Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

Clive

Barker

Coldheart

Canyon

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

COLDHEART CANYON. Copyright 2001 by Clive Barker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound.

Coldheart Canyon: The Revelations Interview: Clive Barker comments copyright 2001 by Clive Barker. Reprinted by permission. Revelations comments copyright 2001 by Phil and Sarah Stokes. Reprinted by permission.

PerfectBound and the PerfectBound logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.

ISBN-13: 978-0061769054

ISBN-10: 0061769053

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers.

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For David Emilian Armstrong

There are a lot of people to thank for helping me bring this one home. It was a devil of a book to write, for a host of reasons. For one thing, I began writing it the week before my father passed away, and inevitably the long shadow of that event dimmed the joy of writing, at least for the first six months or so, slowing it to a crawl.

Paradoxically, even as my production of usable text diminished, I could feel the scale of the story I wanted to tell getting bigger. What had originally begun life as an idea for a short, satiric stab at Hollywood began to blossom into something larger, lusher, and stranger: a fantasia on Hollywood both in its not-so-innocent youth and in its present, wholly commercialized phase, linked by a sizable cast and a mythology which I would need to create and explain in very considerable detail.

I dont doubt that this second incarnation of the book will be much more satisfying a read than the firstwhich I had written almost in its entirety before changing directionbut Lord, it was a sonofabitch to get down onto the page.

Forgive me, then, if the list of people Im thanking is longer than usual.

And believe me when I tell you every one of them deserves this nod of recognition, because each has helped get Coldheart Canyon out of my head and into print.

Let me begin with the dedicatee of this book, David Emilian Armstrong, my husband and in every sense of the word my partner: the one who was with me when one of our five dogs, Charlie, passed away (Charlies loving See Revsd TOC 9/10/01 2:25 PM Page viii

presence, and the sadness and frustration of losing him, is recorded in this novel). David always has faith in my capacity to go one step further: to make the tale Im telling a little richer, the picture Im painting a little brighter, the photograph Im taking a little sexier.

My thanks to Craig Green and Don MacKay, to whom I first gave the handwritten pages to be typed; and most especially to David John Doddsmy oldest and dearest friendwho worked through much of the Christmas period (with the Seraphim offices deserted around us) polishing the text, then polishing the polishes, so that the immense manuscript would be ready to be dispatched to my publishers before I went to recuperate in Kauai.

To Bob Pescovitz, my researcher, and Angela Calin, my translator, my thanks.

To Michael Hadley, Joe Daley and Rene Rosen, who run all the various aspects of my creative life outside writing and painting (films, television, theme park mazes and toy-lines, web-sites, photographsand the endless business of promoting the above), my gratitude. In the last year and a half, I have often been an absentee boss, because Ive been in the wilds of Coldheart Canyon. During that period, they have worked together to make our businesses prosper. Let me not forget Ana Osgood and Denny McLain, to whom fall the very considerable responsibilities of organizing and archiving my visual work, especially the many enormous paintings for my next books, The Abarat Quartet.

Then there are the two peopleToya Castillo and Alex Rosaswho make the homes in which we work run smoothly. Who feed David and myself, and wash our clothes; who make sure theres shampoo in our shower and our dogs smell sweet. Again, I have been something of a phantom of myself for much of the last year, passing through the house on my way to write or paint with a distracted look. They kindly indulge my craziness, and my endless calls for cups of hot sweet tea.

I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Doctor Alex del Rosario, and his assistant, Judy Azar. I recently described Alex as the perfect artists doctor. He has guided me through some lengthy periods of sickness in the See Revsd TOC 9/10/01 2:25 PM Page ix

last couple of years, understanding as no other physician in my history has the fierce and sometimes self-wounding passion that makes artists attempt to do the impossible: to paint another world into being, while writing a two-hundred-thousand-word novel while producing a couple of movies, for instance. For me, this is my natural, albeit obsessive, behavior.

But my body isnt that of a thirty-year-old any longer (or even that of a forty-year-old!). It complains now when I drive it hard; as I do daily. It has taken a massive contribution of sympathetic counsel, medication and alternative therapies to keep body and spirit together since my fathers death and I owe Alex a huge debt of thanks for my present good health.

Finally, the powers that be. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in this book, for instance) as being for cold, artistically disinterested men and women. My thanks and great admiration go to the lawyer who has helped shape my business life in the last two years, David Colden.

The Abarat deal with the Disney Company was the largest literary deal made in Hollywood last year, and it covers every possible shape and per-mutation that my invented world might take, in the hands of Disneys imagineers. To give you a taste of what kind of wordage David Colden has minutely analyzed on my behalf: the Disney contract had three pages alone devoted to listing its contents!

On the literary side, my dear Anne Sibbald, who has surely the tender-est heart of any agent who ever represented an unreformed maker of monsters like myself, has been a constant source of encouragement, and a fearless champion whenon occasionthe machinations of the corporate world proved painful and incomprehensible.

And lastbut oh, you both know, never leastmy editors.

In New York, Robert Jones (whos had his own wars to fight of late, and has still always been there with a witty word of support; or some wonderfully dry remark at the expense of the many idiocies of the publishing world).

And finally we come to Jane Johnson. My Jane, I insist, the Editor of Editors, who is never far from my mind when I set pen to paper.

See Revsd TOC 9/10/01 2:25 PM Page x

Increasingly, Jane, I think I write to entertain