A review by tasharobinson
The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker

2.0

I've reached the point where the arbitrariness of Clive Barker's writing bothers me more than the wallowing in gore and the genital/anal fetish that has him repeatedly describing demons with body-length vaginas, or torture victims being pulled inside out through their own rectums, or whatever. So much of what happens in this book follows no particular sense of weight or meaning or myth: Characters kept alive through impossible odds for half the book die unspectacularly and abruptly, characters charge ahead on quests that seem to have occurred to them on the moment, and the universe is constantly shown to be a hideously ugly, yet exhaustingly random place. There's so little sense of anything that happens following from what happened before: as with the Abarat books, there's just always a new character being introduced, and the characters staggering forward to some new place where some preposterously ugly carnage, described in lavish and loving detail, is ready to take place. I recently read Barker's Books Of Blood for the first time, and it was astonishing to me what a terrific writer he is when he's working on one idea, in a contained length. The sprawl of this book mostly just makes room for more elaborate eviscerations, and a plot that plods all over Earth and hell.

Oh, and spoiler alert: the damsel in distress Harry D'Amour and his friends spend literally half of the book trying to rescue from hell gets casually raped to death. Offscreen. By Pinhead. For no apparent reason, and even though he's never seemed like a creature with functioning genitals or a sex drive. And he doesn't even come up with a reason, even though we spend huge chunks of the book getting his baroque explanations for things. And she survives just long enough to gasp out a noble "It's okay, it was my time" heartfelt goodbye to her friends. Maddening. And arbitrary, and gross.