Customer Reviews

Coldheart Canyon

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Clive Barker is often categorized as a horror writer, and while he certainly uses some of the elements of the genre (ghosts, etc.), he is a far different writer from a Stephen King, Peter Straub or Dean Koontz. The worlds Barker creates are far more bizarre than anything you see in a standard horror novel; sometimes this works well, but other times, Barker's works are so strange that their very strangeness weakens his stories.

In this case, however, Barker has done a fine job in creating his own version of a haunted house story. Having recently read King and Straub's Black House, as well as other older classic haunted house stories such as the Shining (by King) or the Haunting (by Shirley Jackson), I am familiar with the conventions, but Barker is successful in twisting these conventions into new directions.

The haunted house in this case is located in an isolated canyon in Los Angeles. A former party house for silent film stars, it has been seeemingly abandoned for years, until a modern movie star retreats there while recovering from plastic surgery. The ghosts of the old stars are still here, drawn to a power within the house; also here is the house's owner, still alive and as young as when she was a silents star herself.

The forces in the house are not so much driven by evil as by lust. This creates a sexual explicitness that may turn off some readers who are caught unaware, but it is essential in the context of this story. The main character is not so much threatened with death (although this is always a possibility) as with being seduced by the powers within the house.

This is one of Barker's better efforts, a well-written work that - despite its length - I was able to finish in just a couple of reasonably idle days. If there is a flaw in the book, I think it is in the last 100 or so pages, which serve more as an extended epilogue than a true part of the story. Overall, this is a good book, however, and worth the effort for fans of horror or dark fantasy.

In the twenties, the haunted cellar of a Transylvanian castle is dismantled, shipped west, and installed in the basement of an imperious Hollywood vamp. In the nineties, leading man Todd Pickett, after making some bad mistakes trying to come to terms with the impending loss of his king-of-the-box-office looks, decides to go into seclusion. And his worst mistake is to rent out the vamp's long abandoned, but far from uninhabited, mansion.

I never felt like putting Coldheart Canyon down, but I found myself wondering several times whether I was still reading the same book I had in my hand a hundred pages ago. It didn't seem able to decide whether it was going to be a satire on Hollywood, or a chilling Old World folktale or a chatty gossip column on the bedroom foibles of the silent screen stars,... or a haunted house story. Ultimately, it's all those things, but not enough of any one of them to fully satisfy, and Barker doesn't succeed in making them all connect convincingly.

When Barker fails, though, the result is more worthwhile, and more fun to read, than the polished heights reached by most other "horror" writers. One thing you can be sure of is that he will never repeat himself, never lapse into repeating some tired successful formula. He did neither here, and I liked the glimpses I got of the several novels this might have been, so I put it at three and a half stars.

Those fans who favor Barker for his mastery of horror, and his unexcelled gore, will be sorely disappointed in this novel. It's only intermittently scary. Those who follow him for his breadth of imagination and capacity for surprise, who were at least as pleased by Imagica as by Hellraiser, will find it optional, but enjoyable. For all its arresting supernatural ornamentation, what Barker is really interested in here is obsession with fame, on the part of those who do and those who don't have it. The head of Pickett's fan club plays a major role in the story, beginning as nearly a cartoon, and developing into the book's most interesting character. And it becomes clear early on that, for all the nasties Todd has to face down, his real nightmare is of being no longer adored.

I have read all of Clive Barkers work. When I saw this on the "new in paperback" shelf I snatched it up without hesitation. Clive Barker has several fantastic works, such as Weaveworld, Imajica, The Great and Secret Show > Everville. This is not one of those greats.

"Hollywood Ghost Story" - yes. Satire smacking of Ben Elton's Popcorn but rather than the old fashioned kinky lunatic murderers of Elton's work this features soft porn-meets-hardcore beastiality-meets-necrophilia. All this in more than generous portions which exhibit both a lack of original thought and a lack of common decency. This novel is deranged, and anything imaginative seems to be recycled from other Barker novels.

Unlike most of Barker's characters in his other novels the characters in Coldheart Canyon generally lack depth. The inclusion of famous characters from history and the implications made of them goes beyond bad taste and might be called: slander. Right, but it's only fiction. Fiction or not I didn't find it necessary to deliberately trash the names of over thirty celebrities as it was done here.

The plot? Not much to speak of. Tedious, redundant, and more predictable than most of Barker's work. A few suprises and a few notable change of character personalities that Barker has always done help, but not much to speak of.

If you want a good Barker book try Imajica, Weaveworld or Great and Secret Show (followed by Everville which is part II of secret show). This isn't worth the time it takes to read.

I didn't go into this book thinking I'd like it as much as I did. I DO enjoy twisted books - this one didn't disappoint. If you don't like any sappy stuff - this isn't your book. It does get a bit sappy at the end. That was OK.

