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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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
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: 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: 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.
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