Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

land out of all recognition.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

Coldheart Canyon: The Revelations Interview

Clive Barker took a break from writing Arabat, his new book for young readers, to speak with Phil and Sarah Stokes, creators of the Clive Barker website, Revelations. An excerpt from that July 10, 2001 interview, 'Nips and Tucks, Tits and Fucks':

Revelations: The first time we heard about Coldheart Canyon it was going to be a short novel - when did that turn into a 600-page epic?

Clive Barker: In fact I do say at the beginning that even though I was sort of mourning my Dad, finding it difficult to write, I was at the same time finding the thing I needed to write, really, if I was going to pay respect to it as a subject, as an idea - I was going to need to tell it more fully than I had originally planned. I mean, the original thing had been, I don't know, 50,000, 60,000 words, I suppose and it had been originally told entirely from Todd's point of view. And it was really going to be a very simple book about a rather narcissistic actor in Hollywood who encounters some ghosts and we're not sure at the end of the short story or the novella, whatever it was going to be -novella, I suppose - whether he's really seen them or whether he hasn't. That was the book.

Revelations: A real Twilight Zone.

Clive Barker: Exactly - and as I got into it I realized these ghosts are sort of really interesting and I want to write about them because they represent Old Hollywood and here I have a chance not only to talk about new Hollywood but also to talk about Old Hollywood and to contrast their methodologies and to talk about Hollywood in a much more rounded way than I had originally anticipated. So it was a judgment call made out of ambition, I think, just to tell a better story.

Revelations: When we were looking at the novel again last night, we started talking about similarities to Day of the Locust.

Clive Barker: Well, Day of the Locust was certainly sitting by my side, amongst other things.

Revelations: With Mr. Todd Hackett the protagonist of that one.

Clive Barker: Locust is a completely depressing vision. I wanted to write something which was sort of bittersweet, that both showed the dark side but also showed that it had some life in it yet. So I was trying to get a little bit of both going, really - trying to tell the story of what it is to be an actor who is so beloved that you sort of feel that belovedness....

Revelations: Now that people are starting to read Coldheart Canyon .what sort of reaction are you getting?

Clive Barker: They have a great time. And they have a great time because it's not what they expected. This is a Barker book which people who didn't like Barker books - like! There's people saying 'Ooh, I really like this one!' They're very, very surprised. I think the Hollywood setting, I think the relatively small amount of fantastic material in it - sure, when the stuff about the tiles comes in it gets pretty wild, but it's really limited to that area, where you really have to take a big imaginative jump with me.

Revelations: In the prologue where Zeffer goes and gets The Hunt, that part is so beautifully evoked you must have sketches of that all around the house. I would love to see those sketches.

Clive Barker: Hey, hey! I did do sketches, of course.

Revelations: [Phil:] As you can tell, Sarah's a bit of a perv. [Sarah:] Okay, hands up, I liked the sex!

Clive Barker: There's a lot of it in the book and that's the other thing which people are liking about the book - it is a sexy book and it's sexier than anything I've done in a long time, wouldn't you agree?

Revelations: Yeah, we've been anticipating stuff in the Scarlet Gospels, but that's still to come. Certainly anything that's gone before has been much more tamed.

Clive Barker: Right, and there were voices that wished to tame this, but they were silenced, because I said 'No, absolutely not! I want to do the scene with the whip and the clitoris. I want to do the orgy scene,' and I wanted it to be the wildest stuff I could make it.

Revelations: This was probably more acceptable because it was largely hetero or lesbian, which is an easier sell.

Clive Barker: That's right. The homosexual stuff, although it's there, is much reduced from other books. Even so, you'd be surprised how many people said, 'Wow, this is too strong.''

Revelations: There's always going to be someone who says it's too strong, whatever you write.

Clive Barker: Yes, though these were, in many cases, people who've been taking a journey with me for a long time.

Revelations: They should know better!

Clive Barker: They should know better, I would have thought, yeah, but at the same time, to be fair, when I made the argument 'This is the way it needs to be,' that's the way it stayed. I mean, the book you're reading, with the exception of those things which were taken out for legal reasons which is perhaps five or six sentences in total, all the rest of the stuff is as I intended. There was one thing - in the orgy scene - when Todd becomes very involved in the orgy scene, physically involved, I had a replay of the S&M stuff that had gone on between him and Katya, and Jane Johnson [Clive Barker's editor], very rightly, said, 'You know, this is a bit of an echo of something that we've seen before. Can't you go into something different?' And I said, 'You know what? You're exactly right.' So I dove into something much more extreme really, which is the three-way sandwich down in the heart of the orgy, as it were.

Revelations: There are always some images that will stay with you after every book - and that's one!

Clive Barker: Then she looked at that and she went, 'Oh my god! Okay, maybe we should just go back to the whipping scene?' And I said, 'No, no, no, you were absolutely right.' And she was. I don't want to repeat something that I've already done once in the book. Let's go with this, so she said, 'Okay, I trust your take,' and we went with it! You know, one thing is Hollywood is a very sexy town - it sells sex constantly, it sells beauty. Yes, it sells sexuality.

Revelations: And beauty's a prevalent theme. It's a recurrent theme. It's only the beautiful people who get to go to the parties. They need to keep going to stay beautiful. Todd needs to get even more beautiful with the face-lift. But it contrasts with Tammy and the inner beauty coming out; with every new horror she faces you get to know more about her and she goes through a transformation from fat girl to hero. She's the most unlikely heroine...

Clive Barker: She is the most unlikely heroine, and that's what I like about her. I think, I suppose of all the characters in the book, the one I enjoyed writing about most was she because her journey was going to be a big one. She was going to be the fat girl from Sacramento, who was going to end up really saving the soul of her hero, at the same time as realizing that her hero is not worth worshipping.

Revelations: Which is a fascinating twist.

Clive Barker: Yeah - so she saves him in spite of what she discovers about him, or perhaps because of what she discovers about him. And in a way, I think, one of the ways to look at the book is as a kind of elaborate jigsaw in which each of the characters in some way or other presses or