Coldheart Canyon [Hardcover]

In the 1920s, magnate Zeffer buys his mistress Katya a room decorated with Boschian mosaics of sex and violence and in the 1990s, Todd Pickett decides he needs a face-lift to save his career; both do not know that they have made a decision which risks their lives and their souls. And somehow, sooner or later, everyone from Tammy, the overweight, obsessive, good president of Todd's fan club, to Micky, a dying former child star with a life full of secrets, ends up in the rich cloying jungle that the gardens of Coldheart Canyon have become, finding out things they never wanted to know about sex, madness, courage and generosity.

Barker has always been brilliant at showing us just how bad things can get--the games of sexual power, the corrupting metamorphoses; here he adds something: a genuine conviction of the possibility of human goodness and kindness that saves people. --Roz Kaveney

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

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 Amorette’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.

The new novel from internationally bestselling author Clive Barker is a savage, poignant ghost story set in Hollywood, that glamorous half-world in which beauty, power and youth is wealth, and all can be stripped away in a heartbeat. A world where every whisper is a conspiracy, and every kiss is a lie, and nothing is what it seems, even Death itself. A world of exquisite women and beautiful men; sharks, visionaries and lunatics, all pursuing the flickering illusion that is cinemas.

Todd Pickett is a has-been actor at twenty-nine; used up by the very system which turned him overnight from an Ohio farm-boy into a superstar. In a desperate attempt to regain his lost beauty, Pickett elects to have extensive surgery. The procedure goes horribly, grotesquely wrong. Hiding from his fans, and from the press he knows will tear his reputation apart if they find out about his operation, Todd takes refuge where he thinks no one will find him.

He's wrong. His retreat from the glare of publicity takes him to a place that no map of Hollywood has ever described: Coldheart Canyon. Here, nursing his wounds and his desperation, he discovers what the history of the Dream Factory has long concealed: a world somewhere between life and death, reality and illusion, where the great legend of a forgotten Hollywood are waiting to educate him in the bitter business of life after fame.

In a story filled with deliciously recognizable portraits of Hollywood characters Clive Barker unveils a dark, original vision of how dreams are made, and lost. And sometimes, for a terrible price, gained.

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 story writer, he also illustrates, writes, directs and produces for the stage and screen.