Coldheart Canyon
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
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.
Reviews
Praise for Clive Barker:
‘An invocation of both magic and the imagination… A majestic maze of mythmaking’
WASHINGTON TIMES
‘Passionate and ingenious… A ride with remarkable views’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘A fabulous, engrossing war of the worlds’
PEOPLE MAGAZINE
‘Barker dislocates your mind’
MAIL ON SUNDAY
About the author
Clive Barker was born in Liverpool in 1952. He is the worldwide bestselling author of the Books of Blood, and numerous novels including Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, Sacrament and Galilee. In addition to his work as a novelist and short sotry writer le also illustrates, writes, directs and produces for the stage and screen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barker fans may breathe a sigh of relief. That the Walt Disney Company is paying $8 million for ancillary rights to the author's forthcoming for-all-ages novel series, The Arabat Quartet (first volume due out in 2002), doesn't mean the British master of dark fantasy has lost his savage bite. Barker's new novel is a ferocious indictment of (and backhanded tribute to) Hollywood Babylon, depicted through Barker's glorious imagination as a nexus of human and inhuman evil where fleshly pursuits corrupt the spirit. It's also one ripping ghost story, spooky and suspenseful, as well as a departure for Barker in that here, as never before, the fantastic mingles with the real, kind of.Many ghosts haunt the titular canyon, and some of them are the shades of men and women we already know as shadows of the silver screen: Victor Mature makes an appearance, as do George Sanders, Mary Pickford and many others. When alive, these stars and their colleagues were drawn by the beautiful, rapacious film star Katya Lupi to her magnificent home in Los Angeles's Coldheart Canyon. What kept them at the house, even after death, is the incredible room in its lowest story. Assembled from thousands of painted tiles, that room brought to California in the 1920s from an ancient monastery in Romania is literally alive with evil; the tiles depict a world that mortals may enter, and within which the Queen of Hell has condemned a nobleman to hunt forever, or until he entraps her son. The room's powers bestow timeless youth on some, including Katya, but give rise to monstrous entities as well. In the present day, into this horrific place enter several modern sorts, most notably A-list film hero Todd Pickett and a dowdy woman, head of Todd's fan club, whose courage and good sense mark her as the novel's hero. The narrative rocks, as Barker's always do, with intense violence and sex sacred, profane and grotesque; a torrent of intent and emotion from the depraved to the sublime; and, here, an impressive thematic excavation of the interplay between illusion and reality, the fantastic and the real. Many of the players without famous names are reminiscent, nastily, of known celebrities; decoding this roman clef is fun. But entertainment is only one card Barker flashes. Along with the others a fluid writing style; a canvas whose twisted originality rivals Bosch; a depth of theme; and an understanding of the human yearning for good and evil alike they add up to a royal flush, one of the most accomplished, and most notable, novels of the year. (On sale Oct. 8.)
