Rating: 
Summary: One Streeetched Novel
Review: Clive is still Clive, and he entranced me in COLDHEART CANYON with his rainbow prose and deft touches. This is my fourth Clive Barker book, and sadly, it couldn't compare to The Damnation Game, Weaveworld or volume one of Books of Blood.Take it's length for example. Over 750 pages, it could have been easily squashed to 500, or maybe 400 pages. I flipped pages in slight frustration at the seemingly endless subplots that seem to pop up in the book. Some scenes could have been compacted, as I felt my attention dropping when I read them, no matter how gruesome or frightening the image was. Todd Pickett is classic Barker characterization, and so is Tammy. Both are full characters, and that somewhat saved the novel. Katya Lupi appeared slightly empty to me, and her moods seemed to gravitate haphazardly. I found Barker's version of Hollywood pleasantly different from what I had expected. I was expecting an entire chapter of the general Hollywood cliches, but Barker knew well enough to cut to the chase and get on with the plot. Overall, a commendable effort. But too long, too dragged and perhaps a little too spiced.
Rating: 
Summary: GLORIFIED PORN
Review: A waste of everybody's time and energy, Barker's talent. I am open-minded, and I hung in there. Whichever characters survive this nightmare, I simply don't care anymore. Maybe the book is a struggle between good and evil; if so, this good reader became too weary of the filth to continue. Quite limited and negative view of women in this book. No love, no inspiration, no redemption. The scariest thing about this novel is how many people think it's great literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: I was a little intimidated by the length of this book but I read it all in one night. It was remarkable and this is the Clive that I love dearly. It was a bit wordy and things could have been left out but the other things that I loved about the novel definately made up for it. I especially loved the power that the women held, Tammy was the one that broken the spell of Coldheart Canyon, Maxine was the one that held up Todd's career and Katya was the destructive entity that made the place cursed and of course there is a cameo by one of the most feared women of all time, Lilith. So this novel was an absolute joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: Who the HELL edited this book?????
Review: A full one-third of this book could have been edited out without effecting the story one bit. Wordy? YES !!!! I keep hoping (against hope) that he will come out with a book as fine as Weaveworld, but his writing has changed in style so much that I'm afraid he won't.....ever. This book is as dead as the characters in it are.
Rating: 
Summary: Much, Much Too Long
Review: There's no reason this book had to be nearly 700 pages (hardcover). It goes on and on. A few chapters are devoted to a dog dying, for heaven's sake! They go to the vet, they come home, they go back to the vet, and you keep turning pages. In addition to the careless editing, giant failures in logic undermine the story. The last two sections seem tacked on.
Rating:
Summary: Entrancing at times, empty at others
Review: Coldheart Canyon is an interesting book. I will give it four stars, because it is closer to four than to three, but it deserves little more than 3 and a half. The idea is an interesting one, and it's fun to see Barker dropping Hollywood names, current and past, into the mix. In CC, Barker really goes for the gross out. This is tough to type with a straight face, given the man's propensity for painting gore with the most vivid brush imaginable, but here it seems he resorts to gag-inducing ideas for lack of anything else popping into his brain. Sex is once again, a HUGE topic in this book, and not just of the living human/living human variety. Ghosts, humans, animals, demons, they all like to get their swerve on in this tale. The amounts of bodily fluids and solids bandied about in this novel are staggering. The book goes on too long, as well, and could have used a nice 100-page trimming. Despite all this, Barker's imagination never ceases to amaze. After writing Weaveworld, Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, Everville etc, I would have assumed that his wellspring of strange characters, names and concepts might have run dry by now. Not so. Where else would you find the devil's son, a goat boy with bad anal hygiene and an extreme weakness for breasts tell you his name is Qweftzalfoni? (or something like that anyway...) Barker still commands the ability to create worlds, to make seemingly ridiculous concepts (a tiled room that comes alive and draws you into it) work. This is not his best work, but he is still better than a LOT of authors out there.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly not Clive¿s best, but could have been much worse
Review: Todd Pickett, one of the hottest movie stars of the last decade, faces the downfall of his career when extensive plastic surgery goes terribly wrong. On the run from his fans and the ever bloodthirsty press he hides in the deep woods of Hollywood. The luxurious mansion of the long deceased silent movie actress Katya Lupi seems at first the ideal hiding place. But when he discovers that the house is still inhabited by the ghost of Katya Lupi the place changes into a death trap. The house itself turns out to be a place of evil, where Lilith, the wife of the Devil, is still out for revenge on the murderers of her son. Todd's biggest fan, Tammy Lauper, worried by the sudden disappearance of her idol starts a search for Todd and she creates, without knowing it, what is likely to be the only chance for redemption Todd has left. Let's start with the weakest point of Coldheart Canyon: the plot. Not that it is really bad, but it just does not honour the previous works of Clive. The building-up of the storyline is comparable to what Dean Koontz does in almost all his novels: a normal situation turns bad, then even a bit worse and in the end everything is back to normal after some apocalyptical struggle. Clive Barker can do a lot better. Look at Imajica, to name just one example of a story with a much more original plot. But luckily the king of 'strange' horror can turn a plot that is not that strong into something that is far beyond average, just by applying his personal style. That is exactly what happened with Coldheart Canyon. The complete atmosphere of the book breathes the competence of an extremely talented writer: even the most violent scenes or those weird erotic extravaganzas have something poetic about them. When skin is slowly pealed off the skull of a presumably living person, Clive makes it sound like a sensual act of love. I am really glad that Clive still dares to write some controversially gruesome stuff. For me The Books of Blood still are his best works, because it is clear that while writing those Clive did not suffer from any limitations at all. His later works are a lot cleaner and tend to miss the real spirit of the earlier works. Nevertheless, Coldheart shows that he still masters the 'craft'.
