His second-most well-known creation is Harry D’Amour, a supernatural detective. Barker’s most well-known creation is Pinhead, or the “Lead Cenobite”. This makes it a very underwhelming book, to say the least.īefore I get into my summary of the book’s plot, let me talk about why the hype for it was so high for me and other Barker fans. And it uses characters from old Barker works that were written extremely well. He does explore deep themes and questions, he has many interesting things going on other than sex and violence, and most of all, he’s a wonderful, wonderful writer - he puts words next to each other in a way unlike any other author I’ve seen.īut the problem with The Scarlet Gospels is that it reads like it was written by the Clive of my friends’ minds. And Clive Barker fans know that while Clive is a little bit like this, he’s much more as well. So their vision of Clive is this immature guy who just barely scratches the surface of interesting ideas and themes while putting sexuality and violence anywhere and everywhere he can, while writing characters that do silly things and don’t make much sense. The friends in question have only seen the first few Hellraiser movies and some of Clive’s two video game projects, Undying and Jericho - and they hear me talk about Clive Barker and since they haven’t read the books, the only stuff I can really talk about is how extreme and sexual his stuff is.

A lot of people who have seen a limited amount of Clive’s work probably have a similar perception of him.

Some of my friends have a vision of Clive Barker - who they think he is, what they think he’s like.

Hellraiser the scarlet gospels