Rating: 
Summary: Barker (Almost) Returns
Review: Those dreading another limp, mushy delivery from Barker (think Galilee or Sacrament) can release that collectively held breath. Barker is back...sort of. While Coldheart Canyon is no Imajica or Weaveworld in scope of vision or imagination, the suspense, mythology, and characterizations herein certainly make up for the new-age, nice-guy deliveries of late. Here Barker offers Hollywood satire sandwiched between the opposing forces of spirituality. It doesn't have the bloodied edge of Cabal or his short fiction, and there are jaw-dropping discrepencies and flat-out mistakes in the plotting--why is the quality of editing always inversely proportional to the projected revenue? And yet there are scenes painted within that resonate with beauty and dread as only Barker can accomplish, and it's good to feel that chill again. It's also nice to have a decent horror novel releasd this year, with Dan Simmons doing suspense fiction and Dean Koontz doing what I can only describe as evangelical suspense fiction. Along with Black House, Coldheart Canyon has reaffirmed my belief in the genre. Stay tuned.
Rating:
Summary: Barker Crosses Over
Review: When asked by a more devoted Clive Barker fan what I thought of "Coldheart Canyon," I told him I couldn't put it down, but quickly added the disclaimer that he probably would not like the book as much as I, a more casual Barker reader. "Coldheart" does have many of the elements Barker fans want: a magical world existing parallel to our reality populated by seductive and sadistic supernatural beings, all brought to life by Barker's vivid prose. What it's not, though, is scary. Suspenseful at parts, yes, but don't pick it up expecting any chills to run up your spine.
That said, this "Hollywood ghost story" is non-stop fun. The novel begins much like an one of the cheesy old movies it references, with the purchase of a room from a Transylvanian monestery and re-built in the Hollywood estate--known as Coldheart Canyon--of a Katya Lupi, a hedonistic movie star of the 1920s and 30s. Cut to the 1990s, when action star Todd Pickett, after getting a botched chemical peel, rents Katya's former dream palace to hide from the media while he recovers. Of course, Katya's not really dead, as Todd finds out. There's a lot of sex and ghosts (a true orgy of the dead), demons, more sex, Satan's wife and one of their children, and Tammy, the overweight housewife who heads the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, in search of what really happened to the man she adores.In the book's acknowledgments, Barker writes he originally conceived of this novel as a Hollywood satire. Through much of "Coldheart Canyon" it's evident he did not totally abandon his initial plan, adeptly skewering Tinsel Town. That his observations have a ring of truth to them--so much more so than alleged roman a clefs of Jackie Collins--makes them all the more fun to read (unless, of course, you're not into Hollywood dish). In some cases Barker uses the spirits of real stars, like Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow and Roman Navarro. While it helps in achieving a certain degree of verisimilitude, I wondered if there's any legal ramifications to portraying these stars as orgiastic ghosts biding their time until they can enter the Devil's Country. This is perhaps Barker's most accessible--and mainstream--novel to date, which may be why some Barker purists hate it. It's sort of a dumbed-down version of Barker's earlier work, "The Great and Secret Show," crossed with a show business pot boiler. In Clive Barker's crossover hit, the scariest monsters are found in Hollywood and Malibu, not Coldheart Canyon.
Rating:
Summary: Raising Hell In Hollywood
Review: In this horror-satire, Clive has crafted a witty ghost story that shares a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. It concerns what happens when superstar Todd Pickett is disfigured during a botched plastic surgery, and is moved into a seeming deserted mansion to recover. There, he is seduced by the mansions sexy (and immortal) owner, and introduced to the ancient horrors that live in the basement. Out to save him, obsessed fan Tammy Lauper (a character all us fans can identify with to some degree,) who in turn discovers that the ghosts of old Hollywood haunt the mansion's grounds, and that she must go the extra distance to save the man she idolizes so much. A man who may not want saving. Irreverent, amusing and epic, this is both classic Clive Barker and an interesting departure from his norm. It is great to see such a lovingly rendered heroine in Tammy (who gets to do many things she only dreamed of,) and even the vain Todd is likable (especially when dealing with his disgust at his own shallowness.) I especially loved the openning passages, which rang with the same portents as his much earlier Hellbound Heart. My only grip is the second climax, which while it entertaining, seems a little tacked on. But then again, it may just be Clive's little dig at all those tacked on Hollywood endings. Don't you just Love them.
