“[Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the farthest reaches of the imagination.” — Washington Post   From The Books of Blood to Hellraiser to Imajica, Abarat, and Mister B. Gone, Clive Barker’s extraordinary vision knows no bounds. With Coldheart Canyon, the New York Times bestselling master of dark fantasy who has been called “a cross between Stephen King and Gabriel Garcia Marquez” ( Boston Herald ) thrills readers with a “Hollywood ghost story” as audacious and chilling as anything he (or anyone else) has ever written. USA Today calls it, “Endlessly entertaining…wickedly enjoyable,” and fans everywhere will agree—a tense and winding trip down into the hellish depths of Coldheart Canyon is well worth making. It is 1916 in the Hollywood of Theda Bara and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and silent film star Katya Lupi receives a magnificent gift: an entire room constructed of hand-painted tiles removed from a Romanian monastery and installed, piece by piece, on her Hollywood estate. Not only is the room an aesthetic masterpiece but it is also possessed by the Devil. Katya, a woman of strong desires and appetites, quickly learns to use its powers to her advantage, ensnaring the souls of other cinema legends who share her thirst for beauty, fame, and fortune. From this dangerous precipice, Barker, whose numerous best-selling novels (Galilee, etc.) and experience as a film producer have won him a loyal following, entices his readers to leap into a fantastical world populated by ghostly beasts that roam the hills of a modern-day Tinseltown. His masterly descriptions of this world and the pathological behavior that occurs within it provide an eerie realism, compelling the reader to venture further. Essential for Barker fans, though others may be disappointed in the unevenness that results from the emphasis on plot at the expense of character development. -Nancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. In 1920, a glamorous movie vamp and her manager go shopping in her homeland, Romania. They purchase the panorama on the walls of a subterranean room in an ancient fortress-turned-monastery. The painted-tile picture depicts a vast and obscene hunt, and virtually every tile contains a scene of sadistic sex between people, animals, and monsters. The tiles are remounted in the star's mansion in Coldheart Canyon, a Hollywood residential area that is, by the twenty-first century, hard to find and harder to leave. A devotee of action star Todd Pickett finds the place for him, though, when, after a face-lift gone awry, he needs to retreat from paparazzi and public. The head of his fan club finds it, too, but not before Todd discovers the vamp, her 1920s beauty intact, still on the premises. Her manager is there, too, and the fan-club president encounters him shortly before being whisked off by ghosts, only to resurface later to fight, with various other characters, for Todd's soul. For the hunt restarts every time new prey comes to it. Mayhem, sex, and namedropping abound in best-selling horror novelist-filmmaker Barker's latest, but they seem only ploys to pump up prurient interest in an opus whose every episode is unconscionably drawn out. Despite his success, Barker has none of Stephen King's or Peter Straub's talent for bringing settings and characters to life. This book should have been one of Barker's potboiler flicks, instead. Then, after 90 minutes or so, it would be over. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “One of our most inventive and risk-taking writers.” - Kirkus Reviews “[Clive Barker] is a mapmaker of the mind, charting the farthest reaches of the imagination.... ” - Washington Post “Lush, musky prose and crisp, staccato dialogue propel the ghost story as assuredly as the perfumed breezes of the Santa Ana winds that open and close this endlessly entertaining novel.” - USA Today “Wickedly enjoyable... endlessly entertaining...a powerhouse of a novel... irresistible.” - USA Today Hollywood has made a star of Todd Pickett. But time is catching up with him. He doesn't have the perfect looks he had last year. After plastic surgery goes awry, Todd needs somewhere to hide away for a few months while his scars heal. As Todd settles into a mansion in Coldheart Canyon -- a corner of the city so secret it doesn't even appear on any map -- Tammy Lauper, the president of his fan club, comes to the City of Angels determined to solve the mystery of Todd's disappearance. Her journey will not be an easy one. The closer she gets to Todd the more of Coldheart Canyon's secrets she uncovers: the ghosts of the A-list stars who came to the Canyon for wild parties; Katya Lupi, the cold-hearted, nowforgotten star for whom the Canyon was named, who is ali