Image credit: Em Stonham for Kyusai
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is looking like it’ll be the horror gaming event of the year, releasing on October 8, 2026, and taking players back into the gory, chewy heart of the Hellraiser franchise.
I’m anxiously counting down the days until October 8, and figured it was the perfect time to check out where the series began – The Hellbound Heart, by Clive Barker. It’s the book that started it all and you’ll find a full review below, looking at what makes this particular slice of horror so utterly compelling.
Please note, this review of The Hellbound Heart will be full of spoilers. If you’ve not read the book beforehand, I’d highly recommend checking it out before digging into this review.
Swarms of torment
I mentioned this briefly at the beginning of the article, but I’ll reiterate – this is not a spoiler-free review. Additionally, The Hellbound Heart deals with graphic and intense topics; I won’t go too in-depth on these, but it’s worth noting that they’re present if you choose to read the book for yourself.
The Hellbound Heart is a 1986 novella from horror icon Clive Barker, making up part of the Night Visions anthology series. It’s a short sliver of hell, centering around a mysterious puzzle box called the Lemarchand Configuration.
The Lemarchand Configuration opens up a doorway to summoning a group of mysterious, otherworldly beings called the Cenobites; beings who have dedicated themselves to pursuing extreme pleasure and physical sensation.
Historically, hedonistic people aim to solve the box and claim this heightened sensation for themselves – much like the first character of the book, Frank. His life revolves around the pursuit of utter pleasure and bliss, at the expense of almost everyone he meets; pure hedonism, essentially.
Frank ends up solving the Lemarchand Configuration, summoning the Cenobites and promptly getting ripped from reality in the process – but not before he leaves a trace of himself behind.
The story then hops to Frank’s brother, Rory, and his wife, Julia. I found the contrast between the first and second chapters to be startling; it goes from extreme sensory overload and gory, sexual descriptions, to a mundane moving-in scene, where Julia and Rory are fed up about having to move boxes.
The room where Frank summoned the Cenobites is still sitting untouched in the house that Julia and Rory now own, and it calls to Julia with a dark energy, eventually revealing that Frank is stuck in an in-between realms state – trapped between the walls – and that he needs human blood to escape.
Julia is presented as an unlikeable yet deeply complex character. She’s cheating on Rory and fed up with her everyday life, and gets sucked into the darkness that the box-summoning room holds, agreeing to help Frank and becoming a murderer to sate his bloodthirst.
She ends up luring men back to the house and taking their lives, eventually rebuilding Frank from the bones and sinew up; he absorbs the essence of humans, it seems, leaving them as dried-up husks that Julia ends up having to dispose of.
Rory’s friend, Kirsty – who seems to be in love with him – eventually notices that something is wrong with Julia and suspects her of having an affair.
The story culminates with a case of mistaken identity and another attempted murder, with Frank wearing his brother’s skin, and Kirsty unintentionally summoning the Cenobites herself, ending up as the only survivor out of the tragic ordeal.
It’s an intense and dramatic narrative that unfolds quickly, with viciously detailed gore scenes, reality-warping descriptions, and a heaping of characters that felt incredibly believable and disturbingly human. I found myself not really connecting with the characters too much – Kirsty was ok – but I felt compelled to see what happened to them regardless.
Pearls in offal
Something that stood out to me with The Hellbound Heart is the description of the Lemarchand Configuration.
I’m a Hellraiser fanatic – I adore the films and try to watch them yearly for Halloween – but this was my first foray into the book that inspired the series. Known as the Lament Configuration in the movies, for the most part, I was intrigued to see the puzzle box written under its original name and description.
The use of the puzzle box as a gateway to a new realm instead of a sigil of Baphomet or pentacle is something that I’ve always loved about Hellraiser; it sets the story apart from other hellish, occult franchises, and avoids tainting otherwise harmless imagery like pentacles in the process. As a practicing pagan, the association of evil with pentacles is mind-numbingly irritating.
The Lemarchand Configuration is treated with the fear and awe that I feel it deserves in the book, and this is something that I’m hoping the upcoming 2026 game follows suit with.
The Cenobites are terror incarnate, sure, but there’s something deeply unsettling and awful about the puzzle box itself. While I’m sure Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival will have plenty of Cenobite features and awesome monsters, I am hoping the Configuration is spotlighted appropriately, and doesn’t just feel like an inventory slot-warmer.
Learning more about the Cenobites and the rituals that summon them was a fiendish delight, too.
They’ve always been one of the biggest elements of the Hellraiser series, and reading the intricately disgusting descriptions of them in The Hellbound Heart conjured up terribly detailed images of them. I’m excited to see how they’re portrayed in Hellraiser: Revival and hope it’s not just Pinhead getting center stage.
If, like me, you’re entranced by the world of Hellraiser and want to get to the core of the gore before the new game comes out in October this year, I cannot recommend The Hellbound Heart highly enough.
It’s a dark and disgusting book, and it’s everything that I’d hoped it’d be as an existing fan of the franchise. The characters are flawed and nasty, the world is miserable yet surprisingly vibrant in places, and the boundaries between the mundane and the fantastically awful are blurred artfully.
I’m hoping that Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival pays homage to the book and acknowledges the power of the Configuration alongside the Cenobites, and I can’t wait to see what else the game has in store. Based on the trailer and official site, it’s looking like it might be the survival horror game of the year.
FAQs
The Hellbound Heart was published as a novella in 1986.
The first Hellraiser movie came out on September 10, 1987.
The Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival release date is October 8, 2026.
The best horror games include ROUTINE, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space, Alien: Isolation, SOMA, and Look Outside.
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