Coldheart Canyon is a novel by Clive Barker

Clive Barker

Clive Barker is an English author, film director and visual artist best known for his work in both fantasy and horror fiction. Barker came to prominence in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories which established him as a leading young horror writer...

, published in 2001 by HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

. The paperback edition was published by HarperTorch on November 5, 2002 (ISBN 006103018X). The story centers around Todd Pickett, a failing movie star, and Tammy Lauper, Todd's obsessive fan.

Synopsis

The story begins in Romania during the 1920s, where poverty and disease run rampant. American talent agent Willem Zeffer and the Romanian-born actress he represents, Katya Lupi, have travelled there in order to visit Katya's relatives. Zeffer visits an old medieval castle which has been turned into a monastery and decides to buy a unique work of art, a series of sculpted and painted tiles depicting, in a grotesque and obscene manner, the local legend of a Count who was cursed to haunt the nearby wilderness for all eternity.

The second part of the story begins in the year 2000, with failing movie star Todd Pickett deciding to undergo plastic surgery in order to make himself look younger and engineer a comeback. Something goes wrong during the surgery, and Todd, now disfigured, is forced to go into hiding during his recovery. His agent selects Katya Lupi's former home, an abandoned house in Coldheart Canyon, a secluded area outside Hollywood, where Todd soon discovers that Katya and her "subjects" still hold court.