Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

Janet Maslin

"Unfolds with genuine momentum, in the vigorous style of a fully engaged storyteller."

Maxine Hong Kingston

"Barker has an unparalleled talent for envisioning other worlds."

Time Out

"...in the language of fear, he has no equals."

People Magazine

"Barker’s vision is impressively bizarre—think Anne Rice meets Jacqueline Susann."

People

“Barker’s vision is impressively bizarre—think Anne Rice meets Jacqueline Susann.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer

"When you’re in the mood for forgettable escapism, nobody does it better."

The Baltimore Sun

"Riveting."

Atlanta Journal & Constitution

"A writer of stunning imagination."

Washington Post

"[Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the farthest reaches of the imagination.... "

USA Today

"Wickedly enjoyable... endlessly entertaining...a powerhouse of a novel... irresistible."

Time Out (London)

“...in the language of fear, he has no equals.”

Washington Post

“[Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the farthest reaches of the imagination.... ”

USA Today

“Wickedly enjoyable... endlessly entertaining...a powerhouse of a novel... irresistible.”

The Baltimore Sun

“Riveting.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer

“When you’re in the mood for forgettable escapism, nobody does it better.”

Atlanta Journal & Constitution

“A writer of stunning imagination.”

Martin Morse Wooster

Coldheart Canyon is a mildly entertaining novel.
— Washington Post Book World

Publishers Weekly

Those with the determination to commit to nearly an entire day of listening will be glad they put forth the effort, because this is one impressive production. Barker's 19th book is an epic saga of Hollywood's underbelly, a dazzling commentary on the world of glitz and glamour. With nods to vintage stars and today's hotties, listeners won't have trouble linking the book's characters to their real-life counterparts (e.g., who on earth could Keifer Smutherland be?). The story's darling is one Todd Pickett, an actor who's approaching a certain age and, seeking escape from the limelight, heads to an estate in the remote Coldheart Canyon neighborhood of Hollywood, where he becomes entangled in a fantastical web of ghosts of early movie stars. This mammoth tale is really best for celluloid fanatics and Barker diehards; so-so fans may want to space out the 22 hours of audio over some time. Audiobook veteran Muller rises to the occasion, and his stalwart performance should please Barker. His accents run the gamut, from an old Romanian priest to a pushy film agent. Not for the straitlaced listener, this audiobook hits hard and will stay with listeners for a while. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Forecasts, July 23, 2001). (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

HBarker fans may breathe a sigh of relief. That the Walt Disney Company is paying $8 million for ancillary rights to the author's forthcoming for-all-ages novel series, The Arabat Quartet (first volume due out in 2002), doesn't mean the British master of dark fantasy has lost his savage bite. Barker's new novel is a ferocious indictment of (and backhanded tribute to) Hollywood Babylon, depicted through Barker's glorious imagination as a nexus of human and inhuman evil where fleshly pursuits corrupt the spirit. It's also one ripping ghost story, spooky and suspenseful, as well as a departure for Barker in that here, as never before, the fantastic mingles with the real, kind of. Many ghosts haunt the titular canyon, and some of them are the shades of men and women we already know as shadows of the silver screen: Victor Mature makes an appearance, as do George Sanders, Mary Pickford and many others. When alive, these stars and their colleagues were drawn by the beautiful, rapacious film star Katya Lupi to her magnificent home in Los Angeles's Coldheart Canyon. What kept them at the house, even after death, is the incredible room in its lowest story. Assembled from thousands of painted tiles, that room brought to California in the 1920s from an ancient monastery in Romania is literally alive with evil; the tiles depict a world that mortals may enter, and within which the Queen of Hell has condemned a nobleman to hunt forever, or until he entraps her son. The room's powers bestow timeless youth on some, including Katya, but give rise to monstrous entities as well. In the present day, into this horrific place enter several modern sorts, most notably A-list film hero Todd Pickett and a dowdywoman, head of Todd's fan club, whose courage and good sense mark her as the novel's hero. The narrative rocks, as Barker's always do, with intense violence and sex sacred, profane and grotesque; a torrent of intent and emotion from the depraved to the sublime; and, here, an impressive thematic excavation of the interplay between illusion and reality, the fantastic and the real. Many of the players without famous names are reminiscent, nastily, of known celebrities; decoding this roman clef is fun. But entertainment is only one card Barker flashes. Along with the others a fluid writing style; a canvas whose twisted originality rivals Bosch; a depth of theme; and an understanding of the human yearning for good and evil alike they add up to a royal flush, one of the most accomplished, and most notable, novels of the year. (On sale Oct. 8.) Forecast: Major ad/promo, including a five-city author tour, plus the book's excellence and the buzz surrounding Barker's Disney deal, as well as a dynamite b&w cover photo of the author as an old-time film star, will make this novel Barker's most popular and most talked-about book to date. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It is 1916 in the Hollywood of Theda Bara and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and silent film star Katya Lupi receives a magnificent gift: an entire room constructed of hand-painted tiles removed from a Romanian monastery and installed, piece by piece, on her Hollywood estate. Not only is the room an aesthetic masterpiece but it is also possessed by the Devil. Katya, a woman of strong desires and appetites, quickly learns to use its powers to her advantage, ensnaring the souls of other cinema legends who share her thirst for beauty, fame, and fortune. From this dangerous precipice, Barker, whose numerous best-selling novels (Galilee, etc.) and experience as a film producer have won him a loyal following, entices his readers to leap into a fantastical world populated by ghostly beasts that roam the hills of a modern-day Tinseltown. His masterly descriptions of this world and the pathological behavior that occurs within it provide an eerie realism, compelling the reader to venture further. Essential for Barker fans, though others may be disappointed in the unevenness that results from the emphasis on plot at the expense of character development. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/01.]Nancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

If Billy Wilder had made Sunset Boulevard as a German Expressionist silent film, it might have been a lot like this engagingly nutty melodrama from the author-director of such stylish horrorfests as the Hellraiser movies and the genre-classic Books of Blood. The story opens in the 1920s, when Willem Zeffer, manager to European-born silent film vamp Katya Lupescu, impulsively purchases and transports to America a roomful of painted tiles that graphically depict bizarre sexual encounters set in the context of an unending "hunt." The lurid "masterwork" thereafter becomes a magnet that draws numerous Hollywood notables to Katya's mansion in the eponymous Canyon (named for her own heartless sadism). All this unfolds while Barker follows the misfortunes (some 60 years later) of contemporary action-film hunk Todd Pickett, who recuperates at the mansion from botched cosmetic surgery, and the president of an "appreciation society" devoted to Todd, unlovely, unhappily married Tammy Lauper, who follows her hero to this impossibly jaded hell on earth. All the familiar Barker mannerisms appear in profusion: witty satirical jabs (this time at Hollywood's culture of glamorous excess) blunted by lax, sloppy prose and pretentious diction ("disorientate," "bizarrity," etc.); credible and appealing characters (especially Todd, who's made sympathetic in a long early sequence describing the death of his beloved dog); and supernatural fireworks featuring strange combinations of human, animal, and unknown life forms (you can almost feel Barker's hand grasping at the mantle worn for centuries by Hieronymus Bosch). Before all hell finally, predictably breaks loose, most readers will have tuned out (the novel isenormously too long). Still, Barker possesses one of contemporary fiction's wildest and finest imaginations, and the "backstory" of the hunt pictured on those tiles-of a nobleman who inadvertently offends Lucifer and must thereafter spend eternity making reparation-has the power and allure of ancient legend. If you can tolerate Barker at his most fantastical and effusive, you won't want to miss Coldheart Canyon. Other readers might want to go back to Jacqueline Susann.