Rating: 
Summary: Ghosts of the Rich & Famous
Review: Barker fans have been anxiously awaiting a new novel from Clive ever since Galilee was published in 1998. Coldheart Canyon (2001), his latest effort to see print, is Barker's take on the classic ghost story genre as well as an exposé of Hollywood and its hypocrisy and idiosyncrasies as only Barker can tell it. Coldheart Canyon will not disappoint Barker's fans and is likely to win over many, many others to the work of this Renaissance-like talented artist of astonishing imagination and vision. Willem Matthias Zeffer is on an expedition to find unique objects d'art for the great silent film star, Katya Lupi, to fill her "fake Spanish mansion her fortune has allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons." In Romania Zeffer finds a treasure the likes of which no American has ever set eyes. Deep in the vaults of the fortress is a room, the walls of which are covered by thousands of painted tiles depicting a hunt "of every kind... pigs, dragons, women... the whole thing... filled with obscenities." The tiles tell various stories, many of them filled with scenes of sexual depravity as well as scenes of blasphemy. Father Sandru tells Zeffer the origin of the tiles are masked in mystery and that the room is "the Devil's Country."
Zeffer determines to build a room for Katya as a part of her new mansion and to have the tiles removed from Romania and taken to Hollywood. He has no idea what the tiles really contain or the effect they will have upon others. Having stirred his readers' imaginations with "the Devil's Country" being transported to Hollywood, Barker transports his readers from the 1920s to 1990s. The book's attention is turned to Todd Pickett, "one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema." Todd, however, is facing some bad times with worse to come. His latest picture is a bust and he doesn't have "the drawing power" he "had back in the old days." Worried because his own father "lost his looks with remarkable speed," Todd makes a decision-to undergo plastic surgery. And then something goes horribly wrong.
Trying to elude reporters and fans alike after his surgery, Todd cannot return to his home in Bel-Air and keep his secret safe. Instead, he is told about a mansion in the Hollywood Hills that is available to him-a place off the beaten track, away from tourists. Instead of a place of seclusion, Todd discovers that he and his bodyguard are not alone. The owner of the mansion, Katya Lupi, still lives in the guesthouse on the estate. He finds yellowed posters of her movies, and a woman who claims to be the star herself, but she looks as she did when she was thirty years old when, instead, she "must be approaching a hundred years of age." Todd also discovers that Coldheart Canyon is still a very popular place-- with ghosts-- hundreds of them, many of them famous stars of Hollywood's past, some of them wanna-be stars who never made it to the screen, but they have all made it to Coldheart Canyon. As only Clive Barker can imagine them, "death had done nothing to dim the libidos" of the revenants that haunt Coldheart Canyon. Barker has the readily identifiable phantoms of famous movie stars engaged in all sorts of explicit, sexual combinations to act upon their eternal lust and with years of practice, the ghosts have mastered all of the possible arts of copulation-even going so far to have mated with wild animals in the canyon, producing some very bizarre offspring: part ghost, part beast, part human, many with identifiable features of famous stars. Coldheart Canyon contains some of the most grotesque beasties Barker has given birth to since Cabal (filmed as Night Breed). Like Hollywood itself, however, filled with illusions, false promises and hypocrisy, neither Katya Lupi and her warm embraces nor the estate at Coldheart Canyon are what they seem to be as Todd Pickett and the reader soon discovers.
Barker pulls a nifty reversal on a theme of terror that Stephen King brought to life in his novel Misery in which a deranged fan becomes a famous writer's worst living nightmare. Tammy Lauper, president of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society and "Todd's Number One Fan" fits all of the stereotypes of a zealously devoted female fan: overweight, stuck in a lifeless marriage to a redneck husband, and childless, Tammy has the world's largest collection of Todd Pickett memorabilia. Her house is filled with unique items she cherishes and she finds that spending time with her memorabilia is one of her few life fulfilling experiences. But when Todd goes missing, Tammy leaves her home in Sacramento to find and bring succor to her hero. In so doing, she sets upon a world of discovery, not just about the terrors that lurk in Coldheart Canyon, but about the man she idolizes and, more importantly, about herself, becoming a most unlikely main character and heroic figure. Coldheart Canyon finds Barker at his creative and imaginative finest. In spite of containing some of Barker's most sexually explicit and outlandish scenes to date, the novel is unexpectedly also one of his most appealingly mainstream novels to date. Barker gives readers a sense of justice and hope in the final pages of Coldheart Canyon. Instead of reaching for even greater, additional heights of terror in a gore fest as may be found in many of Barker's earlier works, the final chapters of Coldheart Canyon, although still filled with revelations, contain a sense of redemption and renewal. All in all, Coldheart Canyon is an amazing and accomplished work. It contains many of the elements that first brought Barker to readers' attention and to fame: his curious mixture of sexuality, sensuality and graphic, gut wrenching, visual horror as well as highly original apparitions of the fantastic. But Coldheart Canyon, like most of Barker's full-length works of the last few years, also displays elements of an artist who is still evolving and taking his craft in new and different directions and heights. It is an evolution and a journey many veteran as well as new fans of Clive Barker will want to continue on with the author in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Over-the-top, lurid, long...and absolutely UNFORGETTABLE!
