Black Light

I was neither born in the right place nor the right time to have experienced Andy Warhol's Factory days or to have experienced one of my favorite bands, The Velvet Underground, in the flesh. However, I have Elizabeth Hand to thank for surrounding me in that cloak of dark, soft, glowing ambiance and letting me experience it vicariously through her work. I usually don't suggest music to listen to while reading for fear of tainting someone else's experience, but I believe Elizabeth Hand may have had this in mind all along. After you have finished reading this book, and are maybe tempted to pick it up and read it again immediately, stop and go to your CD collection, your local independent music store or to Napster and listen to some vintage Velvet Underground: It Was A Pleasure Then, Pale Blue Eyes, Heroin, All Tomorrow's Parties - which swirls the images of the last several chapters through my head every time I hear it: Dark, unknown forests with rotting mulchy foliage underfoot. Branches and limbs scratching shadowy things as they pass, the trees shuddering in their wake. Things you cannot see, but most defintely feel, deep in your marrow. Your bones quake. A wild end-of-the-world party thrown on the edge of these forests. A mansion that belongs to time itself. Doors opening to reveal old shimmering secrets and fetid new worlds... "Waking the Moon" was one of my favorite all-time books and I still revere it, but "Black Light" has wormed its way deeper into my soul, even now, months after my last reading of it. A truly haunting book.

This audacious and playfully malicious followup to Elizabeth Hand's masterpiece _Waking the Moon_ (fans of that book will surely be delighted to find themselves once again in the raffish company of Balthazar Warnick) reads at times like a crazed, sexed-up _Alice in Wonderland_. At other times, you'll think it's a lost "Buffy" episode.Set back in the drug- and sex-crazed early 1970s, the book, crammed with Jungian references that won't scare you off, tells the story of Charlotte (Lit) Moylan, at the turning point between adolescence and womanhood, as she slides and glides her way through a most unusual Hallowe'en party held at a properly mysterious mansion (it's the centerpiece of a suburban New York town) presided over by a renegade film-maker, who happens to be Lit's godfather. Hand turns the gothic mansion, with its hidden passages and its motley crew of guests, into a symbol of the hideous era in which the book is set. And during the course of the long night Lit not only turns the corner into adulthood, but also transforms herself from used to user.Terrifyingly terrific, superbly written, Hand's genre transcending novel is best read in late autumn, with Joni Mitchell's "Don't Give Up the Sorrow" on your stereo and with all the lights turned up bright.

Elizabeth Hand has got to be one of the most amazing writers I have read. Her use of language is so incredible that I confess I read her books mainly to get a hit. I am a little perplexed by my reaction to her writing because on the surface of it hers are not the sort of books I would ordinarily read, not being much inclined to fantasy. (I really hesitate to call her books this, because some of them seem sort of unclassifiable - one of the marks of a great writer.) I picked up Waking the Moon on a whim and was so knocked out by its richness that I immediately started looking for more. Glimmering threw me a little - it wasn't so easy to get into the story but I was so hooked on the language that I have read it more than once. Then I picked up Winterlong and was initially put off by the SF overtones, but you know what they say - never judge a book by its SF cover, because again the language is splendid. Last Summer at Mars Hill - absolutely magnificent. Some of the stories were brilliant. The Boy in the Tree was what convinced me to go back and actually read my copy of Winterlong. Black Light? Well, I have to agree with some of the reviews posted here in that the story line doesn't seem at first to develop very strongly, but what a trip it turned out to be! I am hanging by my fingernails waiting for what she will do next, and hoping maybe someone will see fit to re-release her out-of-print titles. A word to the publishing industry - I would buy ANYTHING this woman chooses to write.

You might not realize how good Black Light actually is until the very last pages. You also might not realize what the novel's main theme is until those very same pages. You'll be carried along Hand's prose anyway, but the book will only reveal its greatness after it's finished.As I read Black Light, while I was clearly enjoying myself, I was also thinking how inferior it was compared to Waking the Moon and Glimmering. Waking the Moon is simply one of the greatest contemporary fantasy novels ever written, and Glimmering, while definitely flawed, had some very interesting ideas in it to keep it moving. Black Light was clearly not one of the best contemporary fantasy novels ever written, and the ideas weren't all that original.But that changed as I got closer to the end of the book. and suddenly I found myself appreciating Black Light immensely. It still is not as good as Waking the Moon, but it's certainly better than Glimmering. And it's also Hand's better structured book.Go read it, live in Kamensic for a few hours, and emerge with your perceptions altered. Recommended.

I agree with other comments made by readers that it is sometimes difficult to classify novels by Elizabeth Hand in the science-fiction / fantasy genre. Her newest novel "Black Light" may well add to that confusion. I think her novels (and short stories) are quite unique and I thoroughly recommend them all.