Customer Reviews

Coldheart Canyon

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

I'm a big Clive Barker fan. Obviously, that's why I read this book. "Abarat" is a great series. "The Books of Blood" are watershed works in horror. "Dread" and "The Madonna" are two of the best horror stories I've ever read. "Imajica" should be celebrated just for its scope and ambition alone. "The Damnation Game" and "Cabal" are very good horror works as well. "Thief Of Always" and "Sacrament" are very nice and accomplished departures from the usual Clive Barker.

However, I am afraid there is little to be said about Coldheart Canyon to recommend it. It's difficult to explain what I don't like about it without giving some majors spoilers, but I'll try.

First of all, the introduction. I find it rather ironic that in a book that concerns itself heavily with "the pride goeth before the fall" or the pitfalls of ego, Barker writes a largely self-congratulatory introduction in which he speaks of what a multimedia force he's become and how awesome the contracts he gets are. Uh, that's great Mr. Barker. We all know you're a success. I wasn't really old enough to appreciate or remember the release of the movie Hellraiser when it first came out, but I knew from a young age that as far back as I could remember Barker was a seminal name in horror, along with the likes of Stephen King. An introduction where he pats himself on the pat for being such a creative guy and landing contracts that require a table of contents seems like the actions of his main character in the novel, Todd Pickett, somewhat jarring.

Barker then later paints himself as a "Hollywood insider" (people may think of themselves that way, but it takes a lot of chutzpah to actually refer to yourself as a "Hollywood insider.") At this point it's become quite clear Barker has a fantastic opinion of himself. But how is the book?

I am fully aware of when this book was published, but for a "Hollywood insider" Barker comes off like a guy who left Hollywood in 1996-7 and joined the Peace Corps, as has little knowledge of what happened since. Nearly all of his references to real Hollywood movies, actors, and events in actuality and the ones he makes "sly" allusions to are almost painfully dated. It's a little silly.

For a Hollywood insider, Barker disappoints: he gives us the same tired, bland, hackneyed "insider's view" of Hollywood that has been served up countless times, with no twists. Hollywood is a teeming rat's nest where the actors are insincere, attention-starved, and shallow (after two characters presumably drown themselves the actors act shocked for a few seconds then go back to cracking jokes - come on), the producers are angry, short little men who threaten to sue whenever they're crossed, and astonishingly people allow themselves to be goaded this way. If you were holding a party, and someone who wasn't invited broke in and attacked one of your guests, would you go along with the guest to hunt this person down because he made a lame threat to sue you? No, you wouldn't. But in Barker's world of unlikely devices necessary to move the plot along, you can be sure characters will often act in ridiculous ways through the most spurious and unbelievable motivations.

Anyway, Hollywood is full of liars, cheaters, phonies, and sycophants. Stop the presses! The characterization is so shallow, except for Tammy, that it's unbelievable. Even the ways Barker tries to "humanize" the characters (they were once good but greed and Hollywood tainted them) are cliched, trite, and perfunctory.

If you've read the description on the Amazon page, you don't need me to recap the basic plot. The problem in this book is that things happen not because they should happen, but because they need to happen, and Barker gives unconvincing reasons why they do. The Devil's Country, for example. It was built for a very definite purpose, but with this purpose in mind, there's no reason it should have the effect on people that it does. Why does it then? Because there would be no book without it. When you know why the Devil's Country was built, you realize there is no reason why it should enchant and addict people, except that you wouldn't have any story without it.

