If you can tolerate Barker at his most fantastical and effusive, you won’t want to miss Coldheart Canyon. Other readers...
If Billy Wilder had made Sunset Boulevard as a German Expressionist silent film, it might have been a lot like this engagingly nutty melodrama from the author-director of such stylish horrorfests as the Hellraiser movies and the genre-classic Books of Blood.
The story opens in the 1920s, when Willem Zeffer, manager to European-born silent film vamp Katya Lupescu, impulsively purchases and transports to America a roomful of painted tiles that graphically depict bizarre sexual encounters set in the context of an unending “hunt.” The lurid “masterwork” thereafter becomes a magnet that draws numerous Hollywood notables to Katya’s mansion in the eponymous Canyon (named for her own heartless sadism). All this unfolds while Barker follows the misfortunes (some 60 years later) of contemporary action-film hunk Todd Pickett, who recuperates at the mansion from botched cosmetic surgery, and the president of an “appreciation society” devoted to Todd, unlovely, unhappily married Tammy Lauper, who follows her hero to this impossibly jaded hell on earth. All the familiar Barker mannerisms appear in profusion: witty satirical jabs (this time at Hollywood’s culture of glamorous excess) blunted by lax, sloppy prose and pretentious diction (“disorientate,” “bizarrity,” etc.); credible and appealing characters (especially Todd, who’s made sympathetic in a long early sequence describing the death of his beloved dog); and supernatural fireworks featuring strange combinations of human, animal, and unknown life forms (you can almost feel Barker’s hand grasping at the mantle worn for centuries by Hieronymus Bosch). Before all hell finally, predictably breaks loose, most readers will have tuned out (the novel is enormously too long). Still, Barker possesses one of contemporary fiction’s wildest and finest imaginations, and the “backstory” of the hunt pictured on those tiles—of a nobleman who inadvertently offends Lucifer and must thereafter spend eternity making reparation—has the power and allure of ancient legend.
If you can tolerate Barker at his most fantastical and effusive, you won’t want to miss Coldheart Canyon. Other readers might want to go back to Jacqueline Susann.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018297-0
Page Count: 704
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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