Coldheart Canyon looks at Hollywood circa 1920s and "present" 1990s. It shows how much the landscape has changed in that time and how little the people have changed. The descriptions are lush, erotic and terrifying all at the same time, especially of course when we are dealing with the fantastical monsters of Barker's imagination, spawned by The Devil's Country.
What Barker does in this book is pretty extraordinary. He juxtaposes the fictional world of Hollywood (which people believe is real) with the nightmarish reality of Coldheart Canyon (which people believe is fiction). He describes vacuous stars and entitled movie producers with a mischievous venom that suggests he has met many of these people.
There is a huge amount of dropping of famous names, although Todd Pickett the main male character is perhaps by necessity a fiction, as I imagine is the boarish movie producer who meets a violent but poetic end.
I read this as the first book in my Booklikes Halloween Bingo challenge.
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