Not only that, Frank’s spirit starts calling to her. Julia is unhappy with her life with Rory and Rory’s friend, Kirsty, secretly has a crush on Rory too.īut, after Rory injures himself with a chisel and spills blood on the floor of one of the house’s abandoned rooms, Julia notices that the blood mysteriously disappears from the floor several hours later. Initially, things seem fairly mundane as they go through the rigmarole of moving in. Since the inherited house is technically also owned by Rory and because Frank hasn’t been there in months, Rory decides to move in. Several months later, Frank’s brother Rory and his wife Julia show up at his house. However, when he solves the box, a bell tolls and a gateway to another world appears.įrom this gateway, hideous beings called Cenobites emerge and drag Frank into their realm – where pain and pleasure are considered to be one and the same thing. Jaded by a life of hedonism, he has heard that this box is a gateway to realms of even greater pleasure than anyone can even imagine. The story begins with a man called Frank trying to solve a puzzle box called the Lemarchand Configuration.

Unfortunately, I probably can’t show the book cover here since one small part of it is very much “not safe for work” and would probably fall foul of some content rule or another. I read the 1997 Voyager (UK) paperback edition of “The Hellbound Heart”. Needless to say, this review may contain some SPOILERS. So, let’s take a look at “The Hellbound Heart”. So, naturally, I was curious to see whether it was similar to what I remembered of it. I was going through a bit of a Clive Barker phase at the time and I remembered enjoying this book, even if it was slightly different to what I’d expected. If I remember rightly, this was a novella that I first read when I was about eighteen or nineteen after realising that the movie “Hellraiser” ( directed by Barker himself) was based on it. So, I found my copy of Clive Barker’s 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart” and decided to re-read it.

Well, although I’d originally planned to read a different horror novel for the next book in this month’s horror marathon, I was having a terrible day and needed to read something that was both short and familiar.

The hellbound heart