The Scarlet Gospels Review

To say that I am a fan of Hellraiser is like saying that the ocean is slightly wet. As you might have gathered both from my own creative works, and the other posts on this blog, I'm a big fan of body horror, and Hellraiser does body horror like very few others. I devoured the Hellbound Heart (the Novella by Barker that started it all), and the first two Hellraiser movies, that had an amazing mythos, fantastic acting, amazing practical effects, and a surreal, vivid, and above all, visceral vision of Hell that made me want more.

Unfortunately, that's what we got. Hellraiser, more than any other slasher film, has had the most stupidly unrelated sequels to date. Whereas even Jason X and New Nightmare, while radically changing the premise and tone of their predecessors, at least had the decency to be ABOUT Freddy and Jason, the Hellraiser sequels actually mostly started out as independent horror movies, that got adapted into the Hellraiser 'franchise', presumably so Doug Bradley could reassure the world that he was still alive. It's kind of obvious why Clive Barker felt the need to take control of the character again.

As for Mr. Barker, I've read some of his fiction, and most of it has been really good. As I mentioned earlier, I loved Hellbound Heart, and he's one of those rare writers that can take even a rather silly premise like Mr. B. Gone (an autobiography of a demon in a weirdly mundane vision of Hell) and make it unsettling. I'm currently reading 'The Great and Secret Show,' which relates a bit to this book, being part of the 'Barker magician universe' with Harry D'Amour of Lord of Illusions fame. I'm less of a fan of his young adult fantasy stuff (which he seems to like way more than his more visceral horror works), but that's not to say they're bad, just that they're not my thing. So imagine my excitement when I heard that Mr. Barker was finally going to do his long awaited sequel to Hellbound Heart, with what he declared will be the 'final Pinhead story', The Scarlet Gospels.

Jesus wept indeed.

Alright, so to start off, the hype for this book was legendary, even among the horror community. Barker promised quite a few things that he didn't really follow through on, much to the detriment of what could have been an amazing narrative. This book, the long awaited death of Pinhead (and his showdown with Barker's re-occurring protagonist Harry D'Amour) was supposed to be so final that no Hollywood director would dare resurrect him. It was supposed to give Pinhead's actual hellish moniker, to replace the one that Barker felt didn't give the character enough gravitas (which I actually agree with). It was supposed to feature Pinhead meeting an adolescent Harry D'Amour. Exactly none of that happens in the book. This was apparently supposed to be a doorstooper, a thousand-plus pages that got reduced to barely over 400 in the final product, which tells me that either the original manuscript was even more of a mess than this one, or that Barker needs to fire his editor.

So, the book actually starts out really good, showing Pinhead slaughtering the last of the Earth's magicians and stealing their shit. Magic is later on shown to be a really powerful force, powerful enough that Pinhead uses it to one up, like, everyone he meets, so how the fuck he did this, I have no idea, but it's neat, visceral and gruesome. He spares one guy to become his pseudo-Cenobite flunky, and shows the audience that he absolutely hates his nickname. The problem is, the book gives him no better moniker than the Hell Priest, or the Cenobite. Confusingly, this is neither the breathy, feminine Pinhead from Hellbound Heart nor Elliot Spencer of the movie-verse, because he's implied to be much, much older, making this just another inconsistency. Oh right, before we go on, this is in no way related to Hellbound Heart, except for a brief cameo of some of the movie Cenobites, and the realm they come from is explicitly called Hell (I know it is in the movie, but I think the original novella was more ambiguous. This I will concede even I couldn't remember. It's been awhile since I read it.)

It's also like....a billion times less cool than Hellraiser 2's Labyrinth.

So Harry D'Amour's story starts out when he's visiting his friend Norma Paine (really), a blind lady who can speak to ghosts. He gets sent on a quest involving a familiar puzzle box and gets wrapped up in Pinhead's whacky hijinks. At some point, Pinhead picks Harry to write his Scarlet Gospels and kidnaps Norma to make him chase them into Hell.

I need to stop at this point and explain Hell for the viewers at home. Gone are the extradimensional, viscera strewn halls of the Labyrinth, so beautifully shown in Hellraiser 2. Gone is the 'eternal tempest of black birds and flapping wings' from Hellbound Heart. Hell, here referred to as Pyratha, is just kind of.....a city. Apparently Lucifer himself built it to upstage Rome (yeah, Lucifer's in this book. That's another giant bag of dicks we'll get to in a minute) and it's really.....like kinda boring. I think the implication is supposed to be that this is set in Mr. B. Gone's Hell, with the Cenobite monastery being just a small and particularly horrible part of an otherwise pretty mundane (if spoooooky) plane of existence. Oh right, and they're no longer 'angels to some, demons to others', the Cenobites are just an order of torturers and that's that.

It's hard to describe just how fucking lame that is. The entire draw of the Hellraiser series is, shock of shocks, the fear of being dragged to Hell. Here, Hell is literally just a place. Harry and his group of superfriends (named the Harrowers for literally no reason) just kinda walk into the place. There's a slum district of the Damned, where, in typical Barker fashion, he confirms they fornicate occasionally, just in case you were curious. There's a tribe of inbred fallen angels (really) which sounds like it could be really cool, but they just end up being weirdos with funny voices. There are some really nice bits, I'll concede, like a mist that basically turns anyone caught in it into the Thing, but these sections are few and far between. Hell even has fucking POLICE OFFICERS, in purple uniforms, no less, guiding the traffic.

