The Scarlet Gospels

I spent the past few weeks curiously awaiting Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels. I was a big Hellraiser fan some years ago and got into Barker's older horror, and it came to influence how I write. He mixes fantastic imagery, violence, and gorgeous turns of phrase in ways that make me feel transported into unique worlds that work very differently from our own.

I liked the visceral violence of Hellraiser, and I liked the way the demons' sadomasochism was laid right out there for the viewer of the movie or the reader of the novella it was based on (The Hellbound Heart, which I also recommend.) But more than that, I liked the way the original novella didn't just tell us "well, demonic tempters would be perverted, right?" It gave us demons whose idea of pleasure differed from our own. They were there to provide the blood and the guts and the scares, yes. But they also did some very clever things.

They tempted humans with the promise of unfathomable pleasures -- so the first thing they did, in the novella, was heighten a victim's senses so they can see every crack in their walls, smell every lingering scent in the air, feel every speck of dust or dead skin on their bodies. Then they begin their mix of pleasure and pain. 

That fascinated me, and drew me in to Barker's writing and to dark fantasy as a whole. I still love the way his early work writes visceral explicit gore as if it's beautiful and elegant, and that has shaped how I write. So when I found out he was writing a new novel about the monster everyone has grown to know from Hellraiser (usually called Pinhead, though this book makes too-abundantly clear he hates it and would rather be called "the Hell Priest"), I was -- mm.

Not quite excited. People change a lot over many decades. But intrigued.

I liked the book. I thought it was good, and recommended it to friends, who seemed intrigued by an officially posted excerpt I showed them. I didn't love it, but I enjoyed it.

The fantastical style I'd fallen in love with shone through most toward the end. The characters are in Hell -- the Hell Priest and his minion having kidnapped a friend of the protagonist, the protagonist and a motley crew of his friends having rushed after them because Oh No You Don't. There's a problem in Hell, though: Lucifer is missing.

What actually happened to the Morning Star is the most fascinating thing in the book, and I'd say really the place where Barker lets himself shine. How would an angel, most beloved of his Father and then sent away for a long-ago act of rebellion, really feel about his life? What would he do with his endless hours of exile? How would he feel about the subjects who worship him in much the same way as the angels still above worship their Lord? When Barker's answering that, he's at his best, making things weird and surreal and yet showing the sense they make. He's created a new character (or at least, one I never saw) and let himself run with the idea, and his Lucifer is a wonderful take on a few bits of loose mythology that make what's probably the richest character in the book. (Sorry, Pinhead. Sorry, Harry D'Amour.)

The rest of the time, unfortunately, I think he's a bit hamstrung by his characters. Pinhead and Harry are characters he invented a very long time ago, and Pinhead especially feels... stuck between the past of the character everyone knows and the future that Barker wants to make. He's desperate from the beginning to break free of the narrow box (heh, heh) that Hell has put him in, experimenting with human magic in an attempt to grow more powerful. He uses this forbidden magic (forbidden, I guess, because us filthy humans came up with it) to slaughter his fellow Cenobites in one fell swoop with a fascinating "working" -- a Writ of Execution delivered to Hell's monastery by animated origami cranes.

But if anything, he succeeds too well in breaking free from what he was. In the original stories, the fascinating thing about the Cenobites was the juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, the way they tempted people with heightened sensation and only once the gate to Hell opened showed them what "heightened sensation" really meant. In this book, he carries his usual implements of torture on his belt and uses his usual hooked chains, and we're Told But Unfortunately Not Shown many times how skilled he is at slow agonies. But most of the time he's using his newfound magic, and the few times he does stop to deliver a beating, usually to Norma, the old, blind woman he's kidnapped (a powerful medium with a wonderfully ascerbic wit, so not just a victim by a long shot), he does it with fists and feet, or commits a rape we don't see. (Which I'm grateful for, but which also seems odd from someone famous even in Hell as a sex demon.) It feels so far distant from what he once was that the evolution is hard to see.

It might just be that I miss the version of him in my head, but I don't think so. I think just a dash more connecting Pinhead Then to Pinhead Now would sell the long evolution in him over countless human lifetimes.

I think that's the biggest problem with the book. I read some bits of interviews that hinted that the original draft was more than a thousand pages -- and the volume in my hand (okay, okay, my iPad) was 360something. It felt like huge chunks had been gouged out of it, and a lot of those chunks had been character development it wouldn't have bored me at all to see.

The protagonists were similar. I felt I had a good sense of Harry, the hero, and the way dealings with the supernatural had shaped his life from the time he was young. His gang of friends/Harrowers of Hell (another odd nickname; they go to Hell, but they don't pardon anyone or sanctify them) are all similar in their connections to the supernatural. One tattoos magical wards on most of the others' bodies. One follows prescient dreams. One finds herself frequently possessed by ghosts. Norma is blind to the everyday world but has seen ghosts all her life.

Each of those things is unique, and could offer an interesting way for the character's experience of similar "stuff" (the supernatural) to vary from the others'. But we get so little detail that they start to feel like copies of one another. These three have tattoos. These three are "a magnet for the supernatural." But only Harry and Norma were drawn in much detail, which made the story suffer.

Similarly, I loved that three of the Harrowers were gay: two, a couple that convincingly (and adorably, amid all the blood and guts and despair and general apocalyptic everything) fall for one another as the tale progresses, and one a big strong butch woman who I found a refreshing break from Fainting Horror Girl. But the two lovebirds often sounded like one another to me even though they were supposed to be different. 

And the butch, who I was elated to see because characters like her are so darned rare in anything at all, was perhaps the most sketchily drawn character of the whole book. Sometimes, she seemed like the group's muscle. Sometimes she seemed far too easily terrified to have ventured into Hell voluntarily. (This could have been done well -- "she's tough outside because she's been used as a vessel so often by malevolent ghosts" -- but it wasn't clear enough, if it was the intent.)

(I also feel obligated, since I'm talking about LGBT characters right now, to mention that there's a brief appearance by a trans woman, who is quickly revealed to have villainous intent. I was glad to see her, but I felt like the narrative didn't treat her particularly well. The heroes mock her identity when they find out she's betrayed them, which is realistic in that... actual people being sold out to demons would probably be mean in any way they could. But since she was the only trans character, it made me wince.)

And that nagging bit of disappointment sums up my reaction to this book: It seemed unfinished.

Reading Barker's older work, I felt almost like Barker was compelled to share the horrifying and brutal, yet mystical and beautiful, worlds his imagination dragged him to. Reading this, I felt like he was driven by a different, but still intense need: to draw things to a close, to share how age and time had changed him and the people in his head.

Which didn't give the reader quite enough time to learn the names and histories and shapes of all these people, much less their particular links to the dream world their lives are all so closely woven with.

So I recommend the book. I like it, as the closing chapter it's meant to be. Barker was very clear that Pinhead Dies In The End, and this book makes that feel right, not cheap.

But I want to know so much more about so many of the characters, and so many of the places. Including how Pinhead got where he ended up.