Hellraiser: The Toll

One of the most notorious characters in Barker’s horror canon, the demonic Cenobite known as the Cold Man or Pinhead, returns in this collaborative novella that bridges his first appearance in The Hellbound Heart (1986) and his spectacular swan song in The Scarlet Gospels (2015). Kirsty barely escaped abduction by the Cenobites, and has been on the run from them for the 30 years since. Finally she answers a summons to the former Devil’s Island penal colony to serve as the Cold Man’s first witness to what he calls his “great working”: an exposure of the world to “the Great Absence which is God.” This is less a story than a mood piece whose infernal main character has grown Mephistophelian and tragic over the years. Barker and Miller (Clive Barker’s Next Testament) suffuse the tale with vivid imagery that intensifies its atmosphere of dread (“The two orbs in his noble skull were black as the night, with a silvery glint, and contained only the sentiment of decay”). Fans who have followed Pinhead’s exploits in fiction and the Hellraiser films will find this book a must, in part for Barker’s artwork sprinkled throughout. (Mar.)