Glimmering

In Glimmering, Elizabeth Hand imagines an apocalyptic, but not cataclysmic, end of the end. It's like the difference between dying on the sidewalk from a massive heart attack & dying in inches from Alzheimer's in your own bed; the destination is the same, but the path is pretty different.

This is not a book about plot. If you need your reads to be tightly plotted, this isn't the one for you. If, however, you love character, place, time, & beautiful descriptive writing you'll enjoy this.

I'm very fond of Hand. Waking the Moon is one of my all-time favorite reads - one I return to again & again for it's beautiful story of what it's like to lose that one true love & survive it to love again. Sounds way cornier than it is since that leaves show more out the college setting, the ancient orders of paternalistic vs. maternalistic societies, The Benandati (the paternalistic movers & shakers behind the scenes of the world since ancient times), & the simple pleasures of Washington, DC.

Glimmering is a very different novel than Waking the Moon, but it has many of the elements that make Hand's writing a pleasure - strong imagery, coherent worldview, words that taste good. She has an uncanny ability to mix goth, raver, & cyberpunk elements while retaining a sense of inclusiveness that makes this work a pleasure to read.

I also appreciate that she writes frankly & honestly about homosexuality without stereotyping or caricaturing or delimiting. In Hand's books, homosexuality is normalized as just another fact about a character rather than put on display as a centralizing & defining trait. She isn't necessarily using homosexuality to illustrate a point, but rather creating a world where it's as much a part of life as heterosexuality. Since that's the world I choose to live in (real or not), I appreciate this element in her books.

Glimmering doesn't provide any comfortable answers nor does it wrap up any simple plot twists in a bow for presentation to the reader. Instead it takes us on a journey through what the end of the end may look like. To quote Kurt Cobain, "Here we are now. Entertain us." show less

Elizabeth Hand is fast becoming one of my favorite writers. This apocalyptic tale weaves together high and low culture, joy and terror, against a background of cultural upheaval. Y2K has passed, uneventfully, but Glimmering still stands as a great read.

This was ok. Long. Great characters, very visual writing, but I got lost in the plot. Probably more me not paying enough attention.