Review: Clive Barker is a writer who never takes the subtle way out. It's a cliche that sometimes the scariest things are those things which are only hinted it or suggested (shower scene in PSYCHO is often trotted out as an example). Barker seems to believe that he can induce fear by pounding us with graphic details...not for the faint of heart. And he's such an adept writer, that he often succeeds, mostly because his imagination dares to go where no one has gone before. COLDHEART CANYON deals with the movie business. A '20s era silent-movie siren has a room installed in her house made entirely of tile taken from a monestery in Romania. This tile, some 30,000 pieces, may actually have been built by Lilith, the wife of Satan, and it seems to have...shall we say...remarkable qualities. The '20s era movie star and all her friends and fellow stars are transfixed and transformed by the power of this room, known as "The Devil's Country." Nothing subtle here. Then we skip forward to present day Hollywood, where star Todd Pickett makes the mistake of getting plastic surgery and suffers severe damage. He takes refuge from the press at the long abandoned "pleasure palace" of the '20s era star, Katya, that he has never heard of. No one seems to live in the house, but we soon find out otherwise. I've only scratched the surface of this wildy imaginative, almost bloated, novel. It's grand to read a book that takes on, with great humor, the foibles of the movie industry, and turns that satire into a horror novel of massive proportions. The house has one mystery after another, and the fates of the people who cross paths with the house, its grounds, its "residents" and especially The Devil's Country are drawn out in exquisite detail. Many have criticised the book for being too long, but I find Barker to be a writer of such power that you get swept along with long passages that don't seem important, but compel you anyway. Some have criticized an early passage, for example, in which Todd deals with taking his very sick dog to the vet's and the aftermath of this rather mundane situation. But he's a huge movie star, so we're interested in seeing how those around him react to him. And it helps to establish Todd as a real person...not just a generic star. We sympathize with him then, which is good, because it's hard to hold that sympathy later on. And just when the dog seems forgotten... Like Barker's other novels, such as Weaveworld and the startlingly beautiful Imajica, he mixes intense, believable feelings like those we might have in a love story (Barker conveys how love can grow in unlikely places VERY well) with some of the most graphic horror anywhere. We are thus given characters who seem very real and palbable to us, and they are thrust into the most outlandish situations anywhere. Whereas Stephen King makes horror "believable" by sticking with mundane, everyday details (I like King very, very much...his approach is different but great as well), Barker hammers us with the power of his imagery. The thingst that happen are so shocking, so horrible, it almost takes your breath away. COLDHEART CANYON is great because it takes place in a world we might recognize, not in another land altogether (such as in IMAJICA). It's heroine comes from the most unlikely sources, and she is an inspiration and a wonderful achievement for Barker. Be warned: the graphic horror is just that...graphic in the EXTREME. And the scenes of sexuality are just about the most horrific, gruesome and twisted you'll see ANYWHERE. It takes a brave heart to venture into COLDHEART CANYON. If you've got that, I believe you'll be richly rewarded.
Rating:
Summary: More Barker Brilliance
Review: SUMMARY: Action movie hero Todd Pickett is losing his foothold on Hollywood and the cinema masses, and undergoes plastic surgery to turn back the hands of time. The surgery is botched, and Todd flees into hiding at an old Hollywood mansion built in the 1920s. Beautiful but bizarre, the mansion lies in Coldheart Canyon, a crater outside Los Angeles that seems to be hidden in plain sight. Todd soon encounters the mysterious owner of the estate, a 1920's silent movie starlet named Katya, who is neither dead nor alive. The rich tapestry of her illustrious life is revealed, and the horrifying magic she controls begins to consume Todd, about whom rumors in the industry are running rampant. Will Todd be consumed by Katya's evil, or can he break free with the help of his chubby fan/stalker? WHY YOU'LL LIKE IT: True Barker fans will love the unfolding saga of Barker's limitless imagination for beauty and evil, and Hollywood gossip mongers will be delighted by the names Barker drops, both of present and past celebrities. The pretentiousness and emotional bankruptcy of Hollywood is clearly on display. As usual, Barker's characterizations and painstaking mastery of detail is unsurpassed. WHY YOU WON'T: Many people are put off by the length of Barker's epics, but if you hang in there you will ulitmately be rewarded. Some passages do seem superfluous at the time they are read, but are recalled later in the narrative to advance the plot. Prudes won't like Barker's unabashed characterization of sexuality and sensuality. BOTTOM LINE: Like Anne Rice fans, Barker's fans will celebrate every page, and at the conclusion will be unsatisfied only because the journey is over.
