I revel in spending time with Barker’s imagination, which has one foot firmly rooted in the literary past while he reinvents multiple genres at once in his own image. Barker’s never been one to skimp on sexuality in his books, but Coldheart Canyon still manages to be the f*ckiest thing he’s ever written.īoth books are over 600 pages but I chewed my way through them in only a few days. An ageing movie-star moves into a curious mansion to hide from the press after his plastic surgery goes wrong, and soon he is immersed in the decadence of the ghosts of the silent age. Coldheart Canyon, by contrast, is lascivious, even by Barker’s standards. It’s grand in tone but not portentous, with a soap opera edge. Galilee follows two warring families over centuries of strife, with the twist being that one of them is peopled with millennia-old deities. Barker’s books are also stuffed to the brim with ideas, perhaps too many. Both love to delve into worldbuilding and historical detail, sometimes to the detriment of the wider plot, but the prose is so gorgeous that you don’t really care. Barker reminds me a lot of another of my favourite authors, Anne Rice. This month, I read Galilee, his generational saga of familial drama with a mythological twist, and over the Christmas period, I devoured Coldheart Canyon, his Hollywood ghost story-slash-orgiastic satire.

Younger me was daft because Barker’s fantasies are amazing, so dense and layered and still fresh decades after their publication. Yet his non-horror works, which are often hefty tomes of mighty ambition, always felt at a distance to me.

I’m a big fan of his short stories and know way more about the Hellraiser franchise than is healthy. It’s taken me a while to get around to reading Clive Barker’s novels. 54DPCb2zKR- Kayleigh Donaldson January 10, 2023 I seem to be the first person to check it out in over 20 years. In fairness, one of my o ther resolutions was to read more poetry, so short books make for quick additions to my Goodreads annual target.

As always, I set myself the goal of reading 100 books a year, and I’m doing pretty solidly so far. Oh well, at least we’ll always have books. We’re one whole month into this shiny new year, because time means nothing and its endless passage makes fools of us all.

Imajica goodreads