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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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