Rating: 
Summary: Had good potential, but ultimately fails
Review: I realise that Barker has an excellent imagination, but sometimes i think he tries too hard, i would like to see more of a storyteller's discipline in his books, because he has the potential to be great (Damnation Game) in that style. This book started out very promising, i liked the idea of the secret world of the weird tile painting, with its fantastic sun and misshapen beasts. I also liked very much the bluntly realistic description of the Hollywood lifestyle, all false and pretentious, and one sympathises with the actor Todd Pickett more because of the way this lifestyle sucks him dry, finally sacrificing him in a horrible plastic surgery accident which ruins his career. However when he comes to take refuge in the Coldheart Canyon house, things start to go downhill in the book. Far too much time is spent here, and the story almost becomes centred upon this house and its weird little secret. I would like to have seen Pickett brutalised by the media over his accident, instead of the soft surrender at the home of his agent, where he is humiliated by the Hollywood set. The love-interest-triangle between the evil Katya Lupesci and his gullible and appropriately named super-fan Tammy also drags on a bit. And somewhere we lose total sympathy with our would be hero Pickett. Indeed at the end of the book Pickett is relegated to just another character, an effect which doesnt work very well im afraid, he becomes dull and confused. As for the 'other' element of the novel, the supernatural dimension, it works well for a while, but then degenerates into something resembling a B-movie plot. I was seldom surprised by anything that happened in the novel after Pickett leaves the Hollywood party. My enjoyment of the novel effectively ended there, and there was what... a hundred or so pages to go? The most important part of a novel lies in its ending, simply because its the very last thing we remember when we put it down, and it recalls in our minds all that went before, this is primarily where this book fails.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe not his best, but a great read...
Review: From evidence in the author's introduction, I do wonder if this book was more difficult to produce than his others. I guess it does lack the liquid flow of imagery and energy that some of his other pieces have; but, to be fair, he is puppeteering an immense cast in this work, and some of the clumsiness almost goes hand-in-hand with that effort. Still, it was a page-turner, and had both Barker's shuddering horrors and his dry humour in spades. The book's format is really interesting. A climax comes early, and then Barker follows the characters well into the aftermath. The climax is so savage it's almost as if he's holding you afterwards, comforting you, soothing you; certainly the characters soothe each other. A reference to human sexuality? Well, maybe. The book does has its fair share of explicit sex. And if you don't know anything about the artist Hieronymus Bosch, you will at the end of this volume. I definitely recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: an insider's masterful touch...
Review: okay, i just slagged off heavily about "abarat" so i feel obliged to balance the scales by saying coldheart canyon is the only book i can remember literally not being able to put down. barker lives in hollywood and must have an outsiders love/hate for the place. it stuns me how much he was able to squeeze into this novel and make it work: it is, first and foremost, an excellent horror story, but it's also a modern dorian gray and sunset blvd. it is an excellent commentary on fame, fortune, hollywood, desire, sexual deviance, evil, the hollowness of superstardom. it's all in there and it's done well. what barker also does well is create a truly sexual story that is also a horror tale. the characters are full and rich, the atmosphere spot on, the telling of the tale tight and interwoven. this should have been a quartet, not the lame "abarat" monster he has created. more like this please, mr. barker!
Rating:
Summary: Don't Go Through that Door
Review: Todd Pickett, movie superstar, is an actor who has built his career on his looks and now they're fading as he wanders through his thirties. So he decides to get a facelift and while recovering from the not so good results, he finds an old mansion, that had been built by now forgotten silent-film star Katya Lupi, in Coldheart Canyon to hide away in. In the middle of the night a few days after arriving, he meets an "intruder" who is, he soon finds out, not an intruder at all, but the true owner of the house, a dramatically still-youthful Katya. She promises him love, but instead what he gets are the horrors of both the canyon itself and the terrors of a special room in the house. When modern-day people step inside it, the pictorial tiles dissolves into a different reality and they've entered another world, The Devil's Country. Clive Barker is the master of making other worlds and he's topped himself with "Coldheart Canyon." Five stars from me for this super book. Reviewed by Stephanie Sane
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