Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“[Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the farthest reaches of the imagination.”—Washington Post From The Books of Blood to Hellraiser to Imajica, Abarat, and Mister B. Gone, Clive Barker’s extraordinary vision knows no bounds. With Coldheart Canyon, the New York Times bestselling master of dark fantasy who has been called “a cross between Stephen King and Gabriel Garcia Marquez” (Boston Herald) thrills readers with a “Hollywood ghost story” as audacious and chilling as anything he (or anyone else) has ever written. USA Today calls it, “Endlessly entertaining…wickedly enjoyable,” and fans everywhere will agree—a tense and winding trip down into the hellish depths of Coldheart Canyon is well worth making.

From Publishers Weekly

HBarker fans may breathe a sigh of relief. That the Walt Disney Company is paying $8 million for ancillary rights to the author's forthcoming for-all-ages novel series, The Arabat Quartet (first volume due out in 2002), doesn't mean the British master of dark fantasy has lost his savage bite. Barker's new novel is a ferocious indictment of (and backhanded tribute to) Hollywood Babylon, depicted through Barker's glorious imagination as a nexus of human and inhuman evil where fleshly pursuits corrupt the spirit. It's also one ripping ghost story, spooky and suspenseful, as well as a departure for Barker in that here, as never before, the fantastic mingles with the real, kind of.Many ghosts haunt the titular canyon, and some of them are the shades of men and women we already know as shadows of the silver screen: Victor Mature makes an appearance, as do George Sanders, Mary Pickford and many others. When alive, these stars and their colleagues were drawn by the beautiful, rapacious film star Katya Lupi to her magnificent home in Los Angeles's Coldheart Canyon. What kept them at the house, even after death, is the incredible room in its lowest story. Assembled from thousands of painted tiles, that room brought to California in the 1920s from an ancient monastery in Romania is literally alive with evil; the tiles depict a world that mortals may enter, and within which the Queen of Hell has condemned a nobleman to hunt forever, or until he entraps her son. The room's powers bestow timeless youth on some, including Katya, but give rise to monstrous entities as well. In the present day, into this horrific place enter several modern sorts, most notably A-list film hero Todd Pickett and a dowdy woman, head of Todd's fan club, whose courage and good sense mark her as the novel's hero. The narrative rocks, as Barker's always do, with intense violence and sex sacred, profane and grotesque; a torrent of intent and emotion from the depraved to the sublime; and, here, an impressive thematic excavation of the interplay between illusion and reality, the fantastic and the real. Many of the players without famous names are reminiscent, nastily, of known celebrities; decoding this roman … clef is fun. But entertainment is only one card Barker flashes. Along with the others a fluid writing style; a canvas whose twisted originality rivals Bosch; a depth of theme; and an understanding of the human yearning for good and evil alike they add up to a royal flush, one of the most accomplished, and most notable, novels of the year. (On sale Oct. 8.) Forecast: Major ad/promo, including a five-city author tour, plus the book's excellence and the buzz surrounding Barker's Disney deal, as well as a dynamite b&w cover photo of the author as an old-time film star, will make this novel Barker's most popular and most talked-about book to date. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

