A veritable feast of twenty-one Cenobite tales is served up for your pleasure and pain in the anthology of horror short stories, Hellbound Hearts, based on Clive Barker’s novel The Hellbound Heart and his Hellraiser series of movies. Reading them will satisfy your most twisted desires, your need to be sated, by the latest and the best stories about the infamous Cenobite – Pinhead (named that for obvious reasons) - and his fellow associates in the sadistic Order of the Gash. The pain will rise from the creeping realization as you progress through the book that you’re also getting closer to the book’s finish, and a return to the mundane, everyday world of reality – ugh!
Like most anthologies, there are some tales that succeed better than others, and there are some I liked better than the others for various reasons, ranging from how poetic the language was to the tale’s body count. I won’t give a detailed analysis of each story here, but I’ll give first my overall impression of the collection as a whole, and then point out a few highlights in the anthology.
The twenty-one short stories are written by some of the most well-known fantasy and horror authors of today. For instance, there’s the graphic work “Wordsworth,” from the bestselling author Neil Gaiman and the artist Dave McKean. Kelley Armstrong contributes a little jewel called “The Collector.” There’s an ultrashort, page-and-a-half offering by the great Richard Christian Matheson, “Bulimia.” Simon Clark’s short story, “Our Lord of Quarters,” is not the bloodiest nor goriest of the bunch, but I was taken by his poetic and descriptive language and brilliant storytelling. Also, “Mechanisms,” by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola was one of my favorites, almost as much for the black-and-white woodblock cut pictures of portions of mechanical devices that accompany the tale as for the story itself.
Now, I’ll quit speaking in generalities and get a bit more specific. The short stories can be roughly divided into distinct categories: those in which no one dies, but death is imminent because the Cenobites are near enough to get their hooks in their intended victims and just haven’t done so yet; those in which only one person, the solver of the Lemarchand box puzzle usually, os slaughtered by the Cenobites; and those stories in which multiple people bite the dust. The tales that fall into the second two categories are my favorites in this collection, for the most part (not counting suspenseful mini-masterpieces of the macabre like “Mechanisms” and “Our Lord of Quarters”).
“Mechanisms,” is about wealthy and studious Colin Radford, who is attending Oxford University. His father, Sir Egdar, disappears and is believed by some to be dead, though a search is being conducted around the countryside. Colin hears mysterious sounds late at night that seem to be coming from the basement, where he’s been told his father had built a strange contraption that obsessed him up until the time of his disappearance. Eventually, Colin decides to go into the basement to investigate for himself, and maybe to get clues into his father’s whereabouts. He sees pipes that enter into the walls but seem to lead nowhere, and are connected to a machine that appears as if it can be powered by sitting in it and pedaling. He hears what sounds like the voice of his dead mother, Deidre, whom his father has been trying to contact and get reunited with through the use of the machine. Of course, he tries it out, also, and….
It is a pretty suspenseful and cool story, and the pictures that go with it really added to my enjoyment. It was as if I was, along with Colin, seeing portions of the infernal machine his father had created to contact his dead wife.
“Our Lord of Quarters” is a darkly atmospheric short story set in Constantinople, in 1401. The Lord of Quarters is not a Cenobite, but the description of him is similar to what one might imagine a Cenobite might look like, and a rusty metal chain that ends in a barbed hook runs from a chest to his heart. A Slave, or Clown, who is a court jester type of character and wants to try to save the kingdom from the Demon’s influence, ponders on the visage of the Lord of Quarters:
Surely he must be dead. Such a ruinous body could not possibly be alive. In the lamplight, the Slave feasted on the minutiae of its blasphemous anatomy. Perhaps three-quarters of the Demon’s body consisted of dried flesh that adhered like dry mud to a stick. Part of the rib cage lay exposed. Beneath it could be glimpsed a fist-sized brown lump that was the heart. Along one forearm, which rested on its lap, the bone had been entirely denuded of muscle. Yet that limb terminated in a perfectly formed hand.
