Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart is perhaps the story Lovecraft would have written had he been remotely interested in sex. It bears comparison with Lovecraft’s Silver Key stories, in particular Through the Gates of the Silver Key, to which it bears certain structural similarities. In both stories, a seeker after “higher” knowledge passes, by occult means, into an infinitely remote and humanly inconceivable world from which he then returns, transfigured, as a figure of horror.

In Barker’s tale, the place of Randall Carter’s Silver Key to the “realms of dream” is taken by Lemarchand’s box, a puzzle which owes something - but not everything - to “the Chinese taste for making metaphysics of hard wood”. We are told that Lemarchand, “who had been in his time a maker of singing birds”, had supplemented “the acuity and technical genius of the Chinese” with “a perverse logic that was entirely his own”.

Having Lemarchand be a maker of mechanical birds is a masterly touch, amplified by Barker’s subsequent tremendous description of the realm from which the Cenobites emerge as “a world of…vast blackbirds caught in perpetual tempest…brittle, broken things that rose and fell and filled the dark air with their fright”. Why are mechanical birds creepy? Because they are dead things, driven by gears and springs, pretending to life. The “perverse logic” of their intricate mechanisms is the logic of that drive. The Cenobites appear to Frank as a parody of life, of the vital sensuality he is pursuing: theirs is a world of cold perpetual motion.

The artifact that opens the door to the Cenobite’s world is not, like Lovecraft’s Silver Key, a repository of ancestral arcana, inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphs that the would-be user must decipher in order to wield its power, but something rather more opaque and novel. Lemarchand’s box is lacquered, inside and out: all there is to be seen in it is the user’s own “distorted, fragmented” reflection. Rather than representing an occulted wisdom, the “Chinese box” is an involuted mirror-ball: an impossible, fractal object that subtracts its own perverse torsion from the world.

The story thus begins with an un-contortion, an unravelling. Frank succeeds in opening the box, working through its sequence of “alignments of fluted slot and oiled peg” until its “mirrored innards” become “unknitted”: “Lemarchand’s device was undone: the final trick had been turned”. The contemporary slang (“turning tricks” as cant for prostitution) is here referred back to an older vocabulary of moral undoing, of sin and penitence (“we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”). The final trick of the story has by no means been turned, but from this moment on we are undone, in extremis; beyond good and evil.

We can now clarify the difference between Lovecraft and Barker on one point. For Lovecraft, the passage to other worlds must pass through a discourse of knowledge, variously symbolised by the institution of Miskatonic University, the “Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Azhalred”, and other musty and “blasphemous” sources. The identification of “knowledge” with “blasphemy” is less significant here than the reverse identification of “blasphemy” with “knowledge”: to be a blasphemer, or to encounter things in their blasphemous reality, one must first be a scholar.

For Barker, however, gaining access to other worlds is a matter of novel technique, of fashioning some new assemblage (the Cenobites refer to the box as “Lemarchand’s Configuration”) that will disarticulate the world. The sequence to be worked through is perverse, but not forbidden: it lies beyond the reach of the law, rather like certain financial instruments alleged to be so complex that they defy regulation.

Accordingly, Lovecraft’s adventurer and Barker’s are destined to quite different “beyond”s. Lovecraft’s is a revelation of ultimate truth, the unity of the All-is-One, which decomposes every particular identity by making it a mere “facet” of a many-angled geometric totality (placing it on the surface of the Body-Without-Organs, one might say). The nature of Barker’s beyond is quite different, and the subject of the next section.