Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Scarlet Gospels

Fully went into this thinking it was a sequel to Hellbound Heart when really, it’s got one character (Pinhead and he sucks ass in this book) from the book and then it’s all about Harry D’Amour. Whom is he? No clue, idk that man. I finished it but I hated every second of it.

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leirben's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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lancemama's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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atmathis's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.25

Coming into this book as a fan of the Cenobite mythos and Barker in general, I was excited to read the long-awaited sequel to The Hellbound Heart. I went into the book fresh after reading through every story detective Harry D'Amour stars in ("The Last Illusion", "Lost Souls", The Great and Secret Show, and Everville) as well as The Hellbound Heart.

After a promising prologue, the novel quickly loses its luster. The story feels rushed, peppering in just enough backstory to set the stage, then rushing quickly into the meat of the story. The poetic prose observed in Barker's other works is largely lacking here, as characters are quickly shuttled from place to place to keep the plot moving. Honestly, for all his trying, the description of Hell is just boring.

And these characters, several of which the reader has come to know over decades of other loosely-related stories, feel wrong. The way Harry speaks and acts feels out of character with the detective we followed through TGaSS and Everville, almost as if the experience and lessons learned in those books are just thrown out the window. In place of the mysteries of

Quiddity

or the Cenobite world hinted at in The Hellbound Heart, we end up with a very stereotypical Christian version of Hell and the Devil. This isn't necessarily bad, but it feels out of place with the world Barker has built to date. In the same way, the gravitas of the Hell Priest ("Pinhead") is lost in a whiny, brooding character that you don't really end up rooting for or against. For the focal point of the novel, he's ultimately a bland character for all the promise.

At the end, the story feels rushed, and ultimately unsatisfying. The little character growth seen feels unearned, and I don't feel like I care about them any more than I did before picking up the book. If anything, the characters I picked up the book for I ended up liking less.

I've read that the novel was whittled down from a much larger (1000+ page) manuscript, and potentially ghostwritten after the opening chapter. I believe it, and think the work suffered greatly for it.

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islabjb's review against another edition

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Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

2.0

If you watch Saw 3 high on Benadryl while someone explains the Protestant Reformation to you- you will have a similar experience to reading this book.

Is this book at all related to the Hellbound Heart? No. Is it related to the Hellraiser films? No. Is Kirsty Cotton in it? No. Does this book tell you that Lucifer’s favorite food is pizza? Yes. I considered giving up on this book many times mostly because the first 40% is totally inconsequential to the plot and is just gore for seemingly the sake of being gorey. Pinhead is a totally different character from the movies and first book. I don’t think he is Elliot Spencer in this version because I don’t know what cannon this book follows, but the movie and hellbound heart ‘hell priest’ had a moral code, that was his whole shtick, you open the box- he’ll mess with you otherwise he doesn’t care. This Pinhead just tortures people for no reason, and his actions are inconsequential- by the end he is able to escape death/the devil, and seemingly manifest himself anywhere (not manifest himself with the bells and the lament configuration like previously but just randomly show up behind the protagonists) that is convenient. I know that we are all supposed to worship Clive Barker as this horror god and I do believe he has done a lot of the genre but this wasn’t it.

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existential_dreadnought's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Took about two thirds of the book for the characters to become likeable, rather than just seeming forced caricatures.

The body horror, while expected in this, just dragged on and felt pointless much of the time.

I found myself just hoping it would be over soon.

It wasn't awful, but simply didn't hold a candle to the author's early works.

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seanhussey's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

I don't normally rate books this low. If I don't like a book, I try to chalk it up to a difference in style or perhaps I set my expectations incorrectly. This story is just bad. And after I read several reviews saying as much, I still went ahead and read it and I wish I hadn't wasted my time. If you're on the fence about reading this book, check out some other reviews before you decide. To each their own, but, wow, this was silly and much too self-serious.

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