Revelations: There are always some images that will stay with you after every book - and that's one!
Clive Barker: Then she looked at that and she went, "Oh my god! Okay, maybe we should just go back to the whipping scene?" And I said, "No, no, no, you were absolutely right." And she was. I don't want to repeat something that I've already done once in the book. Let's go with this, so she said, "Okay, I trust your take," and we went with it! You know, one thing is Hollywood is a very sexy town - it sells sex constantly, it sells beauty. Yes, it sells sexuality.
Revelations: And beauty's a prevalent theme. It's a recurrent theme. It's only the beautiful people who get to go to the parties. They need to keep going to stay beautiful. Todd needs to get even more beautiful with the face-lift. But it contrasts with Tammy and the inner beauty coming out; with every new horror she faces you get to know more about her and she goes through a transformation from fat girl to hero. She's the most unlikely heroine...
Clive Barker: She is the most unlikely heroine, and that's what I like about her. I think, I suppose of all the characters in the book, the one I enjoyed writing about most was she because her journey was going to be a big one. She was going to be the fat girl from Sacramento, who was going to end up really saving the soul of her hero, at the same time as realizing that her hero is not worth worshipping.
Revelations: Which is a fascinating twist.
Clive Barker: Yeah - so she saves him in spite of what she discovers about him, or perhaps because of what she discovers about him. And in a way, I think, one of the ways to look at the book is as a kind of elaborate jigsaw in which each of the characters in some way or other presses or impresses themselves upon another. Maxine touches Tammy, Jerry, Todd, and you know, I just take her as an example. And each of the relationships she has is a necessary one for the development of her or the other person. And what I wanted to do was make sure that this kind of jigsaw worked throughout the entire book, so that everybody got some transformation of some kind. Even a relatively minor character like Jerry is saved from his cancer.
Revelations: I think Jerry's a fascinating character - was he based on Roddy McDowall?
Clive Barker: I couldn't say... All I could say would be that that was a very smart guess!
Revelations: The interesting thing about Roddy McDowall is that we read that, after he died, he asked for his diaries and personal effects to be locked up for 100 years before they were read. I'm just wondering whether any of it's going to be like Coldheart Canyon when we get to read it!
Clive Barker: Well, I've read a lot of that stuff and I knew Roddy really well and I don't believe Coldheart Canyon would be what it is without Roddy! But I kept Roddy out of the dedication pages, or the thanks, because he passed away and it just didn't feel appropriate to be talking about that when he had been so very passionate about not... he didn't want a memorial service; we were all ready to go to the memorial service, it was canceled the day of... but I would go to his house...
Revelations: How did you come to know him?
Clive Barker: We met at a Fangoria convention!
Revelations: Of all things.
Clive Barker: And he said he loved what I did, and he was very familiar with the books; I obviously loved what he did. I went to his house dozens of times to dinner and met Gore Vidal, Elizabeth Taylor... and so on and so forth, the list is endless. And a lot of the time, I was just the observer, very quiet, I was easily the least important person in the room and I thought it was just important to do my job as an author and just shut the fuck up!
Revelations: And then report back afterwards from wherever it is -"the furthest reaches of our imagination..." - however the quote goes!
Clive Barker: Hopefully so! The fun thing about this book is that it matches the furthest reaches of our imagination with things that we all know are going on all of the time, and I think if the book has a different kind of chance in the marketplace to previous books it's because Hollywood is fascinating to everybody. Because everybody knows that people are having face-lifts and tummy-tucks and ass-tucks and all kinds of other things all the time and here I am just simply saying what people already know is the case. And there's nothing I think I can say, beyond the outrageously fantastical stuff (of which there is obviously a significant amount, but it doesn't, I think, overwhelm the book) there's nothing amongst the factual stuff which is not supported in some way or other by something I have either personally experienced or personally heard - that is to say, none of this came just from books.
Revelations: Right, it resonates as a real story on those levels.
Clive Barker: Thank you! Thank you - that is the most important thing you could say. Thank you, Phil, I appreciate that, because, obviously the fan part of it I know about. I know a lot of people who work in the "body improvement" business and I got hold, through them, or through one person in particular, of some descriptions of protocols for what happens if things go wrong, which were... chilling isn't the word. And there are so many things I could have had happen to Todd which were so much worse than what actually happened to him. You only have to think of Michael Jackson to see a man who took a journey for which there is no return - so that part, I supported all that. I supported all the stuff with fact and information and interviews. And the stuff about the movies themselves - that's my experience. The stuff about Oscar night, y'know, where he's sitting there at home, wishing he wasn't there, at the same time despising every minute of it - that is completely my experience of Oscar night and, having been there as a guest, as it were, that whole thing of fake smiles and... Yeuch!
Revelations: There is some marketing to do around this book. It's almost in a genre of its own; it's another of those Lord of Illusions crossovers. It's an edgy crossover.
Clive Barker: It is a crossover.
Revelations: And what we saw from Lord of Illusions is that if you don't get the crossover marketing right, you lose the audience.
Clive Barker: Yes, but I think the audience in literary terms, the reading audience, is much more willing to accept crossovers than a cinematic audience - it's a smarter audience - and I have greater faith, I will say, in the reading audience than I do in the movie audience. Maybe that's a misplaced faith but, you know, I've given my readers a whole host of very different kinds of books. Just over the last little while I've given people a lot of different kinds of things - Sacrament and Galilee - and each thing that's come along has been very different and in many cases they've been crossovers in a way, or hybrids: the gay novel with the metaphysical adventure novel in the case of Sacrament; the inter-racial war novel going with a strange romance about the Kennedys in Galilee; and I think in this case, this one is perhaps the easiest of the combinations because everybody knows Hollywood is a weird place. And I think that the suspicion that the occult hangs around Hollywood, that Hollywood has always had an unnatural or an unhealthy ... preoccupation with the occult is something I think that people generally know. You think of the Manson business and you look through the pages of Hollywood Babylon and there's plenty of stuff there. It's an interesting place because Hollywood lives in a dream of itself - half believing itself and half not. Half in fear of losing its own grasp on its sanity.