Clive Barker's messy, phantasmagorical novels tend to start in familiar places and then wander quickly into uncharted biological and psychological territory, ultimately fetching up on alien shores some 50 to 400 pages after any other writer would have thrown in the towel. His latest, Coldheart Canyon, stays closer to home than most; sexually, it's more daring than his usual work, but its relatively conventional setting and storyline give its fantasy dramas a solid grounding. The title refers to a curiously obscure L.A. canyon that was once home to Katya Lupi, the debauched but magnetic queen of 1920s Hollywood. Modern-day film superstar Todd Pickett washes up in the canyon's luxurious mansion, hiding from his fans and the press after a bout of cosmetic surgery gone wrong. Shortly thereafter, he meets Lupi—who is still impossibly young and beautiful—and the legion of hungry Hollywood ghosts who hover around her house, coveting the powerful magical secret that preserves her. Meanwhile, Tammy Lauper, the overweight, obsessive, strong-willed president of Pickett's "appreciation society," comes looking for him and ends up in the canyon and on Lupi's bad side, setting the stage for a catfight of surprisingly small-scale proportions. The themes of Coldheart Canyon, with its real-world name-dropping, roman à clef characters, and digressions on Hollywood's shallowness and the price of celebrity, have mostly been done to death. But Barker's take on it has typically unusual (and grotesque) touches, such as the canyon's ghosts: Prominent figures like Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford, who retain their bodies and their sexuality after death, continue to stage elaborate orgies, mating with living animals to produce monstrous offspring. Barker, a one-time filmmaker who has said he's not interested in directing again, often seems to be speaking directly through his protagonists, or offering them as mouthpieces for various disaffected Hollywood acquaintances. Pickett in particular is patchily characterized, sincere from moment to moment but incomprehensibly schizoid in the aggregate. But in spite of some unevenly integrated ideas, Coldheart Canyon is one of Barker's most accessible and traditional books. Spooky, unpredictable, and as plainspoken as most of his recent novels, it's more cerebral and immediate than most Halloween fare.