The Hellbound Heart

Ever since I can recall, Clive Barker has been one of my favorite authors. I first started reading his books when I was in high school, and unfortunately, I have only barely tapped into his collection, reading only six of his works. One of his books in particular though stood out to me as being rather chilling. The book that I am referring to is, of course, The Hellbound Heart. In this book, there are two types of creatures which we are introduced to – one of these types of creatures is the Cenobites. If you are unfamiliar with this book, the Cenobites are a sort of gift - or curse, as we see in this case - which entrap Frank, one of the characters, in their own world. After a string of events, Frank is able to enter back into our realm, but only barely. His journey to the Cenobite world has left him weak and it’s only through blood in which he can return to his full human form.

In this story, we discover that it is Frank, not the Cenobites, who is the actual monster. When he first encounters Julia, his once lover, she responds with disgust and fear – the elements which Carroll claims to produce a horror monster. Frank’s skin has deteriorated and is therefore unimaginably gruesome to look at. But to enter back into his own world fully human again, Frank must enlist Julia’s help in a monstrous and devious plot.

Overall, I found this tale very chilling. Being one who favors mysteries with the occasional horror story, I found Clive Barker’s work especially enthralling. While I’m not one who is particularly susceptible to believing in things that go bump in the night, I must admit that this tale brought back childhood nightmares for me. As stated in class, perhaps horror movies tap into our unconscious mind and we regress to childhood beliefs about monsters and zombies. Carroll provides a different explanation as to why we relate to these fictional characters, stating that we believe the illusion which is presented to us either on screen or in books, and that we use our imagination to fill in the rest of the story. But isn’t it our childhood imagination that gave us the images of monsters under the bed, or the creatures we heard outside our windows at night? Our imaginations can lead us into our own fairy tale or concoct something so imaginable, tapping into our deepest fears to fuel it. Therefore, in seeing horror films, this theory of imagination is reignited within us, producing some of our own most feared images and taking us back to a time in which we believed these images to be real.