Clive Barker
 Coldheart Canyon
  
  
  
  
  
  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 first-which I had written almost in its entirety before 
changing direction-but 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 Dodds-my oldest and dearest 
friend-who 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 people-Toya Castillo and Alex Rosas-who 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. Again, I have been something 
of a phantom of myself for much of the last year, passing through the house on my way to 
write or paint with a distracted look. They kindly indulge my craziness, and my endless 
calls for cups of hot sweet tea.
  	I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Alex del Rosario, and his assistant 
Judy Azar. I recently described Alex as the perfect 'artist's doctor'. He has guided me 
through some lengthy periods of sickness in the last couple of years, understanding as no 
other physician in my history has the fierce and sometimes self-wounding passion that 
makes artists attempt to do the impossible: to paint another world into being, while 
writing a two hundred thousand word novel while producing a couple of movies, for 
instance. For me, this is my natural, albeit obsessive, behavior. But my body isn't that 
of a thirty-year-old any longer (or even that of a forty-year-old!). It complains now 
when I drive it hard; as I do daily. It has taken a massive contribution of sympathetic 
counsel, medication and alternative therapies to keep body and spirit together since my 
father's death and I owe Alex a huge debt of thanks for my present good health.
  	Finally, the powers that be. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my Hollywood 
agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned (in this book, for 
instance) as being for cold, artistically disinterested men and women. My thanks and 
great admiration go to the lawyer who has helped shape my business life in the last two 
years, David Golden. The Abarat deal with the Disney Company was the largest literary 
deal made in Hollywood last year, and it covers every possible shape and permutation that 
my invented world might take, in the hands of Disney's imagineers. To give you a taste of 
what kind of wordage David Golden has minutely analyzed on my behalf: the Disney contract 
had three pages alone devoted to listing its contents!
  	On the literary side, my dear Anne Sibbald, who has surely the tenderest heart of 
any agent who ever represented an unreformed maker of monsters like myself, has been a 
constant source of encouragement, and a fearless champion when-on occasion-the 
machinations of the corporate world proved painful and incomprehensible.
  	And last-but oh, you both know, never least-my editors.
  	In New York, Robert Jones (who's had his own wars to fight of late, and has still 
always been there with a witty word of support; or some wonderfully dry remark at the 
expense of the many idiocies of the publishing world.)
  	And finally we come to Jane Johnson. My Jane, I insist, the Editor of Editors, 
who is never far from my mind when I set pen to paper. Increasingly, Jane, I think I 
write to entertain you, to please you. We have survived for many years together on a raft 
of shared beliefs about the necessity of dreams, tossed around in the tumultuous seas of 
modern publishing. In that time, Jane has lost countless colleagues to exhaustion, 
frustration and despair, and yet she manages to be a mistress of beautiful prose as well 
as an editor of a stable of authors, who, like me, could not imagine their literary lives 
continuing without her.
  	I would have given up the increasingly problematic ambition of having a broad 
audience for my work, and fled into the minor, the hermetic and the oblique, without her 
tireless encouragement.
  	My love to you, my Jane; and, as always, my heartfelt thanks.
  	Here's another tale for you, saved from the flood.
  	CB