SOURCE: Barker, Clive, and Michael Rowe. “Horrors, It's Hollywood!” Advocate, no. 852 (4 December 2001): 69-72.

In the following interview, Barker discusses Coldheart Canyon, Hollywood, and his personal life.

Clive Barker, ruggedly handsome at 49 and looking vaguely piratical in a black shirt and gold earring, sits at a wooden refectory table in one of the three houses that form his residential compound high in the canyon country above Beverly Hills.

In front of Barker sits his most recent novel, Coldheart Canyon, the story of a narcissistic, washed-up action star named Todd Pickett in flight from the media while he recovers from plastic surgery. A blistering satire of modern Hollywood, the novel is also a full-on ghost story: Pickett selects as his hiding place the remote estate of a once-famous silent film actress with a taste for sexual sadism (among other things), and it turns out she's still haunting the place along...