|
Sure, Hollywood's a scary place --- but I've come to expect weirder things from Clive Barker, the man who brought us HELLRAISER, WEAVEWORLD and BOOKS OF BLOOD. Perhaps he's starting to feel his age: His latest novel, subtitled "A Hollywood Ghost Story," seems obsessed with the fear of death and the American cult of celebrity and youth.
A touchingly intimate Acknowledgments section offers one clue: Barker began writing the novel a week before his father died. "Inevitably," he writes, "the long shadow of that event dimmed the joy of writing, at least for the first six months or so, slowing it to a crawl." Regrettably, the joylessness he must have felt while writing has cast its pall over the first two-thirds of the novel.
"Crawl" might be too harsh a word, but the book does start lethargically. Exposition consistently trumps action, and the pace seems tortured, ponderous, as if everything were taking place underwater. There are too many "indeeds" and "actuallys," too many instances of telling rather than showing. Nothing remotely supernatural or creepy happens in the first 170 pages. Thirty-five pages are spent recording the illness and death of a pet dog --- a sweet and well-written episode, but one that gets a disproportionate amount of attention considering its relevance to the plot. Things pick up dramatically around page 500 --- but crikey, it's page 500!!
At the center of the novel is a beautifully conceived and meticulously described fantasy world painted on small tiles that originally covered the walls of a room beneath an ancient Romanian fortress. Superstition says that the Devil's wife, Lilith, created the room. The tiles depict a mysterious hunt and a forest filled with numberless scenes of Hieronymous Boschian depravity. Barker's litany of the violent contortions and sexual abominations shown there --- ravens flying out from between the legs of hanged women; Harpies skinning a man and wearing his epidermis as a costume; cataclysmic transformations of people into demons; girls ecstatically/painfully being impaled by centaurs --- is stunning, but static. And no sooner is this intriguing world described than we leave it behind for banal, vapid Hollywood.
In L. A. we meet Todd Pickett, a no-longer-20-something movie star in the Pitt/Cruise mold; his agent, Maxine, something of a harpy herself; and Tammy, the head of Pickett's fan club, who seems pathetic at first but winds up being the most compelling character in the novel. Then Barker adds what amounts to distracting scenery in the form of Sigourney Weaver, Nicole Kidman, Catherine Deneuve, and the like. Ironically, his use of real Hollywood people as characters in the novel make it feel even more artificial. (The scene in which Deneuve and Tammy exchange dialogue at a party, for example, is simply not convincing.)
After a botched face-lift, Pickett moves into a mansion in a canyon in the hills to recover in secrecy. It happens to be the former home of one Katya Lupi, a silent-film goddess who ran with Valentino's crowd. Among Katya's extravagant movie-star possessions is The Hunt, transferred tile-by-tile from the Romanian fortress and reinstalled in her basement.
Katya herself soon appears and seduces Pickett into a dark realm, where the fountain of youth runs from a wellspring of evil. The Hunt has preserved her beauty and strength. Its power is addictive, and the mansion is surrounded by the ghosts of old movie stars hooked on supernatural youth, to whom Katya has denied their fix. They hang around in case she relents, meanwhile frenziedly mating with wild animals to produce litters of offspring the likes of which only Barker could imagine.
Pickett, while entranced by the thought of eternal youth, gets really hooked on Katya. His friends' efforts to save him are what finally cause the two bizarre worlds --- Hollywood and The Hunt --- to collide in an over-the-top phantasmagoria that is pure classic Barker. Next time, I hope he skips the bitter-reality stuff and goes straight to the slimy, sex-obsessed monstrosities he writes about so masterfully.
--- Reviewed by Becky Ohlsen
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