Even more galling, after the book reaches its natural conclusion, Barker tacks on an extra, and totally unnecessary 110 pages or so on to the book. Why? I have little idea. Perhaps to make it more epic. I'm afraid I must use spoilers here:

START SPOILERS - DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK

The Angel and Todd. We all know Todd should go with the Angel. Tammy and Maxine even suggest as much. Ghosts are not meant to be roaming the human world, clearly. But Todd doesn't want to go with the Angel. So the book spends a lot of useless time trying to figure out how to avoid the Angel. Then they put into action the plan to avoid the Angel. Then they get wrecked, and Todd decides to go with the Angel anyway. Brilliant. This is one of the most clear-cut examples of "book filler" that I've ever seen since the Wheel of Time series. Also, the whole ending that the national tabloids are going to be interested in Tammy (this would never happened in real life) or that Maxine is going to fall in love with Tammy is simply ludicrous.

END SPOILERS - CONTINUE READING FROM HERE

I did appreciate the character of Katya. I felt it was interesting that she got more sympathetic in the middle of the book's sequence of events, but then she took the standard character route of villains and that was something of a disappointment. The Devil's Country was interestingly described but Barker has done a much better job describing the sins of the flesh and the degredation mankind and the supernatural can inflict and the horrors they bring in the past.

In conclusion, I cannot recommend this book to general horror fans or even Clive Barker fans.

Clive Barker, who is probably best known for his work on the Hellraiser series delivers, well, exactly what you'd expect him too. Which basically includes lots of scenes of perverse sexuality, gore and references to the devil. If you aren't framiliar with Barker, I'm sure you'll find much of this shocking or horrifying. If you are framiliar with Barker, you'll know that he has much better works out there.
This is the plot: ancient Romanian do-dad, in this case, an entire room, is brought over to their hollywood home, Coldheart Canyon. Mental note: Everything Romanian is evil.
Throw in an assortment of stereotypical characters, a dejected boyfriend, a timeless hollywood siren, a thuggish bodyguard, a greedy producer, a heartless talent agent, an overweight housewife and a modern movie star.....the sort you would expect in "a hollywood ghost story". You keep waiting for someone to axe off these annoying characters, but instead they ramble on and on about the housewife's weight loss of 32 pounds, her husband's affair with the woman at the FedEx office, or how hard it is to be an agless siren who is getting really really bored with every conceivable act of perverse pleasure and how, no really, she actually loves the main character, really. It's different this time....
So basically, if you are looking for surprises or even horror and you aren't easily shocked, you should probably look elsewhere.

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.

While there are some interesting things about this book, and some compelling scenes, it is a *very* long story that lacks the kind of coherence you expect in a sprawling tale, encompassing gruesome occult scenes, Hollywood dirt-dishing, and downright action-packed adventure. Somehow we trust a published author to take us through 700 pages with authority--that each scene is a needed piece of the puzzle; but that's not how it goes. Whole sections of this book go nowhere, or only tangentially move the plot along (such as the endless scenes of the protagonist Todd's dog being put down: we get it, we get it); then a scene of unbearable gruesomeness and wanton sexual play comes in, followed by a poetic few paragraphs of descriptions of the sunset and the flowers and the hills of Hollywood. One senses that Clive has the run of a very expensive toy store here, but he doesn't know how to play very well with what's given him. His bravura consists in writing vivid, short scenes, but not in the overarching picture. This book is really three stories (at least), with an ending that goes on for hundreds of pages, listlessly. Once Todd is dead, when we later find out that he matter-of-factly returns is increasingly dull (exception: his reluctance to go off with an angel because 'he never trusted agents' is a nice line, one of the few in this section). I think a good editor would have made it into something better with judicious cutting. The sex scenes stand out as being brutal and not terribly erotic; the mutilation scenes as excessive and not terribly imaginative, reminding one of "The Island of Dr. Moreau" brought to a slimier plane. Too bad, as I think it could have been an uncommonly good story, especially since Barker demonstrates that he can turn an effective phrase on many pages.

While to much attention was paid in the last Clive barker interview in Rue Morgue about Clive Barker's return to horror I am finding increasingly annoying that people ever thought he left. Sacrament has many elements of Clive Barker in his classic form and Coldheart Canyon is no different. There is fantasy but not in the way that books like Weaveworld or even his Art books (Great and secret show/Everville) Sure CC often has a biting tongue in cheek satire of the imagine consciousness of Barker's new home town of Hollywood. This is the man who wrote the books of blood it might be fairer to say it is a shredded and pierced tongue in cheek.

