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: 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 Is Correct
Review: First the story captivates you, and then the porn begins. Usually its ok because books get through it and move on with the plot. Not this book. Page after page, the most detailed porn and underside of the rock as this articulate (obviously) gay man can muster.
Plot is second to his getting his rocks off.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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.
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