Rating: 
Summary: Tarantino-esque "Dialogue"
Review: Clive Barkers new book is touted by Quentin Tarantino on the backcover. There's a preface where he talks about his deal with Disney Corp and associated corporate publishing (often the same owners Touchstone publishing for example owned by Disney) he makes some vague remarks about commercialization but the fact that this will make writers increasingly beholden to movie studios and hack directors trained on T.V. commercials doesn't impress him much apparently. What follows fails to balance the ethical & artistic flaws which the forgoing imply.
Rating: 
Summary: Clive Barker misses the mark this time, very disappointing.
Review: What Clive Barker does best, what sets him apart from the likes of Stephen King and the Wannabes, is to write with a furious imagination that kindles the spark of fantasy and brings it to an adult level were it never lie before. His prior works, most notably 'Weaveworld' allowed those of us who think the 'The Wizard of Oz' is a great concept but wish it wasn't so, well childish to have our own 'OZ' complete with Sex, Drugs, Violence and a real Menace that is not for the kids. What he does equally well is to establish living, soul-filled characters that transcend the carbon copy hero's we are so used to (in every, single Stephen King Novell.) Add to that his brilliance as an artist, a director and his ability to visit the 'Oz' concept with 'The Thief Of Always' his book for younger readers and he becomes the most well rounded fantasy figures alive. It is then a great mystery how something as empty and unfulfilling as 'Coldheart Canyon' came about.
This story of redemption, at a price, is filled with generic characters, forced plot lines and unoriginal narrative. It's Clive Barker on autopilot as it reads like something someone imitating Clive may write rather than a real work by the author himself.
A semi ' aging movie star, Todd Picket, agrees to plastic surgery as a career facelift. This makes little sense when you consider the considerable power Middle aged men have in Hollywood right now, Todd is about Tom Cruises age and I don't think Tom needs a facelift anytime soon to get women. Also, when you consider that Middle aged men are now regularly staring with Twenty ' something women as leads (think Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Sean Connery) the thought that a man would fear laugh lines in a time when maturity is in is preposterous. The Procedure has to go wrong for the plot to work; the actor needs a hideaway to lick his wounds and ends up in the pad of a 1920's screen vixen.
Below the house is a room constructed by the devils wife, Lillith, with Katya Lupi (the Screen Vixen) uses to stay young. Outside the house, the ghosts of dead stars roam having tasted the rooms' power and wanting back. They also have orgies and breed with the local wildlife producing offspring so the Author has monsters to kill people off with violently.
Nothing really happens once the set up is in place, sure there's lots of sex, lots of terrible things, but nothing interesting, there's no plot, no point to it all. The background story of Katya and the film stars of the Twenties and thirties would have made for a better book. Todd is a boring self-serving idiot, Katya is supposed to be our Villain, but she does everything to be loved then kills what she loves without explanation of why she's like this. Tammy, the Todd Fanatic who saves the day, sort of, is an oaf who's made a shambles of her life in the pointless pursuit of a man who only exists to her through film.
The concept here is an exercise in Hollywood stereotypes with a horror fantasy twist but the result is tired and labored. Clive was here before producing the true story 'Gods and Monsters' to Academy Award Winning effect. What Clive misses her is that beneath the stereotypes must exist real people, but he only allows that at the very end, by then we don't care any more. These clones can't carry a 600+ page novel as they have no depth and therefore we simply don't care what happens to them, or this book. 'Coldheart Canyon' lacks heart and has no soul. Go rent 'Gods & Monsters' on Video.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent! Tammy Lauper rocks!
Review: When famous actor Todd Pickett goes missing after blotched plastic surgery, his most fanatical fan, a fat housewife named Tammy Lauper, decides to try to find
her missing heartthrob. She tracks him to Coldheart Canyon, a great mansion haunted by old Hollywood stars and controlled by Katya Lupi, a silent screen star whose youthful ethereal beauty is still strangely preserved despite decades of hard living, and who will do anything to keep Todd by her side.
What worked for me:
Tammy rocks! She starts off as a stereotypical character, a fat housewife obsessed with a famous actor; but she turns out to be a tough, sweet-natured and intelligent woman.
Size-wise, although her weight isn't mentioned, I expected she's a rather big girl.
What didn't work for me:
Not enough Tammy in this book, and she should have been given a love interest.
Overall:
I highly recommend this suspense-filled horror novel. Tammy Lauper is a great heroine; do not judge her right away. She becomes a wonderfully well-defined character as the story progresses.
Warning: There are mentions of the occult in this book, as well as some very violent and sexual scenes, including rape and bestiality.
(...)
Rating: 
Summary: Barker's getting lazy
Review: This is the work of an author whose career hasn't depended on writing at his best for some time. Compare this book to Books of Blood- no contest. I enjoyed the glimpses of Hollywood behind-the-scenes, but that's about where the fun stopped. Barker does show his talent and potential when the action hots up in the room of magical tiles, but he's past having potential- he should be knocking our socks off by now, considering how long he's been at it. The tile-room was not bad, but a little too familiar with magical tricks he's pulled in his other books, like Galilee.
