The Scarlet Gospels
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"I think Clive Barker is so good that I am literally tongue-tied." Stephen King
THE GATES TO HELL ARE OPEN AND SOMETHING BECKONS ...
The last of Earth's magicians are living in fear. A Cenobite Hell Priest known as Pinhead is killing them off, gorging on their knowledge to enhance his own magical powers as part of a quest to take over Hell. Meanwhile, Private Investigator Harry D' Amour is fulfilling the final wishes of the dead, who communicate with his business associate, the blind medium Norma Paine. But while investigating one such case, Harry inadvertently opens up a portal between Hell and Earth.
When Harry's nemesis Pinhead emerges through the portal, a vicious battle ensues. After failing to enlist Harry to pen his Scarlet Gospels - the epistles chronicling the Hell Priest's grand coup - Pinhead instead captures Norma. Harry realizes he must go through Hell - literally - to save her.
MORE PRAISE FOR CLIVE BARKER
"A powerful and fascinating writer with a brilliant imagination... an outstanding storyteller" JG Ballard
"To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band'... He is the great imaginer of our time. He knows not only our greatest fears, but also what delights us, what turns us on, and what is truly holy in the world. Haunting, bizarre, beautiful." Quentin Tarantino
"Barker is much more than genre writer" New York Times Book Review
"Barker dislocates your mind" Mail on Sunday
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
“Splatterpunk” writer Clive Barker doesn’t hold back with The Scarlet Gospels, which starts with a frenzy of gore. But what this horror thriller lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in sardonic humour and page-turning scenes that sizzle with menace and fevered imagination. Barker’s antiheroes Harry D’Amour (a hardened cop who senses supernatural forces) and Norma Paine (a blind old woman who communes with the dead) contend with a demonic foe named Pinhead, who'll be familiar to fans of the Hellraiser movies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harry D'Amour, the psychically sensitive detective from Barker's Books of Blood, faces off with Pinhead, the sadistic Cenobite star of the Hellraiser series, in this gory battle royal that takes the reader literally to hell and back. Following a blood-spattered prologue that sets the tone for the rest of the novel, Pinhead here portrayed as a demon residing in hell lures D'Amour and his entourage of mortal sidekicks to the infernal realm to serve as "witness" to what the demon calls "my gospels": a succession of gruesome atrocities whose purpose is revealed in the tale's outrageous climax. Barker's depiction of hell is Dantesque in scope and scale, and his descriptions of its architecture and denizens form an awesomely creative display of imagination. The visceral horrors that clot nearly every page of this novel are not for the squeamish, but the reader who stomachs them to the end will be impressed by the audacity of the author's ambitions.
