Coldheart Canyon

Inhoud

The new novel from international 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 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 cinema.

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 legends 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 again.

No writer of fantastic fiction has ever been as intimate with the dark side of Hollywood as Clive Barker. As both a writer and director he has worked in the Dream Factory for fifteen years, on such projects as Hellraiser, Lord of Illusions and the Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters.

Clive Barker is the bestselling author of nineteen books, including Weaveworld, Imajica and Galilee. He regularly shows his art in Los Angeles and New York, and produces and directs for both large screen and small. Recent projects include the Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters, and an exhibition of erotic paintings and photographs, The Weird and the Wicked. He lives with his lover, the photographer David Armstrong, in Los Angeles, along with a family of dogs, rats, geckoes, iguanas and turtles.