THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE GHOSTS AND CHILDREN OF COLDHEART CANYON

A self-indulgent, preening narcissist, a product of Hollywood at its most perverse and out-of-control, she still has ambitions of returning to the waking world, beyond the strange nightmare she has come to inhabit in Coldheart Canyon, despite the fact that she is anchored in place, little more than a ghost herself, by her dependancy on the metaphysics that has sustained her and the dreaming-life of the canyon down the decades.

​Barker's relationship with the film industry has always been fractious, to say the least. To someone so consumed by their own imagination, who wishes to create beyond bounds and without recourse to petty constraints, middling doubts and the imperative to pander to the widest possible demographic (always a recipe that results in the blandest work imaginable), the bastions of cinema are often dreary, depressing places, if not outright hostile. 


His novel Coldheart Canyon is the ultimate expression of that; published long after he'd bowed out of any direct involvement in film making (prefering instead to champion other film makers with more of a head for the proscribed processes and more of a will to jump through their various hoops), it is his excoriating critique and expose of the absurdity of Hollywood culture, a delightfully prurient raking-of-the-muck in which he brings to light not only the self-mutilating absurdity the systems put people through for the price of fame, but also the secret histories that it would much, much rather forget. 


Here, the ghosts of “Old Hollywood,” those sainted and shining figures that occupy the positions of post-modern saints and prophets in our cultures, are explicitly revealed in all of their sordid infamy, every concealed vice, every indulgence and addiction and abuse revealed and put on display. 


Because, according to this mythology, the ghosts of Hollywood are still very much present, anchored there by the promise of perpetual youth and vitality and pleasure. From Greta Garbo to Rudolph Valentino, every shining, sacred star is here, and presented non-too-sympathetically. 


To Barker, the cult of aesthetics and superfice that pervades Hollywood is grotesque, indicative of a spiritual malaise that treats potential miracles not as transcendental, but as commodities; a pathway to a more elegant facelift or nip-and-tuck, rather than a means of realising dreams or transcending the banal concerns of waking life. 


Therefore, the ghosts of Coldheart Canyon are sybaritic in the extreme, engaging in every sordid pasttime they did whilst alive (and myriad more besides). They cannot conceive of anything other, since it is how they lived their lives, their indulgences one of the few things that brought fleeting pleasure or relief from the spiritual void at their cores. One of the many, many means by which they have staved off ennui over the decades is by indulging in sexual escapades that weren't possible whilst they were flesh and blood, but which are now easily accommodated (however unlikely): 


Finding new lovers amongst the exotic fauna that inhabit the Canyon (everything from escaped pet tigers and ostriches to coyotes, lizards and more besides), they have sired a distinctly Barkerian brood of abominations that are neither ghost nor beast, neither living nor dead, but that boast elements of their parents anatomies perversely intermingled. 


As well as being horrors in and of themselves (their activities more rapine than cannibal, for the most part), the children represent Barker's contempt for Hollywood and its enshrined saints; they are the ultimate manifestation of their self-interested indulgence, their lack of grace or elan beyond what fashion and lifestyle magazines demand. The marriage of the bestial and the misshapen to culturally enshrined avatars of celestial beauty is a direct and excoriating stab at the heart of Hollywood itself. Combined with Barker's portrayal of various actual and imaginary movie stars as pampered, preening, self-indulgent narcissists capable of the utmost atrocity if it means they get a few more moments of ephemeral adoration, Coldheart Canyon presents a wryly bitter take on the culture from its diseased innards, from the perspective of one who has passed through them and witnessed every species of disease the sickly beast suffers from. 


The children themselves are, despite their various malformities (creatures that resemble hideous marriages between silent cinema heart-throbs and syphilitic ostriches, archaic Hollywood sex symbols and skinless panthers), almost passive in comparison to their parents; the various ghosts of Hollywood itself that litter the eponymous canyon, where they were granted a taste of the truly miraculous for perhaps the first and only time in their enchanted -but generally miserable- lives (and were damned by their failures to comprehend its possibility or import).


It is not the unasked-for children that the novel treats with contempt or distaste; rather the scions of dead Hollywood itself, the meat-grinder culture that worships aesthetics and has no wider philosophy beyond reducing human beings to products. 


Antagonist Katya Lupi is a remnant of the first iterations of that engine; a silent movie star that has generally been forgotten by Hollywood at large, save as an historical artefact, a curio whose lustre has faded over time. Despite this, she is still very much alive -unlike most of her contemporaries-, and the cold-hearted Mistress of ghosts and children both; the presiding empress of the canyon purportedly named after her most abiding quality. It was she who accidentally discovered the metaphysics that has suspended the ghosts in their desperate, unliving conditions, that has allowed her to live many years in youth and beauty far, far beyond her natural span. 


And, in terms of monstrosity, the children are barely comparable: 


A self-indulgent, preening narcissist, a product of Hollywood at its most perverse and out-of-control, she still has ambitions of returning to the waking world, beyond the strange nightmare she has come to inhabit in Coldheart Canyon, despite the fact that she is anchored in place, little more than a ghost herself, by her dependancy on the metaphysics that has sustained her and the dreaming-life of the canyon down the decades.


She is the very epitome of all that Barker loathes in Hollywood's myths of itself; one who appears, initially, to be spectral amd sublime, who comes to both the book's protagonist and the reader as a bringer of metaphysics, a keeper of hidden secrets, but who is slowly revealed as little more than a spiteful and egotistical child, who has evolved no further than the point of her own self-indulgence. What metaphysics she brings she does not understand, nor does she have the imagination to conceive of its import beyond the merely aesthetic and in terms of its usefulness as an instrument of control:


Having addicted her various lovers and contacts throughout the ages of Hollywood to its effects, she now wields it over them as both a promise and sublime threat. The ghosts are as much addicts in death as most of them were in life, clamouring for entrance to the house and access to the miracle it contains, so that they might bathe in its rejuvenating energies as they once did, when flesh and its decay were sincere concerns. 


Meanwhile, the children they have unwittingly -and obscenely- sired roam the emptiness of the canyon, creatures that should never have been; not quite human, not quite animal, not quite living and not quite dead; infernal marriages of contradictions, the by-products of a culture that Barker insists lacks all humanity, coherence and certainly all metaphysics. In that, they perhaps the most sincere and overt reflections of its unspoken monstrosity, the truest of its children, beyond what media and culture insist through their tailored, touched-up and air-brushed syntheses of superficial beauty.