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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story
Copyright 2001 by Clive Barker
Scanned from an Advanced Readers Edition
For David Emilian Armstrong
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a lot of people to thank for helping me bring this one home. It
was a devil of a book to write, for a host of reasons. For one thing, I began
writing it the week before my father passed away, and inevitably 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.
Paradoxically, even as my production of useable text diminished, I could
feel the scale of the story I wanted to tell getting bigger. What had originally
begun life as an idea for a short, satiric stab at Hollywood began to blossom into
something larger, lusher and stranger: a fantasia on Hollywood both in its
not-so-innocent youth and in its present, wholly commercialized phase, linked by a
sizeable cast and a mythology which I would need to create and explain in very
considerable detail.
I don't doubt that this second incarnation of the book will be much more
satisfying a read than the firstєwhich I had written almost in its entirety before
changing directionєbut Lord, it was a son of a bitch to get down onto the page.
Forgive me, then, if the list of people I'm thanking is longer than usual.
And believe me when I tell you every one of them deserves this nod of recognition,
because each has helped get Coldheart Canyon out of my head and into print.
Let me begin with the dedicatee of this book, David Emilian Armstrong, my
husband and in every sense of the word my partner: the one who was with me when one
of our five dogs, Charlie, passed away (Charlie's loving presence, and the sadness
and frustration of losing him, is recorded in this novel). David always has faith in
my capacity to go one step further: to make the tale I'm telling a little richer,
the picture I'm painting a little brighter, the photograph I'm taking a little
sexier.
My thanks to Craig Green and Don MacKay, to whom I first gave the
handwritten pages to be typed; and most especially to David John Doddsєmy oldest and
dearest friendєwho worked through much of the Christmas period (with the Seraphim
offices deserted around us) polishing the text, then polishing the polishes, so that
the immense manuscript would be ready to be dispatched to my publishers before I
went to recuperate in Kauai.
To Bob Pescovitz, my researcher, and Angela Calin, my translator, my thanks.
To Michael Hadley, Joe Daley and Renee Rosen, who run all the various
aspects of my creative life outside writing and painting (films, television, theme
park mazes and toy-lines, web-sites, photographs-and the endless business of
promoting the above), my gratitude. In the last year and a half, I have often been
an absentee boss, because I've been in the wilds of Coldheart Canyon. During that
period, they have worked together to make our businesses prosper. Let me not forget
Ana Osgood and Denny McLain, to whom fall the very considerable responsibilities of
organizing and archiving my visual work, especially the many enormous paintings for
my next books, The Abarat Quartet.
Then there are the two peopleєToya Castillo and Alex Rosasєwho make the
homes in which we work run smoothly. Who feed David and myself, and wash our
clothes; who make sure there's shampoo in our shower and our dogs smell sweet.