Pinhead, the demonic sadomasochistic hellpriest from the Hellraiser films, is one of horror cinema’s most popular and recognizable monsters, having appeared in nine feature films as well as numerous comic books and other media.

The character was first introduced by fantasy and horror author Clive Barker in his novella “The Hellbound Heart,” in which Pinhead played a minor role. Pinhead also played a minor role in the first Hellraiser film, appearing on screen for only about eight minutes. Barker didn’t realize he’d created a classic monster until he saw the response from fans.

“Soon after the movie opened we saw that almost every photograph was of the guy with the pins in his head,” Barker says in Episode 151 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “People teach you what they want. They educate you, if you like, in what you’ve done.”

Unfortunately, Barker had little control over how Pinhead was used in the Hellraiser sequels, and found himself less than thrilled with the results. His long-awaited new novel, The Scarlet Gospels, tells one last Pinhead story, in a way that stays true to Barker’s original vision. In this adventure Pinhead goes toe-to-toe with another popular Clive Barker character, the noir detective Harry D’Amour.

“I was dealing with two iconic characters for me, particularly Pinhead,” says Barker. “People view him with a certain amount of respect, and I like that. I wanted to say goodbye to him in a really good way.”

The showdown takes place against a big, ambitious backdrop—hell itself. Barker worked hard to present a vision of the netherworld that’s distinct from Dante or Milton. He puts special emphasis on the hierarchical and bureaucratic nature of hell, which he feels reflects the modern world.

“Hell is reimagined by every generation,” he says. “We have to reinvent the worst so that we can reinvent the best.”

The story is a grand operatic odyssey full of demon armies, grotesque monsters, and destruction on a scale far beyond even the most immense special effects budget. Pinhead’s story began on the page and now, appropriately, ends on the page.

“The word is magical,” says Barker. “The word is protean. It gives us all sorts of things, for almost nothing. Just the price of your imagination.”

Listen to our complete interview with Clive Barker in Episode 151 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Clive Barker on Lemarchand’s box:

“I wanted to have access to hell in the book and in the first movie, explored by something rather different than drawing a circle on the floor with magical symbols around it. That seemed rather stale and rather old. So I went back to something that I remembered from my childhood. My grandfather was a ship’s cook, and he came back from the Far East very often with strange little toys. One of the things he brought back was a puzzle box, which obsessed me for a long time. … So when I went back to the problem of how to open the doors of hell, the idea of [using] a puzzle box seemed interesting to me. You know, the image of a cube is everywhere in world culture, whether it’s the Rubik’s Cube or the idea of the [Tesseract] in the Avengers movies. There’s a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don’t know why that is, I don’t have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.”

Clive Barker on fan reactions to his coma:

“There have been a lot of examples recently—it happened to Anne Rice—where the readers’ interest in when the next book is coming along takes precedence over the author’s health. And I think that’s regrettable. … It doesn’t have to be bad health. It could be losing your husband, as it was with Anne Rice, who was losing her husband Stan. And the fans were not very kind—they were impatient, frankly—with Anne, wanting her to just stop moaning and groaning and mourning and get back to writing. That is cruel. That is inhuman, actually. It’s not what I would hope my fans would be first concerned with, but it turned out to be the case with some of the fans—I say only some, I think a small number, but they certainly had some volume to their voices.”

Clive Barker on religion and homosexuality:

“I’m a gay man, living an out life for a long time, and it’s tiring and anger-making to hear people continue to spit out the same old dreary cliches about the fact that gay men are doing something unnatural, and there’ll be a price to pay when the Rapture happens. … But life has a tendency to prove that [religious leaders] have their own secrets, very often. Even in the time that I’ve been alive and doing interviews, there have been revenges taken by time and circumstance, which have revealed the true nature of many of these people, whether they’ve had their hands in the pockets of their congregation, or whether they’ve had their hands on the breasts of their congregations, they have been very bad men, by and large, and I think that is its own revenge, its own reward, from my point of view. I’d like to think more people would pay attention to what those lessons are telling us, but they don’t.”

Clive Barker on the power of fantasy:

“[At my readings] there will be gay readers who will say, ‘Thank you. I was 15 when I first read one of your books, and it made me realize that Clive Barker was also gay, and that it was cool to live in the world that way.’ So that’s a nice thing, but there are also people who want to believe in the fantastic, not as a reality, but as a way to shape their lives. You know, I’ve lived more by the rules of fantasy than I have by the rules of reality, because the rules of reality are rotten. … If you look at what politics tells you and what Ray Bradbury tells you, well, then I want to learn about the world from Ray, not from politicians. You know, Ray had a lot of wonderful, kind things to say. Healing things, if you will. He made me feel better when I was ill in the soul.”