It seems Clive Barker has applied the sharpest razor of all to his own text, apparently reducing the wordcount by half.I would have liked to have read that book, and be disappointed by something that was audacious and rich and powerful and sprawling rather than enjoy the book that I read.The Scarlet Gospels that is, is a brilliant book, but I long for the book that it might have been. These elements - which are the ones that I looked forward to experiencing the most - are missing. The long-beleaguered detective Harry D’Amour, investigator of all.

In interviews and conversation the author let slip tantalising details - a conversation with Jesus a viking cemetery the holy grail in a tin mine a confrontation between a 12 year old Harry and the Hell Priest at school a dog that accompanied the protagonists into Hell. The Scarlet Gospels, an instant New York Times bestsellerPinhead returns to screens in Fall 2022 in an all new Hellraiser streaming seriestakes readers back to the early days of two of Clive Barker’s most iconic characters in a battle of good and evil as old as time. By that metric, The Scarlet Gospels is good book, a great book, full of the dark horror and baroque detail and bizarre inventiveness that Clive Barker is known for.The chief disappointment of the book is not what it is (which, in case it's not clear, I enjoyed very much), but in what the book might have been. A book is what's delivered, what you buy and hold in your hands and consume. Clive Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels is one such tome Barker has done more to redefine the nature and parameters of what we’ve come to know as horror than probably any other writer from the late 20 th century.

The scarlet gospels