Black Light

This is a follow-up to Hand's amazing & wonderful Waking the Moon. The themes are similar & Balthazar Warnick makes an appearance which is nice for those of us fond of the other book & this character.

I guess this is categorized as horror, although I've never really been able to decide what category Hand is in. She's in her own category with slightly psychedelic & overtly lush writing & odd twisty plots that meander through myth & modernity.

Just as in Waking the Moon, the idea here is that there is an ongoing struggle between the followers of order & those of chaos. In both books the main character is asked to choose between the two &, quite simply, refuses to do so.

Black Light throws the world of the '70s into clear relief as it show more explores the world of these sheltered & maybe not so privileged teenagers. Privilege is in a very sense a limiting (& sometimes deadly) box for all them. In this sense Hand's characters recognize that hewing to a single path is full of pitfalls & she allows them to pick their way through the forest in unique & different ways.

I've always related to her themes of difference, of lost & renewed love, of refusal to give in - that she is so interested in music & mythology is a huge bonus. I very much enjoyed this book & recommend it to anyone who spent their time as a teenager with Anais Nin, Rimbaud, & Iggy Pop in their heads. It's pretty fun for everybody else, too. show less

The first half of the book was pretty slow-going, and I found it hard to stick to at times, but things rapidly got better beginning with Kern's party, and from that point on, things were a lot more interesting. So if you're experiencing the same thing, you might want to hang in there and see if you like it once you get to the party.

When certain events and scenes from a book remain with me up to 6 months or more after I've read it, like the dark scenes from this one did, I know that, in my mind at least, that was a book I enjoyed reading and will remember for a time to come. I wish I could recall the proper adjectives to describe this story though, dark is the only one that comes to mind, and I know that can have a wide range. I think show more you could also call it a sleeper too, or "a mind fk", which is a term I've used more for movies, like psychological thrillers, but I think applies very nicely to this book as well. show less

Gripping set-up of a teenaged girl seemingly trapped, impotent against forces she can't understand led to... hundreds of pages of our heroine being impotent and not understanding. Book must have been 90% over before she exhibited more agency than a ping-pong ball.

elizabeth hand, i love you but you are a weirdo sometimes.

Hand2Hand: idle thoughts about the borderlands of fantasy:

http://www.teaattheford.net/viewpost.php?id=39154