- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo (15 Nov 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006551246
- ISBN-13: 978-0006551249
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,409,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Growing up means discovering that the world is different than one supposed; Charlotte, Lit to her friends, the central character of Black Light, experiences magic and other betrayals, but the unreliability of her parents and her world is more fundamental than that. Lit is a typical adolescent at the point where the hippy-dippy 60s started to turn to the punk 70s,growing up in a very untypical place--a haunted artists' colony with its own rituals and traditions, set in a landscape of vivid beauty and dark memories where natural forces loom threateningly in bestial shapes:
That I could be so insignificant, that it was possible for me to move through the world and have my presence as unremarked as that of a spider spinning its web in the tall grass. And like the spider I could be casually destroyed, my passing neither mourned nor noticed by this monstrous being. An arms-length away from me the horned man dipped his head closer toward the water's surface, as though he would drink there...
Lit and her friends find themselves caught up in the workings of Axel Kern, supposedly just an experimental director in the tradition of Warhol or Kenneth Anger, but actually, like Anger, aspiring to be something altogether more sinister. Nor are the forces of official good--the mystic brotherhood known as the Benandanti, whom we already know from Hand's earlier, award-winning Waking the Moon--significantly less sinister. This is a powerful evocation of the uncanny and the hard work of surviving it, with a young heroine strongly individualised while convincingly typical of her time and place. --Roz Kaveney
Review
‘A potent socio-erotic story for our looming Millennium… Hand’s high-resolution narrative never falters’
WILLIAM GIBSON
‘Ms Hand is a superior stylist’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful book, but it is not a crime/thriller, that is very misleading. Also the cover is rather off-putting, but then you know the old adage. This is a woozy, dreamy tale that is fabulously atmospheric. Top- notch descriptive writing, a winding, mysterious story and gripping too. It can be read in a number of ways- is it drugs? Is it magic? But I won't give the story away. The main character is very well written and I find myself identifying with her so that the wild events become almost plausible. Autumn in upstate New York sounds beautiful and you can smell the bonfires in the air. I didn't get the idea it was set at the end of the sixties, though, as it is not a period piece. I doubt it will date. I read it through twice straight away. This is the sort of book that you turn over and over in your mind afterwards and that continues to affect you as the years pass. It had the same effect on me as Fire And Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
20 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
"A vengeful little goddess"
20 Oct 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Second Disappointing Book in a Row
1 Sep 2000
Format:Hardcover
I have read every novel written by Elizabeth Hand (in the order of their publication) and have been a devoted fan until now. The Winterlong novels featured a rich prose and surreal imagery reminiscent of Samuel Delaney's best novels (e.g. Triton or Nova). Waking the Moon was a truly spookey novel placed in a modern setting that was more accessable than the fantasy/sci-fi oriented Winterlong books. While much has been made of Hand's darkly atmospheric writing style, I also appreciated the characters and the ideas (though plotting has never been her strong suit). HOWEVER, the last two books, Glimmering and Black Light, seem to have been written on auto-pilot. It was as if someone else tried to write these books "in the style of Elizabeth Hand." In fact, I was so bored by Black Light, I stopped reading it on page 300 after 200 pages of following the main character around from room to room during the course of a party. In both books, the pacing was dreadfully slow and I just did not care about the characters. Both works needed a good editor, frankly.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Now that I understand it better...
2 Nov 2001
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I retract my previous negative review. The more I learn about the cult of Dionysus, the more I realize just how well-researched and how well-crafted this novel is. I still say it might be a little boring if you don't know what's really going on--but think about Dionysus, think about Ariadne and her myth, learn everything you can. and then look at it again and see the pieces begin to fall into place.
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