The Hellbound Heart is a novella by Clive Barker about the wages of the sins of the flesh and how it affects the people around you. While it incorporates the supernatural with the demonic cenobites of the Order of the Gash, by and large, it is a story about how the lack of moderation can ultimately destroy and damn you.
Of course, this novella was adapted into a movie, Hellraiser, and its many sequels, although only this novella and Barker’s Scarlet Gospels feature the Cenobites prominently. I’m going to focus on the novella in this review, though, because very few people have read it compared to those who have watched the movie.
The narrative of the novella shows us the perspective of the four primary characters Frank, Julia, Kristy, and Rory. I’m going to do a breakdown of each of these four characters from the novella since the story is told from their perspectives, though not in first person.
Frank
Frank is the first character we meet in the story and he’s an outright sociopath and Sigma male. He has little regard for authority, and it is hinted that entire adult life before the story begins is one of pursuing the most extreme sexual conquests while also committing petty crimes to get by, although he may have committed some more heinous crimes. He has little regard for others and only views people in terms of how he can exploit them in some capacity or another.
He is an apex human predator, through and through. This predatory nature that he has, though, makes him probably the most honest and confident character in the entire story. When he sees Kristy for the first time, he immediately recognizes that she the kind of woman who, while suffering from anxiety issues, is a ton of fun once you break down her inhibitions, more so than Julia.
Frank starts out in his abandoned grandmother’s house performing a basic ritual to summon the Cenobites of the Order of the Gash. He had heard of them through one of his criminal friends and performed a series of small favors to obtain the Lemarchand Configuration. He was given instructions on what offerings he was to prepare and once that was done, he then spent several hours dismantling the box. Once the puzzle box was solved by taking it apart, the Cenobites appear.
Frank is, at first, appalled by their appearances. Three of them are androgynous in appearance, largely due to their mutilations, with the fourth covered in robes, though later depicted as definitely female, albeit with her own mutilations. After getting over the initial shock of their appearance. Frank demands that they show him the heights of their pleasures, despite their warnings to him.
After this, he is essentially dragged to the world where they routinely torture Frank and then leave him in a space that is just beyond the walls of where he had summoned the Cenobites. He’s basically torn apart and put back together in the barest of pieces when this happens. When his brother Rory bleeds over a semen stain he left behind, he is able to communicate with Julia, with whom he had an affair before she married Rory, and uses her to provide him with the blood of foolish hook-ups to gain more and more of his body back in the our world.
Eventually he murders his own brother to steal his skin to wear in an attempt to trick the Cenobites. He fails, however, and ends up back in their world in the end.
Julia
Julia is Rory’s wife, though she constantly pines for Frank ever since they had an affair just before her wedding. It is stated that she deliberately seduced him, by having him visit her while she was trying on her wedding dress and allowed him to essentially “rape” her. As a result, she despises Rory and all that he stands, secretly wanting to run off with Frank at some point.
We aren’t given much about Julia’s background, but it’s clear that she’s a snob and knows exactly her power as a beautiful woman. She easily picks up men on three separate occasions, convincing them to come to her home while Rory is at work, and murdering them for Frank. By the time she gets to the third victim, she shows little regard for him, knowing full well that he’s a married man with children and even aiding Frank to kill him when he gets cold feet and has a crisis of conscious.
Julia’s tragedy is that she doesn’t know how good she really has things. Rory, while boring to her, is stable, has a career and is ambitious enough to move up, and has a really nice house to live in. But she rejects stability for the thrill of whatever it is that Frank is going to do, to the point that she’s willing to murder for him.
Instead, when she has sex with Rory, she pretends he’s Frank and the mere act of sexual intercourse with Rory becomes a basic act of anatomy to her. She only does it to keep Rory happy and only when she’s not left much of a choice otherwise. More than likely, had Frank not returned, she probably would have divorced Rory eventually.
Frank, for his part, doesn’t love Julia like she loves him. Instead, he merely sees her as a tool, first as a sexual object, and second as a way to escape the Order of the Gash. When Frank accidentally stabs her, he feeds on her like how he fed on her previous hook-ups. She is then damned to the same world as Frank, or at least that is the implication in the end.
Rory
Rory is the character with the least amount of narrative and backstory, probably because he is the everyman of the story. And that’s by and large the tragedy of Rory. He’s bland, vanilla, weak, and married to a woman who is completely out of his league. He’s the typical Delta man who is working toward what the vast majority of men want at the end of the day: a family, a home, and a stable income.
