Coldheart Canyon

Clive Barker writes some very long stories. This is over 700 pages. Well worth reading.

It starts in europe with an interesting tale about a room below a monastery wich is decorated with tiles that, well it's hard to describe what they do in part fantasy I suppose they create a loop of somesort to a fantasy world/dimension where some bizarre things happen.

The novel then gets started in the bulk of the story which is set in the present day. A fictional movie star re-locates to a haunted canyon after recovering from cosmetic surgery. In Coldheart Canyon he discovers the woman who owns the tiled room that was moved from europe to this canyon a long time ago back when movies started probably the 1920's. He is shown the tiled room and from there all kinds of strange and imaginative happenings are revealed to him. Quite a lot of which is explicit couplings.

At the same time the administrator of his fan club journeys to the same canyon in an effort to find why he has not been in the public eye lately and begins to get caught up in the strange occurrences within the canyon. Here she is educated by a man who was present and organised the movement of the tiled room.

The story moves away from the canyon in the latter part of the book and moves back to town. Here a few confrontations occur and more characters are introduced, expanded upon before they all proceed enmasse to the canyon for the climax and final showdown in the book.

I did enjoy large parts of this book but sometimes felt there was too much going, a lot of which was strange and not easy to follow. Usually I really enjoy this sort of thing. All in all I have now read 4 novels by Clive Barker and I enjoyed the other one's more. Guess my expectations were different. I will read many more of his novels and continue to review them.