It is 1916 in the Hollywood of Theda Bara and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and silent film star Katya Lupi receives a magnificent gift: an entire room constructed of hand-painted tiles removed from a Romanian monastery and installed, piece by piece, on her Hollywood estate. Not only is the room an aesthetic masterpiece but it is also possessed by the Devil. Katya, a woman of strong desires and appetites, quickly learns to use its powers to her advantage, ensnaring the souls of other cinema legends who share her thirst for beauty, fame, and fortune. From this dangerous precipice, Barker, whose numerous best-selling novels (Galilee, etc.) and experience as a film producer have won him a loyal following, entices his readers to leap into a fantastical world populated by ghostly beasts that roam the hills of a modern-day Tinseltown. His masterly descriptions of this world and the pathological behavior that occurs within it provide an eerie realism, compelling the reader to venture further. Essential for Barker fans, though others may be disappointed in the unevenness that results from the emphasis on plot at the expense of character development.-Nancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In 1920, a glamorous movie vamp and her manager go shopping in her homeland, Romania. They purchase the panorama on the walls of a subterranean room in an ancient fortress-turned-monastery. The painted-tile picture depicts a vast and obscene hunt, and virtually every tile contains a scene of sadistic sex between people, animals, and monsters. The tiles are remounted in the star's mansion in Coldheart Canyon, a Hollywood residential area that is, by the twenty-first century, hard to find and harder to leave. A devotee of action star Todd Pickett finds the place for him, though, when, after a face-lift gone awry, he needs to retreat from paparazzi and public. The head of his fan club finds it, too, but not before Todd discovers the vamp, her 1920s beauty intact, still on the premises. Her manager is there, too, and the fan-club president encounters him shortly before being whisked off by ghosts, only to resurface later to fight, with various other characters, for Todd's soul. For the hunt restarts every time new prey comes to it. Mayhem, sex, and namedropping abound in best-selling horror novelist-filmmaker Barker's latest, but they seem only ploys to pump up prurient interest in an opus whose every episode is unconscionably drawn out. Despite his success, Barker has none of Stephen King's or Peter Straub's talent for bringing settings and characters to life. This book should have been one of Barker's potboiler flicks, instead. Then, after 90 minutes or so, it would be over. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Washington Post

“[Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the farthest reaches of the imagination.... ”

Maxine Hong Kingston, Washington Post Book World

“Barker has an unparalleled talent for envisioning other worlds.”

Atlanta Journal & Constitution

“A writer of stunning imagination.”

Kirkus Reviews

“One of our most inventive and risk-taking writers.”

Time Out (London)

“...in the language of fear, he has no equals.”

Kirkus

“Barker possesses one of contemporary fictions’ wildest and finest imaginations.”

Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Unfolds with genuine momentum, in the vigorous style of a fully engaged storyteller.”

USA Today

“Wickedly enjoyable... endlessly entertaining...a powerhouse of a novel... irresistible.”

think Anne Rice meets Jacqueline Susann.”

“Barker’s vision is impressively bizarre

The Philadelphia Inquirer

“When you’re in the mood for forgettable escapism, nobody does it better.”

The Baltimore Sun

“Riveting.”

From the Back Cover

Hollywood has made a star of Todd Pickett. But time is catching up with him. He doesn't have the perfect looks he had last year. After plastic surgery goes awry, Todd needs somewhere to hide away for a few months while his scars heal.As Todd settles into a mansion in Coldheart Canyon -- a corner of the city so secret it doesn't even appear on any map -- Tammy Lauper, the president of his fan club, comes to the City of Angels determined to solve the mystery of Todd's disappearance. Her journey will not be an easy one. The closer she gets to Todd the more of Coldheart Canyon's secrets she uncovers: the ghosts of the A-list stars who came to the Canyon for wild parties; Katya Lupi, the cold-hearted, nowforgotten star for whom the Canyon was named, who is alive and exquisite after a hundred years; and, finally, the door in the bowels of Katya's dream palace that reputedly open up to another world, the Devil's Country. No one who has ever ventured to this dark, barbaric corner of hell has returned without their souls shadowed by what they'd seen and done.Mingling an insider's view of modern Hollywood with a wild streak of visionary fantasy, Coldheart Canyon is a book without parallel: an irresistible and unmerciful picture of Hollywood and its demons, told with all the style and raw narrative power that have made Clive Barker's books and films a phenomenon worldwide.

About the Author

Clive Barker is the bestselling author of twenty-two books, including the New York Times bestsellers Abarat; Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War; the Hellraiser and Candyman series, and The Thief of Always. He is also an acclaimed painter, film producer, and director. He lives in Southern California.

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