My general negative estimation of Clive Barker's work probably discouraged me from bothering to check out "The Hellbound Heart" until now. But given that I did read the 2015 SCARLET GOSPELS, in which Barker sought to construct a "Cenobite mythology" independent of the movie franchise, that probably motivated me to gauge the origins of the Cenobites in prose fiction. In my review I rated the "iconicity" of those characters in the movies over that of the GOSPELS novel, and that made me more a little curious about the source novel. There's also another reason for my reading-reticence, but I'll come back to that later.
To my great surprise, HEART was the best Barker prose work I've ever read. The characters are clearly delineated and confined to a small group of necessary functions in a tightly plotted tale. At base HEART is a "devil's bargain" story, in which a mortal makes a deal that he thinks will be to his benefit, but that instead ends up leaving him both burned and burning. The transgressive mortal this time is Englishman Frank Cotton, a hedonistic reprobate who travels from city to city, getting by on his charm and looks. His one relative is his brother Rory, but Frank holds Rory in contempt for his dull conservatism. On the day Rory wed his glamorous bride Julia, Frank secretly seduced Julia and then blew town.
But a life of heedless pleasures leaves Frank wanting something beyond ordinary experience. At a family house in England, Frank uses that iconic "puzzle box" to summon other-dimensional beings called "Cenobites." They're not connected to any religious entities, so there's no soul-bartering going on, but Frank thinks that he can make a deal with them anyway, one he thinks will result in his gaining access to new levels of heterosexual pleasures. Instead, the Cenobites' definition of pleasure is the imposition of endless forms of torture upon the body, until pain becomes synonymous with pleasure. Frank is taken into their dimension for the Cenobite games, and the book loosely suggests that these strange entities, with their body piercings and mutilations, may have been humans who became enthralled with self-inflicted mortification. None of the Cenobites in the story are as vivid as their movie-counterparts, by the way.
Barker's first HELLRAISER movie followed the novel's plot fairly closely, and since I minutely described the plot-action of the 1987 HELLRAISER in this review, I won't repeat myself here. The greatest alteration the movie made to the book is that Kirsty Singer, a friend of Rory's nursing unrequited feelings for him, gets changed in the 1987 movie into Kirsty Cotton. This Kirsty is the unmarried daughter of Rory (whose name is changed to Larry), who resents her stepmother without knowing precisely why. In both book and movie, Kirsty is responsible for consigning Frank back to "Hell" after Frank has murdered his brother. So, in the book Kirsty's no relation to either Rory or Frank. Yet HEART includes a strange scene in which Frank's trying to masquerade as Rory to deceive Kirsty. To lure the young woman, Frank utters a come-on that Barker himself calls "incestuous:" saying "Come to Daddy" to Kirsty Singer. But if Kirsty's not related to either man, how can the come-on seem "incestuous" to anyone, least of all Kirsty? Despite the various actions of Kirsty, Frank and Julia, Barker throws his narrative spotlight upon the mysterious Cenobites, though they're much more nebulous in prose than in cinema. One Cenobite displays the "pinhead" look and gets more lines than the others, so obviously in crafting the movie Barker built up that character to be more of an authority over the others, so as to take advantage of the talents of actor David Bradley. The movie still edges out the novel in terms of iconicity, but the mythicity of the two is about equal. Lastly, the other reason I was reluctant to read HEART was that I wondered if Barker, who has been public as a gay author for many years now, might not have constructed Frank's "bad bargain with the Devil" as a punishment for his heterosexual excesses. I've seen no shortage of modern narratives willing to punish fictional characters for the sin of being "heteronormative." But while I don't dismiss the possibility that Barker might have had some sort of punitive notion in mind, at least subconsciously, he succeeded in creating myth-figures that went beyond the boundaries of ideology. That the Cenobites deserve that status is suggested by the fact that other authors could excel in depicting the infernal pain-freaks in terms Barker would not have attempted, not least the HELLRAISER movie sequel. Ironically, though SCARLET GOSPELS wanted to stand apart from those other works, Barker's character of "The Hell Priest" owes a lot more to the movie's Pinhead than to the vague figure from HEART.
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