I don't know where he comes up with this stuff....but I hope he continues.

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.

Coldheart Canyon has everything: an atmospheric setting, a house with a past, an artwork that seems imbued with a life of its own, a woman of mystery who couldn't possibly be who she says she is, a gallant if vain and self-absorbed protagonist -- and it's all happening in the Hollywood Hills just out of the bustle of L.A.

And therein lies its flaw: in its efforts to have everything the book loses its ability to chill to the marrow, and instead becomes a catalog of every stock situation that could possibly be conjured up with little regard to continuity and focus.

This becomes painfully obvious in the spoken format. Characters are established and then almost obstinately behave completely out of character, so much so that you wonder if Barker himself actually read the beginning of his book. Situations are set up as set pieces, often not actually moving the plot along. One incident is simply not sequenced properly, and implies character knowledge that we know the characters couldn't have.

This all culminates into a rather ghastly denouement with a number of dead and injured, and a stirring ending. Except it doesn't end -- the book proceeds into a second ending, which is nearly laughable. And it DOESN'T END! There is yet further ending material and it just serves to flatten the power of the previous narrative.

I listened to the book because I'm a long-time Frank Muller fan, and his portrayals do not disappoint. Unfortunately the material does, and I found that at some point I stopped listening to find out what happened next, and instead listened for how bad it could get.

Ultimately, this is a book about movies that can't decide which movie it wants to be. It begins like a Christopher Lee horror flick, tumbles into being a Nicholas Cage angst story, segues to a dishy Dinner at Eight sequence, suddenly caroms into Debbie Does Dallas, takes a brief turn as a classic Dynasty episode, reverts to a Friday the 13th stint, recalls Star Trek (keep an eye on the newbie in the plain uniform), and then, when it should be satisfied being The Fall of the House of Usher, instead becomes a lesser episode of Touched by an Angel.

Where are editors when you need them?

What Clive Barker does best, what sets him apart from the likes of Stephen King and the Wannabes, is to write with a furious imagination that kindles the spark of fantasy and brings it to an adult level were it never lie before. His prior works, most notably Weaveworld allowed those of us who think the The Wizard of Oz is a great concept but wish it wasnt so, well childish to have our own OZ complete with Sex, Drugs, Violence and a real Menace that is not for the kids. What he does equally well is to establish living, soul-filled characters that transcend the carbon copy heros we are so used to (in every, single Stephen King Novell.) Add to that his brilliance as an artist, a director and his ability to visit the Oz concept with The Thief Of Always his book for younger readers and he becomes the most well rounded fantasy figures alive. It is then a great mystery how something as empty and unfulfilling as Coldheart Canyon came about.
This story of redemption, at a price, is filled with generic characters, forced plot lines and unoriginal narrative. Its Clive Barker on autopilot as it reads like something someone imitating Clive may write rather than a real work by the author himself.
A semi  aging movie star, Todd Picket, agrees to plastic surgery as a career facelift. This makes little sense when you consider the considerable power Middle aged men have in Hollywood right now, Todd is about Tom Cruises age and I dont think Tom needs a facelift anytime soon to get women. Also, when you consider that Middle aged men are now regularly staring with Twenty  something women as leads (think Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Sean Connery) the thought that a man would fear laugh lines in a time when maturity is in is preposterous. The Procedure has to go wrong for the plot to work; the actor needs a hideaway to lick his wounds and ends up in the pad of a 1920s screen vixen.
Below the house is a room constructed by the devils wife, Lillith, with Katya Lupi (the Screen Vixen) uses to stay young. Outside the house, the ghosts of dead stars roam having tasted the rooms power and wanting back. They also have orgies and breed with the local wildlife producing offspring so the Author has monsters to kill people off with violently.
Nothing really happens once the set up is in place, sure theres lots of sex, lots of terrible things, but nothing interesting, theres no plot, no point to it all. The background story of Katya and the film stars of the Twenties and thirties would have made for a better book. Todd is a boring self-serving idiot, Katya is supposed to be our Villain, but she does everything to be loved then kills what she loves without explanation of why shes like this. Tammy, the Todd Fanatic who saves the day, sort of, is an oaf whos made a shambles of her life in the pointless pursuit of a man who only exists to her through film.
The concept here is an exercise in Hollywood stereotypes with a horror fantasy twist but the result is tired and labored. Clive was here before producing the true story Gods and Monsters to Academy Award Winning effect. What Clive misses her is that beneath the stereotypes must exist real people, but he only allows that at the very end, by then we dont care any more. These clones cant carry a 600+ page novel as they have no depth and therefore we simply dont care what happens to them, or this book. Coldheart Canyon lacks heart and has no soul. Go rent Gods & Monsters on Video.