While I really liked reading both “Mechanisms,” and “The Lord of Quarters,” the stars of the anthology are the Cenobites. They are the main reason why fans of the Hellraiser series and of Clive Barker’s writing would likely be interested in buying this anthology and including it in their collections of horror novels. Of the directly Cenobite-driven stories, which make up the bulk of the anthology, I’ll talk about three short stories I believe stand out above the rest. These are “Wordsworth” by Neil Gaiman, “Demon’s Design” by Nicholas Vince, and “Santos del Infierno” by Jeffrey J. Mariotte.
“Wordsworth” is the story of a dull, drab man who is obsessed with crossword puzzles. One day, a man with no face who is riding in a second class carriage with Wordsworth gives him a very unusual crossword puzzle to solve. This puzzle is based on things, events, and people in Wordsworth’s own pathetic life, and to solve each of its clues, he becomes involved directly in it. He remembers drowning his pet rabbit Flopsy when he was seven years old. He no longer eats. His actions become “solely defined by the puzzle,” as a screenplay by Gaiman of the graphic story, included at the end of this anthology, puts it. I actually didn’t like the illustrations for the graphic story all that much; but, the story itself, combined with the screenplay version of it at the back of the book, made me think it’s a pretty good story. If it’s fleshed out a bit, it could probably be turned into a cool movie.
“Demon’s Design” is about a group of people who are connected to each other by their past. They used to be goths, and they are reuniting at the graveyard where their troubles began years ago, the cemetary where Lemarchand’s crpyt is located. They partied and screwed each other in the past, getting high, and decided to investigate the crypt. One of their group, Justin, pressed on thirteen stones, and solved a puzzle granting them access to the inside of the crypt. High and drunk, they opened the coffins and danced with the corpses they removed – and, they heard the tolling of a bell, a signal which often in the movies and stories about Cenobites indicates they are soon to follow. The reason the group has gone back is that they struck a deal with the Cenobites. The Cenobites, as a sacrifice and a way to allow the others to leave the crypt alive, took one of the group away with them to be eternally tortured. However, they said that if the others left, they had to agree to return after a certain amount of years passed, when another of their members would be selected as a sacrifice. I liked this story because of the homage to Lemarchand, the deal the ex-goths strike up with the Cenobites, and the narrator’s slow realization that, no matter what they do, they’re all doomed.
“Santos del Infierno” is one I liked because it is one of the stories in the collection in which the Cenobites are contacted without the use of a Lemarchand Configuration. The method of contacting them in this short story is by gathering together seven figures of santos, or carved saints, but santos of a sacreligious and twisted nature. Ron Marks’s life, he discovers to his dismay, is inexorably connected to that of the other main character of this story, Leonardo (Lenny) Montoya. Lenny is the man who drove the truck that crashed into the car Ron’s wife, Linda, and daughter, Hayley, had been in, killing them. Ron collected a million dollars as he was the sole beneficiary of her insurance policy. Lenny arrives at Ron’s doorstep about a year later, supposedly to apologize. Ron has spent most of the intervening time getting and staying drunk, staying at home, trying to shut out the world because he wants to drive away the memories of what happened as much as possible. He barely is able to feed himself, and doesn’t bother cleaning the house or leaving it, unless he runs out of alcohol. Lenny ends up crashing at Ron’s house, and he tells Ron about a way they both can experience happiness and pleasure beyond their imaginations – but, it involves gathering together seven of the hideous, perverse and sexually suggestive santos from different people. The santos would somehow join together, and summon the Cenobites. Lenny either doesn’t know or just wants to keep the truth away from Ron, that the Cenobites don’t distinguish between intense pleasure and intense pain, and that the type of pleasure they claim they provide is really an eternity of being tortured.
Hellbound Hearts has more than its share of hits in a well-rounded anthology of short stories about Cenobites. It’s a credit to Clive Barker that the characters he envisaged years ago still hold our interest and imaginations today. If you’re a fan of the writing of Clive Barker and the Hellraiser movies, you’ll want to include Hellbound Hearts in your personal library. It’s a great complement to Barker’s own works of fiction
