The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker

Reading The Scarlet Gospels (MacMillan, New York. May 2015, available in print and ebook editions in amazon.com) is, as you may expect from a book by Clive Barker, a strange adventure. At times it recalls the inventive fury that inhabited his early Books of Blood, each one a compilation of short stories where a series of perverted worlds are depicted in insane detail and magnificent prose. It counts as a back-to-shape statement, I think. The kind of Barker book that I was waiting for a long time.

After the big success of his Blood books and other stories – applauded by the master of horror himself, Stephen King – Barker decided to move permanently into the realm of the infernal, conceiving entirely cogent demonic worlds of a richness and vastness that, in a way, seemed propelled by a sort of encyclopedic knowledge of the netherworld.

I must confess though that, along the way, the Barker’s magic dissipated for me. Next to his determination to show off his infernal acumen, his work got vacated of compelling characters and his plots passed from being refreshingly fantastic to be just weird and hallucinogenic. Way back remained those atmospheres where a unique mix of cruelty, poetic fantasy and sensuality – or sexuality indeed, since he never avoided any valid chance to go into the physical detail of sexual encounters among humans, ghosts or demons – was powered by the surgical precision of his writing style.

Barker is an ambitious messenger of the otherworldly. He has dabbled into novels and short stories as mentioned, but also in movies as a script writer, director and producer. The most famous of his works is of course Hellraiser, directed by Barker himself and, in my opinion, the only one of the movies based on his books or any of his scripts – or at least inspired by them – that was capable of recreating the sweetly disturbing atmosphere that is the trademark of his best works.

The main character of The Scarlet Gospels is Harry D’Amour, a private detective that realizing his special ability to perceive and attract demons decides to make a career out of it –a little bit like Barker himself. I remember the D’Amour characterization by Scot Bakula in Lord of Illusions (1995), a film also scripted by Barker. We also get reacquainted here with one of the most famous infernal devices from Barker’s world, a “Lemarchand box,” which is described as being no bigger than a Rubik cube that lures men into playing with the apparently innocent “Lament Configurations” carved into its walls. This is the box that creates havoc in the first place in the plot of The Hellbound Heart and in the movie that it inspired, Hellraiser, by simply leaving ajar one of the doors to Hell so that its inadvertent players discover the limits of human pain at the hands of one of most nightmarish dwellers of the infernal, Pinhead.

I might be wrong, of course, since I have not read all of Barker’s body of work, but it seems to me that this is the first of his books that mixes the destinies of D’Amour and Pinhead. It makes wonders for a plot that has apocalyptic keys aplenty and that drives the unsuspecting readers to Hell and back, introducing, in a display of daring inventive that never waivers in the face of the unthinkable, to the master of Hell himself, Lucifer.

With the stakes so high it was almost impossible to leave unscathed. But Barker is not only able to pull it off with brilliance but also creates a resonating story that ignites our imaginations with enduring creative fire.