I understand that Mr. Barker's dog died during the writing of this book, and I understand that was traumatic, but why the hell do we have to hear about it? The dog wasn't related to the rest of the story at all. I'm not interested in the damn dog. I'm sorry but there we have it. Clive Barker is capable of better than this. He used to be, anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Great story once you get past everything else
Review: I loved this book. At every turn I was disgusted, amazed, horrified, and awed by Clive Barker's newest creation. While not quite as good as the other two books I have read by him (The Thief of Always and Imajica), I was still pleased with the time I spent reading it (including staying up until one in the morning on a school night to finish it). While the book has a fantastic story, showing all the pitfalls of Hollywood self absorption, it unfortunately has a great deal of sexually explicit images, especially between pages 150 and 250 or so, which will drive many readers away before Clive Barker really gets going. Those who do make it through, however, are in for a treat.
If you wanted to know the entire story before you read the book, you'd probably be looking elsewhere right now, so I won't go into it here, the other reviewers already did a good enough job with it, anyway. This book is long, however most of this length is made up of description. The story itself could be told in probably around 200 to 300 pages, yet Barker decided to make us intimate with his characters, so he goes into great depth in describing the emotions and thoughts of each player in this horror story. This is in sharp contrast to Imajica, where the book could have been stretched out to 1500 pages (or 900 in the case of the awesome big version with the apendix), without ruining the book. Imajica's great story made me fail to notice the somewhat meager character development. This book's character development seems almost more important than the story, but the story steams on forward just the same.
Rating:
Summary: AMAZING, EROTIC, FANTASTIC, REWARDING!
Review: I really like this novel. Sure it was longer, but that's part of it's charm. This novels very erotic, which I like. I love the way Clive describes sex, the way he'll set the scenery up, the characters, what they are doing and how and they do it. There's nothing perverted about it. I find it more truer to life. And I love the way all the charcters are flawed in his novels, just like life, and the way the characters interact with each other.
Clive blows my mind with his imagination. My own imagination is a pretty heated one like his, but man, Clive just keeps on comin'. I truely appreciate him.
When coming to the end of the novel, it's very rewarding, I feel like Clive's taught me something that others aren't aware of, I've been let in to his world.
Rating:
Summary: If you like gore dressed up in twisted porn...
Review: I picked this up because it was on sale and because the author's name was familiar. Would I recommend it? Not particularly. The story gives a backhand to everyone and everything in Hollyweird, and while admittedly there are some very sick souls in the modern Babylon, the sickest and most depraved seems to be this author.
It's impossible to become emotionally involved with Coldheart Canyon's characters because frankly, none of them are likeable. What was probably intended as complex personalities simply comes across as a weird mix of the neurotic and the narcissistic. It isn't a mix that works. There are no heroes and no heroines, which might be real life were it not for the grotesquely fantastic veer into an occult world that, while imaginative enough, never quite lives up to the surreal sensualism that readers are expected to believe.
True horror strikes on a much deeper level than this book. Even at horror's most fantastic, a reader should shiver with a slight sense that maybe, just maybe, it could happen. There might be a monster in the closet - or in this case, in the basement. Instead, this book offers that there's a bad movie in the basement and, as the story concludes, it's past time for it to end.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of Dragging and Gross scenes
Review: This book is full of dragging detail and gross scenes. There is a little bit of sickness for everyone. Lots of sick sex scenes. Some discusting kill scenes. Some ghosts and an angel. Oh and some characters that you end up hoping will just die so the book will end. The book drags on and on. I gave it three stars because the discusting details are pretty good. I have to give Barker credit for not disappointing me on the gore. I don't think i could really in good concience recommend this book to anyone. Maybe to someone who just wanted to skim for certain kinds of scenes.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, but not profound
Review: I enjoyed Coldheart Canyon, but I wouldn't put it in the same class as Gallilee or Sanctuary. There wasn't the depth of character that Barker usually provides, and it seemed to me that he just wasn't his usual meticulous self in crafting the small details that characterize his work. I kept wondering where Tammy got the money to fly to LA, get a rental car, and stay in a motel on her husband's pay as a baggage handler, for example. And I couldn't make sense of the timeline around Marco's flight from the house and the events that logically followed from it (I won't say more to avoid spoiling a significant plot development).
That said, I didn't want to put it down, and I did enjoy it. Unlike his other works, though, I probably won't want to read it a second time.
Rating:
Summary: Will this book ever end?
Review: It's only my obsessive compulsive need to finish a book I've started that qualifies me to write this review. It just goes on and on with insignificant detail about insignificant events, flora, fauna, people, whatever. I didn't care about anyone in the book. I didn't care what happened at any point in the book. The very detailed and explicit sexual scenes weren't erotic. The gore was gratuitous, and like the book, went on and on and on and on. The supernatural scenes weren't scary. The plot wasn't interesting.
My mother-in-law, bless her heart, used to tell you (if you didn't get up and leave), everything that had happened to her from the moment she got up that morning, until the moment she started talking to you, without ever relating anything remotely interesting. This book is more tiresome. There was a climactic moment about the middle of the book. The book could have ended there, and it would have been a waste of time, but far less time, and it would have been a better book.
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