I haven't read enough of Clive Barker to have an overall opinion, but the short stories I've come across have been pretty hit-and-miss, so Coldheart Canyon with its intimidating, nearly 700-page thickness in paperback was something of a gamble. I am happy to say I come out mostly unscathed and generally happy for having undertaken the ride.

CC has a brilliant prologue set in the 1920's, where the manager of Katya Lupi, a star of the silent film era, buys for her a special painting that occupies the area of an entire room; it is a cornucopia of vividly imagined (and described) sexual and mythic imagery that has an effect on its admirers transcending the aesthetic. You see, for a price unknown, this painting rejuvenates those who gaze upon it. What else could an actor want?

Cut then to the millennium where Todd Pickett, a Tom Cruise dead-ringer “big-budget and inflated-ego” action star known for his “thousand-watt smile”, has a facial surgery that may not have gone all right and in a bid to escape notice till he recovers, takes refuge in the house that Katya once lived in...and finds that its previous occupant may still lurk. Pickett finds himself drawn to Katya and awakens to other presences around the house. These were once the reigning gods of Hollywood, now reduced to hungry forms lurking in that unholy divide between the spectral and the corporeal, whose only desire is to once more gaze upon the painting...and not perhaps just gaze because Barker shows us that his characters even find themselves part of the scene.

Barker builds on his themes wonderfully well, and the best parts of this book rival the creepy feeling that one got from the good bits in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The descriptions of the painting and of Katya's decaying wonderland, the unfulfillable orgies of the zombie-like people that were once her friends and lovers, the Moreau-esque “hybrids”...these are episodes where Barker flourishes blazing imagination and splendid narrative skill. As a piece of Hollywood Horror, this book far surpasses Ramsey Campbell's anemic Hungry Moon.

On the minus side, the major characters are clichéd, the panting sexual imagery that powers the bulk of the book is barely a footnote towards the (pun unintended) “climax”, and most of all...the last third or so of the book totters when it should gallop. Scenes where characters bicker amongst themselves in a petty manner whilst facing off against the supernatural elements come across as silly and annoying, like if the climax in Dracula had been interspersed with an episode from Seinfeld. And there are enough extended moments and epilogues to remind one of Return of The King.

But on the whole, Coldheart Canyon has enough highs to excuse its lows and is a goodly read for the horror fan.