Sympathy for the Devilish: Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon

Years ago, back in my college days, I met a science-fiction writer. He came to this class I was taking, to discuss a book of his that we were assigned to read. The book, Beyond Heaven's River wasn't a very good one, I'm afraid, and the author, Greg Bear, has since gone on to write better stuff, I take it, having won numerous awards including the Nebula, twice, for Best Novel.

I was really into movies at the time (still am) and so was this friend of mine and, even though we were suppose to be discussing Mr. Bear's book, those were the type of questions we ended up asking.

As it turns out, Greg Bear was into movies too. Seems he was, at the time, eagerly awaiting a call from Mr. Spielberg expressing interest in turning one of his books into the next blockbuster (still waiting, alas). Spielberg's Indiana Jones series was popular back then and he told us how everyone in the theater (probably mostly teenagers) thought he was nuts when he yelled out "It's Lilith", or words to that effect, during the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you've seen the movie (and who hasn't, right?) you'll recall that near the end a female, ghost-like thing emerges from the ark—an entity both beautiful and deadly. That ghost, according to Greg Bear, was Lilith.

I was reminded of this because Lilith plays a significant role in Clive Barker's Hollywood ghost story, Coldheart Canyon too—although many of the reviews I've read don't mention her.

Lilith, according to Jewish tradition, was the first wife of Adam. Other stories, including Barker's, speak of her union with the Devil and their evil offspring.

It is Lilith who really sets in motion the entire plot of Coldheart Canyon, which is a lurid, tabloid-like tale of both old and new Hollywood that bears at least a passing resemblance to the Billy Wilder film, Sunset Blvd.

Representing Old Hollywood is the fictional, silent-era star Katya Lupi. She's sweet and Lillian Gish-like on screen, but a selfish and narcissistic vamp in real life, prone to throwing wild parties in her Hollywood Hills mansion (Cesar Romero nicknames her La Puta Enojada or "the Mad Bitch").

Rescued from her dirt-poor childhood in Romania by the cultured, Svengali-like Willem Zeffer, Coldheart Canyon opens with the love-struck Zeffer, officially Katya's manager, purchasing a gift for the silent-screen star on a trip to her native land. He's looking for something unique and he finds more than he bargained for in the bowels of a centuries-old monastery. It is here that he is shown the Fortress, a room made up of thousands of painted tiles which line its walls and which depict—among other things—"The Hunt", an unending quest of a penance-paying nobleman for Qwaftzefoni, a goat-like child of Lilith and Satan.

It would be possible to go on listing at great length the horrors and the spectacles of the scenes laid out on the tile: the fields of dancing demons, the fairy races, the succubi squatting on roofs, the holy fools draped in coats of cow-dung, the satyrs, the spirits of graveside, roadside and hearthside; the weasel-kings and the bloated toads; and so on, and so on, behind every tree and on every cloud, sliding down every waterfall and lingering beneath every rock: a world haunted by the shapes of lust and animal lust and all that humanity called to its bosom in the long nights of its despair.

Zeffer purchases the room, known as the Devil's Country, and moves it (at great expense) to Hollywood where it's reassembled tile by tile.

Flash forward to the present. Heart-throb action-film star Todd Pickett is a pretty-boy who isn't aging particularly well (or at least that's what he's being told by a troll-like studio head). He turns to plastic surgery to revive his moribund career, but the operation is botched and his face ruined. He's shuffled away to Katya Lupi's old Hollywood mansion to get away from the press while he recuperates.

Since this is a ghost story, you can probably guess what comes next. Katya lives on, thanks to the Devil's Country, forever youthful and eager to seduce our wounded hero. Meanwhile, Todd's Number One fan, the overweight President of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, one Tammy Lauper, is out to discover the truth behind her favorite actor's disappearance.

The 600-plus page Coldheart Canyon is loosely plotted. Barker's all over the map and it strikes me that at least some of it could go bye-bye unmissed. The climax, in trendy and tedious fashion, goes on too long—although it includes one bit of signature grisliness: plants capable of piercing your body with needle-prick shoots ("He could see their trajectory through his skin; they were getting steadily more ambitious as they climbed; dividing and dividing again, forming a network through his flesh.").

Still, Barker has latched onto something fun here (skewering Hollywood) and he knows it. The novel may put you off, but it won't bore you.

What's most fascinating is, of course, what's most sinister—the Devil's Country. And everyone who enters falls under its wicked and narcotic-like spell. Far from static, images dance and flicker about and take control of your eyes.

The correlative is, of course, the movie theater itself. In the early days of motion pictures, audiences were afraid and had to be convinced that what they were seeing would not pop out of the screen. Folks who enter the Devil's Country are also afraid, but with good reason—as shiny scenes play out in a virtual reality where one is both spectator and participant.

Barker is a talented writer, of that I have no doubt, and he both arouses and repulses us with Coldheart Canyon—which means you can expect lots of graphic sex and violence. It's a freak show (quite literally) up at the Lupi estate, but Barker's tale isn't morally black-and-white. Evil isn't entirely evil here and the book ends on a rather redemptive note. "There's always some light in the darkness, somewhere," somebody says near the close.