So, apparently British horror writer Clive Barker’s 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart is a classic. It spawned the cult movie Hellraiser, which I have never seen…and am not likely to see after having finished the book.

Frank is tired of the world. In fact, “there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat. No sweat. No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.” Then he finds Lemarchand’s box, which offers him an intriguing puzzle to solve and if he does, untold pleasure of the darkest kind.

Of course, you can’t make a fair bargain with the Cenobites. They are tricky entities. Frank soon discovers “There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.”

Frank’s brother Rory and his wife Julia have recently moved into Frank and Rory’s childhood home. One of the rooms is damp and creepy and Julia soon discovers the reason why. Some version of Frank inhabits the walls and in order to be made whole he needs blood. Julia, who had a pre-marital tryst with Frank, an event that “had in every regard but the matter of her acquiescence, all the aggression and joylessness of rape”, feels her lust for Frank reunited. despite the abhorrent form he currently takes.

It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blacked as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle, a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason–

The plot is relatively straightforward – equal parts predictable and revolting. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either.