Even if you haven’t heard of Hellraiser, you’ve probably seen images of Pinhead, the main antagonist of the series. He looks like BDSM taken to its perverted extreme, with a grid of cuts carved into his head and nails driven in at each intersection. It’s distressing imagery, and the series details incredibly distressing concepts. Within the universe, there exists a method of breaking into other dimensions where beings dedicated to extremes of experience exist. Pinhead leads the Cenobites, who spend eternity exploring the furthest reaches of sensation, aka torturing the hell out of anyone who comes into contact with them with the exactitude of a surgeon and the passion of the truly perverse. Unfortunately, in my opinion the movies don’t actually do justice to this concept, opting for shlocky BS, gruesome shock value, and really no hint nor explanation of how deep this lore goes.
Enter The Hellbound Heart. I picked this book up knowing it was Barker’s source material, and it blew me away. The language is lyrical and mournful, the characters are reasonably well-developed, and the depth of the Cenobite extremity is plumbed in some truly disturbing sensations. Within the story, solving a mystical puzzle box, the Lament Configuration (or LeMarchand’s Puzzlebox) opens a rift through which the Cenobites find you and accept you into their order, by which I mean they torture you to extremity for centuries and centuries until you become one of them. The long form text version of this means Barker is able to explore the ideas in depth, and to make the worst things happen through implication. It is a shockingly different experience than the movie, and one I think blows away expectations. In that way I would compare it to Deliverance, another infamous film whose book is much deeper and more interesting than the adaptation.
Hellbound Heart is not long, the cover art is rad, and it is approachable even to people who don’t typically like horror. Max recommend.