So the Canyon sits in the middle of the sprawling city, inviolate. Nobody will touch it now. All it has to do is wait; wait for a certain summons.
There's no telling when it will come.
Perhaps it's a hundred years away, this call. On the other hand, perhaps it will come tomorrow.
All the Canyon knows is this: that at some point in the future a whisper will pass through its cracks and its vaults, and with one almighty heave, the canyons and the hills and the flatlands as far as the shore will stand up on end, and all the towers and the dams and the dream palaces that were built here, along with their builders and their inheritors, will drop away into the deep, dark Pacific.
The land will shake for a year or so, as it lays itself down again. Tremors will continue to convulse it. But by degrees, things will return to the way they were in an earlier time. The Santa Anas will blow in their season, and they'll carry into the Canyon the seeds of the flowers whose scents they bear, dropping them carelessly in the newly-churned dirt.
After a few weeks of warm winter rain, the naked ground will be covered with grass and the shoots of young flowers; even the first spears of palm trees and bamboo. In the months to come they will flourish, transforming the land out of all recognition.
And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.
Coldheart Canyon: The Revelations Interview
Clive Barker took a break from writing Arabat, his new book for young readers, to speak with Phil and Sarah Stokes, creators of the Clive Barker website, Revelations. An excerpt from that July 10, 2001 interview, "Nips and Tucks, Tits and Fucks":
Revelations: The first time we heard about Coldheart Canyon it was going to be a short novel - when did that turn into a 600-page epic?
Clive Barker: In fact I do say at the beginning that even though I was sort of mourning my Dad, finding it difficult to write, I was at the same time finding the thing I needed to write, really, if I was going to pay respect to it as a subject, as an idea - I was going to need to tell it more fully than I had originally planned. I mean, the original thing had been, I don't know, 50,000, 60,000 words, I suppose and it had been originally told entirely from Todd's point of view. And it was really going to be a very simple book about a rather narcissistic actor in Hollywood who encounters some ghosts and we're not sure at the end of the short story or the novella, whatever it was going to be -novella, I suppose - whether he's really seen them or whether he hasn't. That was the book.
Revelations: A real Twilight Zone.
Clive Barker: Exactly - and as I got into it I realized these ghosts are sort of really interesting and I want to write about them because they represent Old Hollywood and here I have a chance not only to talk about new Hollywood but also to talk about Old Hollywood and to contrast their methodologies and to talk about Hollywood in a much more rounded way than I had originally anticipated. So it was a judgment call made out of ambition, I think, just to tell a better story.
Revelations: When we were looking at the novel again last night, we started talking about similarities to Day of the Locust.
Clive Barker: Well, Day of the Locust was certainly sitting by my side, amongst other things.
Revelations: With Mr. Todd Hackett the protagonist of that one.
Clive Barker: Locust is a completely depressing vision. I wanted to write something which was sort of bittersweet, that both showed the dark side but also showed that it had some life in it yet. So I was trying to get a little bit of both going, really - trying to tell the story of what it is to be an actor who is so beloved that you sort of feel that belovedness....
Revelations: Now that people are starting to read Coldheart Canyon .what sort of reaction are you getting?
Clive Barker: They have a great time. And they have a great time because it's not what they expected. This is a Barker book which people who didn't like Barker books - like! There's people saying "Ooh, I really like this one!" They're very, very surprised. I think the Hollywood setting, I think the relatively small amount of fantastic material in it - sure, when the stuff about the tiles comes in it gets pretty wild, but it's really limited to that area, where you really have to take a big imaginative jump with me.
Revelations: In the prologue where Zeffer goes and gets The Hunt, that part is so beautifully evoked you must have sketches of that all around the house. I would love to see those sketches.
Clive Barker: Hey, hey! I did do sketches, of course.
Revelations: [Phiclass="underline" ] As you can tell, Sarah's a bit of a perv. [Sarah:] Okay, hands up, I liked the sex!
Clive Barker: There's a lot of it in the book and that's the other thing which people are liking about the book - it is a sexy book and it's sexier than anything I've done in a long time, wouldn't you agree?
Revelations: Yeah, we've been anticipating stuff in the Scarlet Gospels, but that's still to come. Certainly anything that's gone before has been much more tamed.
Clive Barker: Right, and there were voices that wished to tame this, but they were silenced, because I said "No, absolutely not! I want to do the scene with the whip and the clitoris. I want to do the orgy scene," and I wanted it to be the wildest stuff I could make it.
Revelations: This was probably more acceptable because it was largely hetero or lesbian, which is an easier sell.
Clive Barker: That's right. The homosexual stuff, although it's there, is much reduced from other books. Even so, you'd be surprised how many people said, "Wow, this is too strong.'"
Revelations: There's always going to be someone who says it's too strong, whatever you write.
Clive Barker: Yes, though these were, in many cases, people who've been taking a journey with me for a long time.
Revelations: They should know better!
Clive Barker: They should know better, I would have thought, yeah, but at the same time, to be fair, when I made the argument "This is the way it needs to be," that's the way it stayed. I mean, the book you're reading, with the exception of those things which were taken out for legal reasons which is perhaps five or six sentences in total, all the rest of the stuff is as I intended. There was one thing - in the orgy scene - when Todd becomes very involved in the orgy scene, physically involved, I had a replay of the S&M stuff that had gone on between him and Katya, and Jane Johnson [Clive Barker's editor], very rightly, said, "You know, this is a bit of an echo of something that we've seen before. Can't you go into something different?" And I said, "You know what? You're exactly right." So I dove into something much more extreme really, which is the three-way sandwich down in the heart of the orgy, as it were.