Coldheart Canyon

Clive Barker

One of the most disappointing things one can come upon is a weak book by one of one's favorite authors. Especially if the book isn't weak by dint of the story, or the writing, or anything else that ordinarily allows for a good slagging. Coldheart Canyon is 98% vintage Clive Barker; weird, quasi-Biblical stuff, compelling characters, the kind of sex that wakes Jesse helms up at 3AM in sweat-soaked sheets. And the 2% that makes the book painful is editorial mistakes. Someone wasn't firing on all cylinders here, though who it was will probably remain a subject of debate among nitpickers until the end of time.

Most readers may not even notice the slight logical slips. But we're not getting paid to. The editors at Harper, on the other hand, are, and so is Barker. It was said in a book for kids about monster movies that I read way back when that it's impossible to be scared by King Kong when his rampages are interrupted every fifteen minutes by a deodorant commercial. In the same vein, when the attentive reader finds protagonist Todd Pickett asking an acquaintance of his for the number of a doctor whom he's already called three chapters before—as if he's never had it—the atmosphere drains from the book as if someone had pulled the stopper out of the tub. (And this after one of the book's most emotional scenes.)

More galling—and this heresy can be laid squarely at the feet of Messrs. Harper, Collins—the book jacket synopsis contains a major spoiler regarding the fate of one of the other main characters. This is stuff that any entry-level proofreader should be capable of catching.

Those things aside, if you can put them aside, Barker has turned out another page-turner. It is unfair to compare any of Barker's other novels to Sacrament, one of the finest novels of the twentieth century; but this compares quite nicely to Galilee or Weaveworld for readability. And while the world Barker spins here is much more contained than the ambitious alternate reality of Weaveworld, it can be just as easy to get lost in…if you're not thrown by the devil who lives in those details.