novel's progress appeared on Barker's website sporadically over the course of the next twelve years, mostly related to the book's progressively swelling length; at one point, Barker predicted that his completed manuscript would reach 1,000-2,000 pages. Updates culminated in a June 2010 Twitter announcement that "the 243,000 words of The Scarlet Gospels merely lacks a publisher". Due to the length of the completed work, the book underwent heavy editing between 2010 and 2013; the novel was finished in September 2013, but no release date was revealed. A year later, the publisher St Martin's Press acquired the rights to publish The Scarlet Gospels and released it on 19 May 2015. Prequel Hellraiser: The Toll is a 2018 horror novella written by Mark Alan Miller and published by Subterranean Press, from a story by Clive Barker. It serves as a sequel to the 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart and a prequel to The Scarlet Gospels, both written by Barker, set thirty years after the events of the former. It focuses on the returning Kirsty Singer, as she once again comes face-to-face with the Hell Priest. Meanwhile, the Priest calls upon a first witness for his plan seen in The Scarlet Gospels. The Toll evolved from the partially written short story Heaven's Reply by Clive Barker that had been in development dating back to 2010. At one point, Heaven's Reply was integrated into a screenplay for a Hellraiser reboot, which would have featured the creator of the Lament Configuration - the Frenchman Lemarchand - and would have opened in the fictional location of Devil's Island. The script was turned in to Dimension Films, but did not move forward. According to Barker, "that was the last anyone heard until news of a sequel surfaced". When Barker didn't know where to take the short story, it was suggested by his collaborators that the plot tie into the events of The Scarlet Gospels. After considering how to do it, Clive Barker's collaborator and author Mark Alan Miller reverse engineered the story into the novella Hellraiser: The Toll to be published by Subterranean Press. The novella received a limited release in February 2018, in two separate editions–a limited edition, with a quantity of 724 clothbound copies made available, and a lettered edition, with an availability of 26 leather-bound copies. It was released in audiobook format on 6 November 2018, narrated by horror film director Tom Holland. References