Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan (editors),
Hellbound Hearts (Pocket Books, 2009)
Twenty-odd years ago, a horror anthology was published which included stories by Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, and a relatively new writer named Clive Barker. Barker's story was a novella titled "The Hellbound Heart" (1986), which would soon provide the basis for the first Hellraiser (1987) film before going on to inspire an increasingly complex mythos of iconic characters, legends, pseudo-histories, and radical transformations.
Transformation is an integral aspect of the Hellraiser mythos, not just in regard to the stories as they move from medium to medium --print, film, graphic novel --but in the way in which numerous creators have contributed to the vocabulary and visual images which reoccur throughout the web of tales. In his introduction to Hellbound Hearts, Barker himself ascribes the existence of the mythos to the many creative artists, including the special-effects artists and the fans, who have added their own touches to his stories:
On the face of it, a screenwriter/director such as myself referring to his own story as a mythology is immensely arrogant. But here, a more subtle distinction comes into play that may be worth a moment's study. Even though I am the man who had the good fortune to bring this image to a popular medium and therefore facilitate its dissemination throughout much of the world, I am not the creator of this mythology. p. xiv
The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser were themselves modern transformations of older stories, including the Faust legend and the myth of the labyrinth. In its preoccupation with the often catastrophic physical transformations which are visited upon mortals when they cross paths with immortal beings, I've often thought that the Hellraiser mythos could even be said to offer a dark reimagining of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
In Hellbound Hearts, edited by Paul Kane (author of The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (2006) and his wife Marie O'Regan, some of our best contemporary horror writers contribute twenty-one new stories to the Hellraiser mythos. There are a wide variety of settings, historical periods, and material forms for the infamous Lemarchand Configuration, which proves to be a truly infernal device. The anthology is strong from start to finish, although some stories seem to go for the gross-out while others create more psychological tales.
The first two stories were two of my favorites: in "Prisoners of the Inferno" by Peter Atkins (who wrote the screenplays for a number of the Hellraiser films), a horror fan is drawn into a search for a lost film, while Conrad Williams's "The Cold" is a story about a London detective as he searches the dark maze of city streets for a serial killer.
"The Confessor's Tale" by Sarah Pinborough follows the life of a peasant boy whose muteness compels others to confess their crimes to him, and in "Mechanisms," a collaboration between Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, an Oxford student becomes fascinated with the inexplicable machine built by his missing father.
"Every Wrong Turn" by Tim Lebbon follows a man who is traveling a mysterious garden maze, while Kelly Armstrong's "The Collector" is a story about a woman who is addicted to solving puzzles, and Nancy Holder's "Orfeo the Damned" follows a woman who is struggling with severe depression.
In addition to those by Armstrong and Holder, there are a number of other stories written by female horror writers. "The Dark Materials Project" by Sarah Langan concerns a geneticist who is attempting to map the "dark matter" of human DNA, and Yvonne Navarro's "Only the Blind Survive" is set amongst a group of Pueblo Indians. "Sister Cilise" by Barbie Wilde (who played the female Cenobite in a number of the Hellraiser films) follows the journey of a woman from nun to Cenobite. "The Promise" by Nancy Kilpatrick is a haunting story about a group of former goths who reunite at an old crypt twenty years after their last meeting.
"Our Lord of Quarters" by Simon Clark is set in the time of the Byzantine Empire. "Wordsworth" by Neil Gaiman an Dave McKean is a comic about a man who is obsessed with words. The written script for this story by Neil Gaiman is also included as bonus material.
The disturbing " However. . . . " by Gary A. Braunbeck and Lucy A. Snyder poses the possibility that human monsters may be able to outdo even the Cenobites themselves, and "'Tis Pity He's Ashore" by Chaz Brenchley is a surprising but lyrical sea tale.
The anthology also contains lots of extras: a foreword by Clive Barker, an introduction by horror editor (and former publicist for the first Hellraiser film) Stephen Jones, and an afterword by Doug Bradley (the actor who portrays the iconic character Pinhead in the Hellraiser films).
Hellbound Hearts should be a satisfying read for both the Hellraiser fan and any reader looking for top-notch horror fiction.
