Horrors, it's Hollywood! In his new novel, Coldheart Canyon, Clive Barker treats Tinseltown as a source of horror. What gave him that idea? Personal experience. (books).

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 with a cabal of the ghosts of old movie stars. In spite of its innately camp premise, the novel is as dark, violent, and hypersexual as Barker's best-known work.

Ironically, it was a series of delightful parties that got his imagination going. "I was lucky enough, seven years ago, to be drawn into Roddy McDowall's circle," Barker says. "Roddy had Friday night dinner parties regularly throughout the year"--in the company of such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, Gore Vidal, and Maureen O'Sullivan.

"What do you say when you have that degree of history and intelligence and storytelling?" Barker asks rhetorically. "You shut the fuck up, and you listen. The only time I raised my voice at one of those dinner parties was when Gore Vidal opined that there was no such thing as homosexual literature, which I think is nonsense."

As the stream of dinner party anecdotes took root in his imagination, Barker realized that there was a story growing. "Talk about six degrees of separation," he says wryly. "In Hollywood it's three degrees. Everyone has known--or slept with--everyone else."

At the time, he had a friend who worked at a face-lift clinic catering to a privileged Hollywood clientele for whom discretion was essential. The author wanted details. "I said, `Fill me in!' and he said, `I can't! I can't!'" But eventually the friend caved in. "He smuggled out these big books which had these horrendous photographs of what happens when really simple things go wrong," Barker says delightedly. He realized that he had the beginning of his story.

His Beverly Hills home also provided inspiration. "Here I am," he remembers telling himself, "living in a nameless canyon in a house that was built back in the 1920s by Ronald Colman, who, according to those who know the history of this town, had quite an orgiastic time of it."

The more he researched, says Barker, "the more I realized that I had a deep-seated hatred for these [Hollywood] people. The rage I felt surprised me."

Barker says his anger dates back to the process of getting the 1998 film Gods and Monsters made. The film, adapted from Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein, was executive-produced by Barker and won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Bill Condon, who also directed.

"I don't know if I would have felt the same previous to the experience of going around Hollywood with Bill Condon and Ian McKellen trying to get Gods and Monsters set up," Barker muses. "That really changed my idea of what this town was. Bill is an extraordinary talent, and we had Ian and this wonderful book. I was angered by the hypocrisy of the people who you knew were gay but wouldn't say it or who would say it but wouldn't support us." That hypocrisy jibed, in Barker's mind, with Hollywood's obsession with appearance. "All of these things were factored in," he reveals. "The story began to tell itself."

Although he's not downplaying Coldheart Canyon's supernatural themes, he concedes that they frame other motifs befitting a writer of his maturity--the cost of fame, the relationship of a superstar to his fans, and the corroding effects of narcissism. Not that he doesn't sometimes get a kick out of those things.

"This culture, the Southern California culture, is a body culture," Barker observes. "It's in love with surface, and I'm Not about to condemn that. I take great pleasure in seeing beautiful men, and it would be deeply hypocritical of me to say, `Oh, who cares about that?' I care a lot about it. The question is, what is beauty? Is it determined by going to the gym or medical interfering? This book hopefully deals with some of my confusion about this, which on one hand I think is ludicrous. Still, I want my heroes on the screen to be beautiful."

When The Books of Blood was published in 1984 and he began to appear in the media, Barker was just such a hero. His fans had a dewy, wholesome face to attach to the prose that once moved Stephen King to declare him the future of horror. In those days, Barker muses, there was a thrill in a smile of recognition or an autograph request. "They said, `You're the guy who wrote this stuff?. We thought you were really old and twisted!' I'd say, `I really am twisted; it just doesn't show.'"

Today, the Hollywood element often overrides the sweetness of past encounters. "I get into limos," Barker says ruefully, "and the driver will give me a smile that I instantly know means trouble. He'll say, `Mr. Barker, I really loved'--fill in the blank--`and my entire family are actors. Here are our resumes and pictures.' Or worse, `Here's my idea for a script. If you write it, I'll share the profits with you 50-50.' Some variation on that theme happens every third time you get into a car, and it gets very old. But I can't bring myself to be mean to them, because what they have is your attention for a few minutes, and getting anyone's attention in this town is bloody difficult. I've had times when I've needed somebody's attention! But what it gets to is the desperation that this town engenders."

Personally, Barker seems to be holding his own against Hollywood's obsessions with image and youth. "I don't go to the parties," he says. "I don't go anywhere I think I would feel that pressure. When I do go to the Faultline [a Los Angeles leather bar], I feel nothing of that pressure. I go to the gym, I look after my body to a not obsessive degree, and the only person I care about making a judgment on me sexually is my husband."

He and photographer David Armstrong have been a couple for six years; they've had not one but two marriage ceremonies. Barker says his relationship with Armstrong is the place from which he launches himself into his frenetic life, and their family life together with their daughter, Nicole, is where he returns at night to draw strength.

"Relationships provide armor against anxiety, against depression, against the world's woes," Barker says. "It's great to roll over on the bed and find somebody's head on the pillow beside you. If that person is somebody you've known a long time, as I've known David, it is hugely more comforting to me personally.

"I adore the simple pleasures," he says. "We have dogs; we have our daughter to look after." He laughs, perhaps imagining how it must sound coming from a hell-raiser like him. "Doing homework with the daughter? Whoever knew? But my life has always been filled with paradoxes like that."

Rowe is an award-winning Toronto-based journalist and the author of the essay collection Looking for Brothers.