Rating:
Summary: What is the point?
Review: What a time-waster this is...good grief, I kept hoping it would improve or do something, but no...just tripe through and through. What a huge disappointment, can't believe I was stupid enough to keep plowing through it.
Rating:
Summary: Isn't this supposed to be scary???
Review: I'll skip the plot synopsis. I just finished COLDHEART CANYON this morning. Page after page, I kept waiting for the point of the novel to surface. I still can't really tell you why Barker wrote the book. There is no real suspense or fright here, and that is why I read Barker. At his best, he creates complex worlds with rich, lush detail that can scare the pants off the reader. It never happens here. The book rambles on for about 650 pages in the paperback version I read, much, much longer than it deserves to be. There was no reason to go on that long, and ultimately, there is no payoff for the readers' time investment. Part of why he wrote it is to mock the veneer deep world of Hollywood and celebrity, but the in-jokes and references to various power players will go over the average readers head. There are some great ideas here that could have been made into a terrific story if Barker had stuck to the ghosts, the half-breeds and the tiled room of The Devils Country. However those elements are inserted in a wide, meandering tale that seems to be a different book all together. Certain elements appear to be stuck in after the fact when an editor read it and said it doesn't make sense. Take the light that ultimately takes Todd to wherever he is supposed to end up. It first appeared about a third of the way through the book when Barker abruptly kills off a supporting character. Clearly that was inserted into the story when he realized the light couldn't just appear in the last 30 pages out of nowhere. It felt out of place with the rest of the story. And a number of other themes feel the same way, stuck on, and not part of the original equipment.
Oh, there is a fair amount of explicit and perverse sex. Not enough to make it an erotic novel but be aware of it so you're not surprised (or disappointed that there isn't more).
Bottom line, unless you are a huge fan of Clive Barker and wouldn't think of missing a word he has written, this is not worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: Not Barker at his best, but worth reading.
Review: I wish I could say that I liked "Coldheart Canyon" more than I actually did. Clive Barker is one of my favorite writers (and artists), and his more recent book "Abarat" really restored his status for me. However, "Coldheart Canyon" is not a terrible book, it just isn't the top-quality work I often expect from Barker's pen. The interesting thing about "Coldheart Canyon" is that I could see in it his perspectives on Hollywood and California in general. I get the distinct feeling that much of what we see in the characters and the story of the book are sort of "in-jokes," little jabs at people he's known or met since he's been in the United States. There are parodies of Hollywood producers and actors, as well as what seemed to be a somewhat self-conscious look at people who've moved to California from other places. The story centers around a young man and his gradual seduction by a spirit in a haunted house. As the story progresses, we get more and more hints that the spirit in the house (the ghost of a classic Hollywood actress) led a much more scandalous life than anyone really knew about... or at least more than they talked about. Our hero experiences spiritual orgies and debaucheries, all done with Barker's usual flair for the graphic. The feeling I get from "Coldheart Canyon" in the end is that it was trying to be something like a parody of the standard Hollywood expose. The problem with it is that it's taken to such extremes that the funny or wry elements get overshadowed by the more glamorous, dramatic, graphic parts. The ending, also, is somewhat unsatisfying. Barker has definitely written better books than this, but for some hint of what he thinks of Hollywood and his fellow Californians, it still makes for an interesting read.
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