Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story was published by HarperCollins in 2001. Todd Pickett is a major movie star whose career is declining with his looks. After botched plastic surgery leaves his face temporarily monstrous, he retreats to recover in a secluded mansion in a canyon above Los Angeles. The house, it turns out, was once owned by Katya Lupi, a silent-film actress of legendary beauty who acquired a tile from a Romanian monastery — a tile that contains a portal to a hellish other world called the Devil’s Country.
The mansion is haunted — not just by Katya’s ghost but by the ghosts of Hollywood’s Golden Age, who gather for spectral parties that replay the decadence of 1920s Hollywood. Barker uses the ghost story to anatomize Hollywood itself: an industry built on the worship of beauty, the terror of aging, and the willingness to make Faustian bargains for fame. Todd’s plastic surgery is merely the latest version of a deal with the devil that Hollywood has been offering since its inception.
The novel is excessive — Barker’s prose is lush to the point of overripeness, and the narrative sprawls — but its set pieces are memorable, and its portrait of Hollywood as a literally haunted place, built on the bones of discarded beauties, has a dark satirical force.
Collecting Coldheart Canyon
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2001): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $8–$20
- Signed: $40–$100