I don't know what I expected when I finally sat down to read The Hellbound Heart (I mean, I haven't even seen Hellraiser before) but it wasn't what I got.
Perhaps it didn't age as well as I expected, so that what may have taboo and transgressive at the time feels decidedly less so now - 40 years later.
Maybe it's just that all the characters kind of sucked, but not in any way that was particularly interesting.
Maybe I simply expected too much. The Hellbound Heart is often mentioned in transgressive and queer horror conversations, so perhaps I expected a bit too much explicit, or even subtextual, queerness for a book published in 1986. While I do see the influence of queer leather bars on the stylings of the Cenobites, that felt like little more than set dressing - I didn't get the feeling that that influenced much more than the way they looked.
Perhaps you could look at this, symbolically, as a story of underground queer culture becoming more prevalent and disrupting a heteronormative society, which is a premise I'd love, but I simply didn't enjoy reading this. I didn't find any of the characters very likable, which isn't necessarily a sin, but they also weren't even very interesting. And it could have been fun watching characters you kind of hate get their comeuppance but I felt like I also didn't see or know enough about the Cenobites to like or root for them, or even be much interested in them.
I don't know, I find my thoughts on this one quite difficult to put into words. But I was disappointed and I was sad to be disappointed. I really wanted to like this, and I'm definitely in the minority according to Storygraph and Goodreads, so maybe it's just a me thing. Maybe it way just the wrong time for it, and maybe I'll reread it one day and see what everyone else seems to see.
In the meantime, I'm going to go watch Hellraiser and hope the movie is better than the book for once.
And if you have any thoughts on the book or the movie (or why I'm obviously a big dumb idiot that just doesn't get this book), I'd love to hear it in the comments below.
