The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker Summary and Reviews
|
Our Price: $8.80 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Hellbound Heart
Book Review: "pearls in offal."
Summary: 3 Stars
This book leaves little doubt that Clive Barker has an incredible imagination linked and obviously influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft often wrote of alternate dimensions, realms, in which foul denizens wait, hatching diabolical intentions and torturous ideas about harming Mankind. "The Hellbound Heart" is a book with such a scenario at its center. Demons, known here as Cenobites, who are summoned through the opening of a unique artifact called Lemarchand's box. In fact, the entire first chapter reads more like Lovecraft than at any other point in this novella. This book is very short, a little over 160 pages in length, and the margins are narrow with fairly large print. This is a quick read, the modernized style of writing leaving no room for catching your breath. It is entertaining, albeit very naive. I have little doubt that Clive Barker looks back on this book and thinks about how little he knew about characterization and their driving motivations. His writing is clearly ambitious, but the characters are so thinly drawn, their reasons for their actions so tenuously wrought, that I just waited around for another paragraph of straight creative description. I longed for the return of the malevolent Cenobites on many occasions. Kirsty is never fully explained. Is she somebody's daughter, as it is shown in the film version, "Hellraiser"? Is she Julia's daughter? Frank's? It is never directly stated. As for Julia, it seems unlikely that a fleeting love/lust affair would drive her to commit murders. Perhaps it was the affect of the demons lurking upstairs, but that is never suggested. Just all of a sudden she goes out and brings home her first victim/sacrifice. The most interesting character is Frank who aches for new and intense experiences beyond human understanding. So much so that he opens Lemarchand's box and is generously given his requests, to horrifying effect. The first chapter is worth reading again and again, but the film version of this story has much better dialogue and the actors give such splendid performances that it is unlikely I will ever want to read this book cover to cover again. This book shows a very young Clive Barker creatively conjuring the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft, oftentimes matching that master's ideas, but the characterization needs fleshing out(pun intended). The dialogue is rarely passionate or loaded with emotional depth, leaving the reader with a hollow feeling of what could have been. There are many fine ideas here, many inspired moments, but the end result, the overall effect, is one of ambitious youth and ignorant technique.Book Review: A Damn Good Piece of Art
Summary: 4 Stars
I am a fan of all of the Hellraiser movies, so I expected the book to be even better. It really was! Clive Barker plays with grammar just liked the cenobites played with Frank. He has a way of using grammar like no other author that I have read. The details in this novella are great!! Mr. Barker kept me wanting more after I finished the book. I will most definitely buy more of his work.Book Review: A masterful allegory of SM pleasure.
Summary: 5 Stars
Barker has been usually classified as a splatterpunk for his extreme imagery. This small masterpiece doesn't dissapoint.I liked this book a lot more than the Hellraiser movie. Though Barker adapted his own novella, the expansion of the tale to fit a feature lenght film made for ludicrous scenes. None of those here.
This is a story that deals mainly with human desire, the need for love and the need for pleasure, and the search to fulfill sexual appetites, while keeping a very kinky sadomasochist subtext. The Cenobites are displays of pain as pleasure taken to the extreme. And the "conditions of the nerve endings" they mention... engrossing!
Barker uses an almost poetic language that makes for enjoyable prose. I highly recomend this book.
Book Review: A must read for Clive fans.
Summary: 5 Stars
Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant. Remember what the nuns told you back in grade school-If you're not a good boy/girl you will go straight to hell. Well, here it is. Frank is your typical bad boy who goes a little too far down the path of the flesh and winds up suffering at the hands of demons. It may seem basic, but Mr. Barker always makes that trip to hell so fabulous. If you like Clive Barker, or if you're just into the horror genre, don't miss this one.Book Review: A nice, dark story
Summary: 5 Stars
If you're into that dark, twisted kind of horror, then you should buy "The Hellbound Heart" by Clive Barker. It's about temptation and giving into it, man's deepest, darkest desires, and the deep, dark places in all our hearts being unleashed into one big nightmare story. The book is short, so it's fast, but it also develops itself pretty well, rather than being one of those stories that is completely and totally devoid of plot and character development. If you don't take graphic violence too well, then the odds are pretty good that you shoudn't read this, but if you can take it, then definitely dig in. "Hellbound Heart" was the basis for the movie "Hellraiser," so if you saw that, the book is much better than the movie. It's a good, twisted story, and I recommend it.