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Coldheart Canyon
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Coldheart Canyon
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Coldheart Canyon
Ebook971 pages14 hours

Coldheart Canyon

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

A famous Hollywood actor loses his looks – and is drawn into the dark and twisted world of Coldheart Canyon…

Following extensive cosmetic surgery, Hollywood superstar Todd Pickett needs somewhere to hide away while his scars heal. His manager finds the ideal location, Coldheart Canyon – a dream-palace hidden away in a corner of the city so secret it doesn’t even appear on a map.

In the 20s, ‘A’ list stars came to the Canyon to have the kind of parties nobody was supposed to know about. It wasn’t just the wild sex and the drugs that made Katya’s parties so memorable. There was a door in the bowels of the dream-palace, which reputedly opened onto another world – the Devils’ Country – where nothing was forbidden. Nothing.

With his refuge now a prison, Todd needs to get out of Coldheart Canyon. But to do that he must not only solve its mysteries but also face the powers that have protected it for seven decades, and that means stepping through the door…

As a Hollywood insider with a keen eye for its idiocies and horrors Clive Barker is uniquely positioned to write this vitriolic Tinseltown ghost story. Coldheart Canyon is an irresistible and unmerciful picture of Hollywood and its demons, told with all the style and raw narrative power that have made Barker's books and films a worldwide phenomenon.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 4, 2008
ISBN9780007301966
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Coldheart Canyon

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Reviews for Coldheart Canyon

Rating: 3.570512751602564 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

312 ratings7 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Barker is in my top five for writers but for some reason I have started this book twice and every time I seem to get pulled away from it. I have enjoyed what I read. The story is really cool and Barker pulls no punches and gives no quarter.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Clive Barker and I go way back. Long before God and everybody knew who Pinhead was, I was enjoying stories like "In the Hills, the Cities" and "Pig Blood Blues." Hmmm. Perhaps "enjoying" isn't quite the right word, but you know what I mean. I can't say I've read everything the man has written, but I've certainly read a goodly portion of it. Part of the reason for Barker's success is the combination of beautiful, dreamlike prose with some of the most vile and visceral situations and characters known to man. For most of Barker's stories, this works just fine, in huge books like Imajica as well as in smaller gems like The Hellbound Heart or The Thief of Always. But for some reason in Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story, the combination felt flat.

    Coldheart Canyon takes place in two different timeframes and in two different worlds. It opens in 1920 in a monastery in Romania. Although this section does introduce us to characters we'll be meeting later, including a tiled room completely covered in exquisite and obscene artwork, I'm not sure this was necessary. The two major characters we meet, Katya Lupi and the aforementioned tiled room, function as ghosts of a sort in the latter portions of the book. As such, they're allowed to be mysterious and unexplained. Heck, half the fun of a good ghost story is wondering whether or not there really IS a ghost. This opening segment gives us information we don't really need to make the whole story work.

    The rest of the book takes place in modern-day Hollywood, and our main character is Todd Pickett, a brilliantly handsome, megawatt famous, almost competent actor. From here on in the book is essentially a battle for Todd's soul, and that's part of my problem with it. I'm not sure Todd has one. Barker seems to believe that he's worthy of sympathy; that we should care about his struggle. But I don't. I could live with one character I didn't like, even a main character. But "none of the above" should never be your answer when someone asks you about your favorite character. I really didn't like much of anybody in this one, and for a ghost story, that's an especially bad thing. The whole point of a ghost story is to scare you. Sure, some violent episodes and glistening viscera are disturbing, but in order to truly scare you, you have to care about what's going to happen to the characters. If you have no connection with the characters, then their bloody demises are just so much splatter, regardless of how poetically they may be described.

    But maybe the problem is with me. When I hear the words "ghost story," I tend to think of something elegant and subtle. Something eerie and disturbing that makes you jump at sudden noises and stare hard at stray shadows. Barker is a visceral writer. For the most part, he doesn't suggest creepy goings-on; he describes them in all their carnal glory. This vivid description may ultimately be more terrifying, but I like to have room for my imagination to work on a scary story. I believe it was Stephen King who, in talking about film monsters mentioned the sense of relief that comes with the revelation of the scary thing. As scary as that thing may be, there's always a sense of "Whew! That was bad, but not as bad as what I was thinking." Barker takes too much away from me in this one; he doesn't let me create my own worst monster.

    In all fairness, there's no rule that says he has to. It's not a bad book, by any stretch of the imagination. There's a story being told, the characters develop, and Barker's prose is as strong as ever. I just never engaged with the story or the characters. I didn't care who won or lost, or really even who lived or died. It didn't feel like a ghost story to me, and so it left me disappointed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book felt slightly more narrative to me than some of Barker's other works. It also lacked some of the magic found in his other stories. Still an excellent read, though certainly not for those with closed-minds and imaginations.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A great example of a good book that really needed an editor. Was a real chore getting through it, especially when all it's secrets were revealed by 300 pages in.....with 400 pages left to go.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Strange... I loved the tile mural and all the history and craziness that surrounded it, but I could have done without the rest of the plot.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Barker is in my top five for writers but for some reason I have started this book twice and every time I seem to get pulled away from it. I have enjoyed what I read. The story is really cool and Barker pulls no punches and gives no quarter.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of Barker's most underrated yet masterful works, COLDHEART CANYON is overflowing with unrelenting imagination from its moving beginning to its tearful end and all the ghostly depravity in between.