5 Things “The Hellbound Heart” Taught Me About Writing

For those of you who may not know the movie “Hellraiser” and the franchise it spawned was based on the novella “The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Barker. When I first read “The Hellbound Heart” it was because I had seen that Hellraiser was based on a novella and I thought to myself (having not overly enjoyed the movie) that the novella had to be weird or at the very least something drastically different than I was used to. So I listened to a few reviews of it and decided that even though years before when I’d watched “Hellraiser” I didn’t like it I should read “The Hellbound Heart”.

I was shocked. The book starts with a truly horrific scene that I thought was just gratuitous when I’d first seen “Hellraiser” but in the light of the book with the intensity of the writing I really enjoyed it and overall I…