The Dark and fantastic Barker we all know and loved from the Books of blood is alive and well in all his twisted glory. Don't be fooled by the sarcastic Classic Hollywood pretty boy photo fool you...this is a savage horror novel. Barker has like many of the great modern horror authors taken the classic haunted house story and given it a twist that is 100% Barker original. The dark fantasy and twisted sexuality that is a part of barker country is raging.

Themes Barker is fascinated with are at the heart of this story. Keys, puzzles and in this case tiles painted with a living imagine of the devil's country, the room becomes the gate to this dark world. Painted Lilth the devil's wife to...well that is a spoiler for sure. I was hooked from the first intensely gothic moments of the prologue where a silent screen movie star becomes the owner of the tiles the room and the gateway which is also a fountain of youth. Like all Barker gateways it leads to a sexually perverse and pain filled world that he is so good in creating.

At its heart is Todd Picket the world's greatest action star who in the failing years of his career is being courted by the evil forces of Hollywood to trying regain his youth. After the plastic surgery trying to hide from the media Todd ends up at a Hollywood dream palace hidden in a haunted canyon owned by Silent movie star Kayta Lupie and well you get the basic idea.

The only negative to the book is in the 100 or 200 pages of story that is a big over done. Most importantly the last 100 pages which is more of an extended epilogue, I enjoyed the ending but the book could have benefited from a shorter version.

This book could never have happened had Clive Barker not made the three films or lived in Hollywood; he was having fun grinding his axe about the city he loves and hates at the same time. The book has laugh out loud parts, but most importantly it is a horror novel that reminded me why there is no one in the same league as Clive Barker he is a artist and imagination on his own realm.

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.

I realise that Barker has an excellent imagination, but sometimes i think he tries too hard, i would like to see more of a storyteller's discipline in his books, because he has the potential to be great (Damnation Game) in that style.

This book started out very promising, i liked the idea of the secret world of the weird tile painting, with its fantastic sun and misshapen beasts. I also liked very much the bluntly realistic description of the Hollywood lifestyle, all false and pretentious, and one sympathises with the actor Todd Pickett more because of the way this lifestyle sucks him dry, finally sacrificing him in a horrible plastic surgery accident which ruins his career. However when he comes to take refuge in the Coldheart Canyon house, things start to go downhill in the book. Far too much time is spent here, and the story almost becomes centred upon this house and its weird little secret. I would like to have seen Pickett brutalised by the media over his accident, instead of the soft surrender at the home of his agent, where he is humiliated by the Hollywood set. The love-interest-triangle between the evil Katya Lupesci and his gullible and appropriately named super-fan Tammy also drags on a bit. And somewhere we lose total sympathy with our would be hero Pickett. Indeed at the end of the book Pickett is relegated to just another character, an effect which doesnt work very well im afraid, he becomes dull and confused. As for the 'other' element of the novel, the supernatural dimension, it works well for a while, but then degenerates into something resembling a B-movie plot.

I was seldom surprised by anything that happened in the novel after Pickett leaves the Hollywood party. My enjoyment of the novel effectively ended there, and there was what... a hundred or so pages to go? The most important part of a novel lies in its ending, simply because its the very last thing we remember when we put it down, and it recalls in our minds all that went before, this is primarily where this book fails.

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.

I picked up "Coldheart Canyon" by Clive Barker because it was a Hollywood ghost story and I enjoy those Hollywood stories. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong book to start reading Clive Barker. I heard that his books were great, but although this story started out okay, it soon become drawn out and slow and boring. I could not connect to the story or the characters whatsoever. I was looking for horror not sex. Can anyone recommend a better Clive Barker story?