blood at some point? And I did rather enjoy Mr. Still, with Halloween approaching, I figured I’d go for one of the widely acknowledged big names in the horror genre: Clive Barker. Just haven’t had as much time to read as I might like. I shan’t bore you with the details (what is this, Livejournal?) but the silver lining is that things seem to be mostly back to normal. I imagine it’s partly ’cause I’ve had a bunch of Real Life business pop up. You guys, I think this year’s Horrortober may not quite as good as it could be. Book Review: The Scarlet Gospels, by Clive Barker

The scarlet gospels review