The Ghosts of Hollyweird

I can imagine Clive Barker falling asleep on the sofa one night while watching Sunset Boulevard, then waking in the wee hours halfway through a showing of Splatter Cinema Showcase and getting a very bright idea for his next novel.

Hollywood. Has-beens. Ghosts. Sex. Angels. Cretinous atrocities resembling the love children of H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley.

Yes, the elements are all there for horrormeister Barker to whip up weirdness a la ready-for-her-close-up Norma Desmond and the author’s own Nightbreed. Why not throw in a dash of Touched by an Angel for good measure? The result is Coldheart Canyon, a typically thick, luxuriant, ick-stained book which attempts too much and ultimately collapses under the excess weight.

Coldheart Canyon contains several plot threads which tangle into one big ball of slime-coated string. First, there’s the tale of Todd Pickett, a Tom Cruisean golden boy who is sitting at the pinnacle of Hollywood’s A-list. Unfortunately, when you perch on the pinnacle, that usually means you’re teetering and, in Todd’s case, he’s about to go sliding down the has-been side of celebrity. Concerned that his perfect good looks are starting to show too much wear and tear, he visits a cosmetic surgeon for a routine chemical peel.

But something goes wrong while he’s under the knife. Horribly wrong.

Bandaged and bleeding, Todd retreats from society and its paparazzi, buying an old mansion high in the Hollywood hills until his face can heal and he can again face the flashbulbs. The dream-palace he settles in once belonged to an actress named Katya Lupi, the most beautiful actress of the silent era. In her day seventy years ago, Katya out-Garboed Greta, vamped more sensually than Theda Bara, and left Mary Pickford choking on her stardust. In the Hollywood heyday of parties populated by Valentino, Chaplin, Fairbanks and Barrymore, Katya was the life of all the parties. A simpering, pure-hearted virgin on-screen, she turned into a wild vamp after-hours as she threw lavish orgies at her mansion in Coldheart Canyon.

One night, she shimmers into Todd’s life as he’s moping around the house. And when I say “shimmers,” I mean that literally. The eighty-year-old silent cinema has-been appears like a radiant mirage in a dark corner of the room, startling Todd as she walks out of the shadows. She’s gorgeous and downright juicy as a ripe apple. Trouble is, she doesn’t look a day over thirty. Like Alma Mobley, the preserved beauty in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Katya Lupi lingers in corporeal form, a sensuous ectoplasm that soon has Todd dropping his drawers and engaging in some very vivid (and spirited!) sex.

What Todd doesn’t realize is that Katya has become a Queen of the Underworld, the ruler of a howling pack of deformities bred when humans like Victor Mature and Jean Harlow had sex with wild creatures. Those bizarre offspring now want access to a place called the Devil’s Country—a region which could only spring from Barker’s imagination. Pinhead, Candyman and the Cenobites would feel right at home in this corner of Hell. The portal to the Devil’s Country lies deep in the bowels of the Coldheart Canyon house and Katya has placed a spell over the doorway of her house so no creature—especially those resembling half-man, half-peacock—could come back to the country which helps preserve their good looks (the secret to Katya’s ability to look ravishing after all these years).

Meanwhile, topside in the real world, a member of Todd’s fan club, a housewife named Tammy Lauper, is trying to track down the elusive star who seems to have disappeared right off the face of tabloid earth. Tammy eventually makes her way to the Canyon where first she’s assaulted by the well-endowed man-peacock, then finds Todd and aids him in escaping Katya’s clutches.

While Coldheart Canyon ends up in a muddle of disappointment—points are belabored, dialogue is curdled and plots are treacled—there’s plenty of ultra-sharp horror to prick your nerves in the hundreds of pages that come before the closing chapters. This is by no stretch of the imagination a tame novel. Everything—ghosts, mutations, sex, Hollywood satire—reads as if it has been plugged into an electric amplifier. Fair warning to prim, goody-two-shoes readers: there are several sex scenes which will curl your toes; scenes of an orgiastic cornucopia (pornucopia?) with a landscape of writhing limbs, exposed genitalia and kinky S&M; eroticism so intense that, were I to type an excerpt here, the very words on your computer monitor would melt your hard drive. Sex, pain, horror—it’s all a phantasmagorial stew bubbling in Barker’s brain. Even Lovecraft starts to look like a Sunday School teacher by comparison.