Kirsty, a friend of Rory, suspects that Julia is having a series of affairs and begins to trail her. While Rory is at work, Julia begins picking up men whom she lures into the attic and sacrifices them to Frank, whose body becomes more substantial and whose consciousness more stable with every sacrifice. Julia, hoping to rekindle their affair, promises to help him. This allows Frank to contact the physical world, at first only as a whisper in the wall, then as an emaciated corpse. Due to an accident, several drops of Rory's blood land on the spot where Frank had ejaculated prior to being snatched into the Cenobites' realm. Rory is married to Julia, who had an affair with Frank a week before her wedding and has ever since lusted for him while staying married to Rory for the financial support he provides. They see little difference between extreme pleasure and extreme pain and drag Frank, willingly at first, into their extradimensional realm, where Frank begins what he realizes too late will be an eternity of torture.įrank's brother, Rory, moves his family into the house inherited by him and Frank after their grandparents' death.
A gateway opens in the wall and appearing from it are the Cenobites, a race of distorted creatures who practice an extreme form of sadomasochism centered around agonizing torture and mutilation. Frank manages to solve the puzzle while squatting in the attic of his grandparents' house, where he has set up an elaborate display of rose petals and numerous obscene gifts.
Frank tracks down the current owner of the box in Düsseldorf and obtains it through performing "small favors". Jaded, Frank hears rumor of a mysterious puzzle box (the Lament Configuration) which opens the gateway to a realm of unfathomable carnal pleasures. The story focuses on a mystical Puzzle Box (Lemarchand Configuration) and the horror it wreaks on a family which is unfortunate enough to come across it.įrank is a nihilist and selfish moral degenerate who has participated in every hedonistic pleasure, extreme experience and sexual perversion known to man, each time seeking a greater pleasure higher than the last.
It retains the gory, visceral style that Barker introduced in his series of collected short stories The Books of Blood. It was originally published in November 1986 by Dark Harvest in the third volume of their Night Visions anthology series, but was re-released as a stand-alone title by Harper Collins in 1988 after the success of the movie, along with an audiobook recorded by Clive Barker and published by Audioworks. The Hellbound Heart is a horror novella by Clive Barker that was the basis for the 1987 movie Hellraiser.
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