Frank has little regard for his brother Rory. He is only 18 months older than Rory and both brothers were apparently very close growing up but once Frank reached a certain, he decided to pursue his hedonistic pursuits which disgusted Rory who clearly desired a normal life.
So while Rory himself is a normal, nice guy who gets along with everyone and has a stable career that is one the rise, he is also very naïve. He fails to see his own wife’s contempt for him, being only vaguely aware of it, and ultimately his naivety is what causes his death. Of course, it’s not like he could have predicted that his brother Frank was hiding in his house as a skinless monster from “Hell” and was looking to kill him for his own skin. But still, he should have seen through Julia’s lies and deceit if he had his brother’s instincts.
It’s stated that Frank would oftentimes return to their parents’ house and horrify them with his tales of his exploits. Rory should have listened to Frank and maybe inquired as to how he was able to seduce so many women instead of outright rejecting him. At least then he probably wouldn’t have married Julia and ended up a massive heap of flesh on the floor.
Kristy
Kristy is Rory’s friend. Not much is said about how Rory and Kristy became friends, but it’s made clear early on that Kristy is deeply in love with Rory and later on it is stated that she recognizes Frank for what he is when she first met him during Rory and Julia’s wedding preparations and that she was creeped out by him.
Kristy is mousy and very shy. She’s also implied to be less attractive than Julia but more friendly. It’s implied in her introduction that Julia is fully aware of Kristy’s attraction to Rory and that more than secretly delights in the fact that Rory is hers, even though Julia hates him.
Frank, for his part, recognizes that Kristy is the kind of woman who would be a lot of fun in bed should her inhibitions drop as he has seduced similar women in the past. In his two encounters with her, he outright attempts to rape her, despite the first time not having skin and the second time wearing his brother’s skin, albeit loosely.
Kristy, for her part, has a surprising amount of strength and resilience, something that catches Frank off guard. And while she doesn’t exactly kick his ass with little effort, she doesn’t get overwhelmed either.
Her relationship with Rory is fairly close, almost like brother and sister, though clearly Kristy wants more. Rory even contacts her to figure out what is going with Julia after Julia starts killing men to bring Frank back. When Kristy does investigate, she initially suspects that Julia is having an affair, which is devastating to her. This is because she knows that she would have to tell Rory and that it would taint any potential relationship with him. While she can’t stand Julia and hates Rory being with her, she also believes that Rory might see her snitching as an attempt to get Rory for herself instead of genuine concern for Rory.
The narrative at the end of the novella focuses mostly on Kristy. After her first encounter with Frank, she is able to obtain the puzzle box and solves it herself. Because she did so accidentally, only one of the Cenobites appears (not the pinhead one) knowing this. It still says that she has to come with it, but when Kristy is able to convince it that Frank got free of them, it agrees to exchange him for her, provided he confesses as to who he is. This gamble pays off and Frank is reclaimed by his sadistic torturers, along with Julia. The Cenobites keep their end of the bargain and Kristy is allowed to leave with the box. She sees images of Frank and Julia in it, but not Rory and wonders if there is another device to the world where Rory is.
Kristy’s failing is that she wasn’t assertive enough to secure Rory before he married Julia. Women are usually the ones who pick the men, men merely offer themselves as an opportunity. At the end of the day, it is generally women who pick the man they want to hook up with, date, or marry. If Kristy had approached Rory, there is a very good chance she would have settled down with him and lived a happy life, in spite of Frank. Instead, she ended up enduring a nightmare that ended with her love dead and her psyche shattered. As far as I know, she doesn’t show up in any further stories even though most of Clive Barker’s works are linked together in some fashion.
Conclusion
The novella overall is really good and I would recommend it if you’re a fan of horror, or at the very least can stand some gore and some sexual scenes. The sexual scenes are not put in the novella for exploitation and very little is described of them. They have a purpose to show how Frank is able to return and to demonstrate just how messed up Julia is in regards to her marriage with Rory. One scene has her engage Rory while the door to Frank’s room is slightly ajar with her looking into the darkness knowing that Frank is watching.
You may expect the Cenobites to be central to the plot of this story, but they are not. At best, they are merely the drivers for Frank’s growing desperation to escape them. We are given an account of them in the beginning and the end. Sadistic as they are, they appear to have some level of honor as they warn Frank about their nature and they hold up their end of their bargain with Kristy.
The movie Hellraiser is a close adaptation, having been directed by Clive Barker himself, but I feel that the novella has a lot of elements that you just can’t translate well on screen. And while there are some plot holes in the story, I would say it is worth the read.