Partly a sprawling gothic ghost story, Clive Barker’s 2001 novel Coldheart Canyon is also rather a crafty love-letter to the smoke and mirror factory of Hollywood. Emerging amid Barker’s run of doorstopper books, this indulgently weighty tome is delightful and messy. If it were a movie, it would have a cast of thousands (many of them ghost extras) and likely run over budget.
In 1920, just after the fledgling stutters of the film industry, stratospherically successful producer Willem Zeffer returns to Romania with his protégé Katya Lupi. Ostensibly, the trip allows her to revisit the birthplace where he found her a few years earlier. Zeffer is ferociously aware of the transfixing hold cinema has over the audience and of the allure he has discovered in Katya, who has now become the “best paid actress in Hollywood”.1 Barker has a lot of fun mixing his fictional film figures in with historical ones - Katya, after all, has one of the “most famous faces in the world”, right alongside Theda Bara. Zeffer, for his part, is a composite figure of sorts. Past the instinctive comparison to F W Murnau, Zeffer resembles the kind of producer who might have made films like George Archainbaud’s 1917 silent film The Brand of Satan.
While Katya is visiting her Romanian family, Zeffer - “always in the mood to buy” - lingers at the local monastery, eventually being led by Father Sandru down into the basement to view a peculiar room. The monastery’s history, it turns out, rubs shoulders with myth. The monks have taken over what was a fortress, the seat of Duke Goga. Before that, since all gothic places such as this must have a storied and spectral past, the fortress is whispered to have belonged to the Devil’s wife, Lilith. Katya knowingly insists, there is “blood in the mortar”. Father Sandru demurs on Lilith’s presence, but he does bring Zeffer to a secret room, one walled with tiles that he confesses are called the Devil’s Country. Both splendid and obscene, the tiles depict the former Duke Goga on an unfinished hunt for the Devil’s son, and a landscape replete with depravity, violence and wonder painted in lockstep. The tiles, impossibly, feel unstable. Leaning back, Zeffer feels “as though he’d had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free.” Desperate to please his muse, Zeffer - who is not much of a Svengali - buys the tiles, and organises their transportation back to Katya’s excessively opulent mansion in the Hollywood canyons, where they will line an underground room. Barker locates Katya’s corrupted palace at the tail end of cinema’s Silent Era, a period still haunted by the late nineteenth century’s fascination with magic lantern shows and visual sleight of hand. These cinematic tricks, Barker suggests, might just be something more.
Decades later, the mansion gains a new visitor in the shape of actor Todd Pickett, who is aging (in Hollywood terms, the dreaded mid-late thirties). Lacking the acting chops to coast by on talent, and vain to the core, he tries plastic surgery. Floundering during an unexpectedly long recuperation, his agent hides him away at Katya’s not-quite empty mansion, now a mostly-forgotten relic. Years ago, though, Katya has learned that the tiles have rejuvenating properties - “all you had to do was step into the Devil’s Country and you could shed your own skin like a snake”. She uses the tiled to remain youthful, and in the past, has parceled out small moments amid the uncanny landscape there to favoured friends among the Hollywood elite (one memorable moment includes the mopey ghost of 1920s heartthrob Rudolph Valentino). Once Todd is in residence, Katya slowly enchants him closer to the tiled room. He is charmed into an initial sexual encounter, then onto more lavish testing of his limits as she takes him to what can only be described as a ghost orgy, in which it is demonstrated that there is indeed life after death. This Bacchanalian indulgence is also to prime Todd for what he will see once they are in the room beneath the mansion, when he becomes aware that the images on the tiles are not, in fact, static but are, wondrously, moving like a magic lantern:
“There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of wind shook the tangle of a thicket…[...] The motion multiplied with every flicker of his gaze. There were ripples on the rivulets and streams, there were clouds over the sea..[...] The room, he began to understand, had control of his eyes.”
Coldheart Canyon is somewhat at odds with the rest of Barker’s oeuvre. It lacks the bite of his take on Faust, The Damnation Game, or the sordid grime of The Hellbound Heart (which is also the source text for his schlocky body horror film Hellraiser). It is missing the speculative grandeur of Imajica, or the flights of fancy in Weaveworld. What it offers, though, amid its wanderingly slow plot, is an indulgence in ghosts and the opulence of old-fashioned filmmaking. Its language is steeped in the gothic and the ghostly, along with the trappings of old-school cinema. There are worries about angles and lighting; the fear of someone’s voice being unsuited to this newfangled system of sound on film; fans who must know everything about their glittering idols; and the murk left behind on those idols when the glitter is scraped off. In the Devil’s Country, Katya and Todd witness the appearance of Lilith herself (because foreshadowing something like that cannot go to waste in a Barker novel or a gothic melodrama). Delineated by a glorious theatricality that situates her neatly alongside the Hollywood interlopers, Barker’s Lilith is a figure straight from a Medieval Miracle Play, rising up out of the Hell’s Mouth. The bones of the mansion survive this turbulence (though Todd and Katya do not). Once Lilith has sunk back into her infernal realms, and the ghosts have laid waste to the main halls, the tiles themselves remain. Barker sounds his indulgent haunted house off as if he is waiting for the opportunity for a sequel, since “all it has to do is wait”.
Works cited:
1 All quotations in this piece are taken from Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon (2001), HarperCollins.