Explorers in the realms of pain and pleasure indeed.

So.....remember these guys? The Cenobites? Like, they were pretty cool right? Like, cool enough that the entire FUCKING FRANCHISE was based around them? Well, spoiler alert, because Pinhead kills them all with his L33T H4XXOR magic powers. Apparently no one in Hell has any kind of defense or study of magic, because Pinhead gets fired over learning it, and retaliates by making some origami swans (which he had totally prepared from earlier) and sending them to kill all the Cenobites. I could not make this up if I tried. Barker was even nice enough to have cameos of the Female Cenobite and Butterball from the movies, just to confirm 'yep, they're dead, all right.' He wusses out at the end, of course, by saying that a few of them were out partying or some shit, so there's a few left.

At this point, I have to think that Barker really hates Hellraiser or something, and is just trying to piss off the fans. If he really thinks this stupidity is going to stop people from making more Hellraiser movies, then good God, he's more delusional than I thought. Completely gone is the Barker that redefined the horror genre, that tries to create horror both philosophical and visceral, this is an angry child throwing a tantrum and taking his dollies home with him. I have nothing more to say on this other than that it's weak, childish, and I expected WAY better.

I should probably talk a bit about D'Amour and his team right? So we have Harry, Caz, his magical tattoo artist who will not stop reminding us that he likes men, Lana, the required loudmouth Tsundere to balance out the sausage-fest and Dale, a flamboyant, gay psychic dude who speaks entirely in double-entendre and dick jokes. Really. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I despise homophobia, and I'm a big supporter of LGBTQ issues. Still, these guys traipse through HELL, and cannot stop flirting with each other for five, fucking seconds. I'd go on if they contributed more to the plot, but they don't. They just follow in Pinhead's wake, swearing a lot, flirting with each other and hoping Norma is ok.

Speaking of Pinhead, he probably gets the biggest shaft out of everyone here, to the point that I'd say Barker completely derailed his character. In every incarnation, Pinhead has been a figure of dignity, and in a weird way, honor, sticking to his rules and the rules of his order, something even Barker wanted to emphasize with his hate of the Pinhead nickname. So how does the Hell Priest act here? Well, he kills his entire order, for pretty much no reason, and reveals he's been planning this for a while. He literally punches and kicks the shit out of an old lady. Later on, he decides to rape her, for fuck's sake. I'm not saying these actions are too evil for him, because I don't think they are (like torturing someone for eternity is pretty much the worst thing you can do), but they're just so....crass. For a writer who wanted to restore his character's dignity, you pretty much did the exact opposite. It's actually genuinely easier to think of Pinhead as some other Cenobite with a similar body mod than the character he's supposed to be. Pinhead here is crude, breaks his word all over the place, and just plain silly. Oh, and his master plan, by the way? He wants to find Lucifer, Big L himself, who's been missing from Hell.

This picture says more than I ever could. Interestingly, it's also from a comic co-written by Barker.

So they cross a lake with a big demon centipede in it (I don't know) and find Lucifer's castle. Lucifer is at the bottom, and Harry finally catches up just as Pinhead finds out that Lucifer committed suicide millenia ago because he's an angsty bitch who is super hung up over his breakup with God. Pinhead is understandably a bit miffed and nicks Lucifer's armor and declares himself the new devil. All the other demons in Hell say 'lol no,' and he basically kills them all. Then Lucifer wakes up and he and Pinhead have a lightsaber fight.

I'm dead serious. Just re-read that sentence. Let it sink in nicely.

So Lucifer kicks Pinhead's ass, and decides he's done with this shit, and hits Hell's 'self-destruct' button, and Hell collapses. Harry and the idiot brigade find a convenient portal out. Pinhead doesn't and gets squished by a big rock. All that buildup for the legendary death of Pinhead, and that's the send-off he gets. Bra-fucking-vo, Barker. Bra-fucking-vo.

Harry and friends hijack some evangelical preacher's car (after we are assured that yes, he is a giant homophobe, so they leave him and his buddy in the middle of the goddamn desert). Harry is blinded, but it's cool, he can see ghosts now for whatever reason, and Lucifer decides to live a life away from Hell, picks up some chick on the road and nails her, and learns he likes pizza.

Wow, this all seems strangely familiar somehow, but I can't imagine why.

And that's the end. The frustrating thing is, this book is actually really well written, as you'd expect from a legend like Clive Barker. He's not a bad writer, and even when he comes up with plots as paper-thin as this, he still makes you want to keep reading. I really hope that this book was originally as enormous and ambitious as he says it was, and the poorly-plotted, miserable dreck I bought with the same title is an editing hack job. I want to believe that Barker has any kind of respect for his horror fiction, but this really feels like him spitting in the eye of people who like his horror works and going 'nyah, nyah, go buy my fantasy books, idiots.' I probably wouldn't be so mad if it wasn't Hellraiser, one of my absolute favorite horror movies he's fucking up. Say what you will about the sequels, and trust me, I have plenty to say, but man, not one of them just raped the franchise this badly. Pinhead, or what passes for him in this book, along with all of Barker's boring, urbanized Hell perishes here alongside his most enduring and imaginative horror icon, with not a bang, not even a whisper, just a bored sigh. I can only hope that he re-writes and re-releases it sometime in the future, or sticks to writing fantasy from now on.

- Kephn