Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Isn't this supposed to be scary???,
By
This review is from: Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story (Hardcover)
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.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I like Clive Barker, but I don't like this book.,
By
This review is from: Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story (Hardcover)
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
not Barker's best,
By
This review is from: Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story (Hardcover)
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.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
