Paul Kane: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
The seventeenth entry in the Bury Me With… series; Paul Kane, one of the nicest men in genre fiction I’ve met, offers up his choice of entombed reading matter.
“My choice for this shouldn’t come as much of a shock, bearing in mind myself and my better half Marie have just co-edited an anthology based on it which came out from Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster) last September. Yes, of course it’s The Hellbound Heart by my favourite author, none other than Clive Barker (we just removed the definite article and added an ‘s’ at the end – Hellbound Hearts – clever, eh?). The other small-ish clue was that I also wrote a book focussing on the film series this novella spawned, The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy. Obsessed? Me? Naw. It’s just that The Hellbound Heart, which was originally published back in 1986, contains the seeds for such a rich and never-ending mythology, that the short book itself is a springboard for many other tales; or at least it was in my imagination. After reading it for the first time, and later watching the movie based on it, I found myself asking questions like: who are the Cenobites, really? What are their day-to-day lives like? (I know, I’m a weirdo, right?) How many other people have they visited after various puzzles have been solved?
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