Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

When I was little, I would run and cower from anything that was scary. Scary movies, scary places, scary people, scary anything. I'd hide in the corner of the dining room at my house while the rest of my family sat in the living room watching the Howling or Child's Play.

Ironically enough, the film CHUD gave me something comparable to sanity-crippling night-terrors at that point in my life for about two weeks, where I would wake up crying from hyper-realistic dreams of creatures with glowing eyes with unspeakable intentions reaching out to carry me off.

But that was then, this is now. Scary movies aren't scary anymore. I haven't really seen any SCARY scary movies in a long time. I really haven't seen any honest to god original MOVIES in a long time.

And that's what this book is about: Hollywood past its glitz and glamour, gossip and heresay, and most certainly--according to Mr. Barker--past its prime.

Todd Pickett is a famous actor in Hollywood, or "was" is a more appropriate term. His last major film just flopped horribly, and it seems like his time in the spotlight is just about up. He takes this in relative strife until his loving and faithful dog Dempsey dies from cancer.

Mentally wounded by the loss of his dog and his refusal to bow out of the spotlight Todd agrees to have plastic surgery to rejuvenate his good looks and, hopefully, his flagging career. However, the surgery goes horribly wrong, and scars his face, and even with recovery, he will still bear some abnormal scarring for life.

In order to dodge any hooplah from the Paparazzi about his failed surgery and wounded ego, his agent, Maxine, arranges for him to lay low in a well-off yet secluded manor in the outskirts of LA called Coldheart Canyon, named after its former resident's cold-hearted disposition.

And there Todd stays, healing, but also brooding over his dwindling career, and while he consumes himself with doubt and alcohol, he recieves a visit from a mysterious guest that will turn his world upside down....

This isn't the first Clive Barker book I've read. The first was Sacrament. It took me a year to finish this book, although I don't know why. It never takes me that long to finish a book, but somehow I kept putting it off. Maybe it was because I was getting used to the fact that the characters in a Clive Barker story are a lot more realistic than your typical fantasy/murder/romance/horror/satire/mystery/ghost tale. And in a way, that makes his stories all the more appealing. Sometimes a character who isn't in control, who doesn't know what to do, he doesn't understand, and isn't in charge and the complete and utter opposite of glamourous and beautiful is far more fascinating than someone who is.

The main focus of the story is of a mysterious woman named Katya Lupi, a famous 1920s silent-movie-era actress, and then-renowned for her excesses in the secluded confines of the Canyon. She comes to reveal all of this to Todd, who is obviously a little suspicious of her story because the young, dark-haired Romainian vixen ought to be a very old woman by now. However, as she later reveals, her youth has been maintained by a room that was shipped from a monastary of eccentrics from her home country, a room of intricately decorated tiles depicting horrific scenes of beastiality and excess in very horrifying detail which is called, appropriately enough, the Devil's Country, which has been reconstructed in the basement room of the house that Todd has sought refuge from the outside world.

Not to give much away, but this room contains powers that allow someone who steps inside of its confines to remain youthful and healthy as long as they receive exposure to it now and again and perhaps even proximity to it. However, Katya isn't the only one who has been touched by the excesses of the Devil's Country, and those who have developed a craving for its addiction have defied death to have another taste at its enticements....

I don't want to give away much more of the story, it's about 700 pages, but it goes quick if you stay with it, and there is a WHOLE-LOT-MORE to it than that. Clive paints Hollywood with a very imaginative brush, and all his principles are vibrant and alive with character. The climax of the book comes roughly eighty or so pages before the conclusion, but the goriness and shock of the ending puts the worst eviscerations in Hellraiser to shame, so hold onto your stomachs, and the resolution's sudden and unexpected but at-the-same-time touching conclusion had me stifling back tears, something I haven't done in a book, or at a movie, in very, very long time....