Black Light

by Elizabeth Hand

The privileged daughter of famous television actors, Charlotte, "Lit, " Moylan is ready to enjoy one last wild fling before college and adulthood. In fact, the whole idyllic hamlet of Kamensic, New York, is ready to party, for legendary avant-garde film director--and Lit's godfather--Alex Kern is coming back to reopen his fabulous mansion, Bolerium. But it won't be just any party. It'll be the event of all time.The whole town is invited, young and old, famous and obscure. But other, more disturbing guests are arriving, too--seen at the edges of the forest, at the margins of the night. Kern's connections extend far beyond Hollywood, beyond even the modern age . . . and in Bolerium's echoing halls a fearsome confrontation is gathering, between ancient powers of the darkness and those sworn to stop them at any cost, no matter what--or who--the sacrifice...even an innocent girl.

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Ebooks, Gothic, Paranormal

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

A New York Times notable and multiple award– winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hand! Elizabeth Haaaaaaaand! Her books are like food for the dark, gooey parts of my brain. So histrionic and full of dirt and bad behavior. Cruel gods and a wholly incomprehensible love of 1970s fashion. Hyperbolic, stylish, mean.

Recommended for insomniacs trying to make up for lack of sleep by drinking too much coffee. It's the same kind of unbalanced, vibrating buzz.

[Silvana · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars since I don't passionately hate this book but more like disappointed. The book's first chapter was successful in setting the eerie tone of a small village in upstate New York full with beautiful/rich/decadent people in the yore era (late 60s? 70s?). Later, it became a weird acid trip with a dull protagonist (who started out fine, really) who was groped a lot by older dudes, spent most (all?) of her time in a dazed state, and got embroiled in some cultish hullabaloo that confused me until the end. I was ready to give this two stars if the ending was good, but my hope got dashed.

Was it atmospheric? Yes. But then 1/3 of the way the story got so jumbled and I stopped caring about the all characters and wanted everything to end. Some myths and traditions were inserted - like the 16th century Benandanti society - but it's like looking at a bad patchwork where the colors and patterns don't align. I enjoyed Wylding Hall much more than this.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Melanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the prequel to the lovely Waking the Moon with similar themes and much the same vibe. Most of what I said about that one applies here as well: "Part fantasy, part gothic horror, part mythology, part twisted love story. It's dark, lush, sensual, and quite creepy in places."

However, while I found it more empowering than the previous book (woo hoo! the main female can DO something! On her own!), it wasn't nearly as heartbreaking. There's no "I'll love you next time, I promise", no grand passions, and really, no lasting attachment on my part to the characters. It's a good book, just not up to the standard of Waking the Moon.

Also, I have to point out that henna is not a commercial hair dye... You can't just prepare it, apply it, rinse, and be done in an hour. You have to mix it, let the dye sit and soak for a few hours, apply it, then let the mud sit on your head for at least an hour! It's something that takes an afternoon, not something that can be done on a whim as you're getting ready for a party. If someone had tried to mix/apply the henna as Ms. Hand described, they might get a faint, faint orange tint, but it probably wouldn't be worth mentioning.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

It started out strongly, but about 2/3 the way in, I just lost interest in the characters and their storylines. I have little patience for beautiful, rich teenagers who are the chosen ones.

[Leslee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out so promising - a secret cult, an underground director a la Andy Warhol and the factory - a massive party with a sinister purpose that could bring about an end to the world as we know it - and yet this didn't really pop as much as fizzle like a bad batch of microwave popcorn for me.

The last two thirds of the book just meandered annoyingly around a protagonist that was neither interesting nor engaging and I felt that the overarching storyline of Gods and Demons got a bit too 'otherworldly' and lost a lot of its appeal. The beginning of the novel promised a kind of grimy, gods amongst mortals doing dirty things storyline, but it just took way too long to get to the climax and once we were there - I felt like as a reader I was just carried along and got lost somewhere in the ether.

I didn't realize that when I picked this up it was written as a prequel to another novel that, judging from the reviews, is better than this one. I'll check that one out and hope for something that better lives up to its promise.

[Jalilah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a prequel to Waking the Moon https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... written 3 years later. Although it is labelled Horror, it's more of a combination of mystery, gothic and contemporary fantasy. It is suspenseful rather than scary. Reading it, I couldn't help but wonder why I waited 6 years in between reading Waking the Moon and this book! Elizabeth Hand is such a great author and I am certainly not waiting so long to read more of her books!

[Carla Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the beginning of this a lot. I would probably have continued to love it but for the supernatural horror element. Also it was slow and boring. Why does everything, newer books, have to be so long? Also, I am a big fan of horror movies, I'd probably have liked this if it was a movie. I don't know why, but I don't really care for the supernatural in fiction.
(4 days later):
While my feelings about this book are here, I did mean to praise Black Light for the terrific fictional titles, you know, for shows and movies, etc, books. I adore fake titles, so much, I don't know why. And this book has great ones. I forgot to mention it.

[Robbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was really rapey and I didn't like it. There was only one real rape scene, but a few attempts were made. But even when that wasn't happening, there was a general rapey feel in the background through much of it. It's about these three men, two who are late middle-aged and one who is 400 years old and immortal because he had sex with a teenage girl and didn't defend her in an inquisition or something so some god or another got angry at him and cursed him to stick around and be bored for ever. And the story is about how all three of these guys want to have sex with this 17 year old. They pretend that it has something to do with a conflict between the orderly cult of Apollo and the chaotic cult of Dionysus, but they're basically just really gross people. If that sounds like a reference to Nietzsche, rest assured that the only tragedy birthed in this novel is the lost potential. There are actually a lot of interesting things in it, but that doesn't really make up for everything else about the book.

There really aren't any characters in the story I could care about. The story is told from the perspective of the afore mentioned 17 year old girl who is an alcoholic and frustratingly thick. She hangs out with other upper-middle class kids who also have substance abuse problems. One of them seems like he might not be an idiot, but they don't do much with his character aside from have him drive the protagonist around and not be there when she needs him. Everyone is some combination of pathetic and obnoxious and most people are wastrels. This made it nearly impossible for me to care about the story, which is a shame because Hand did some really interesting things with it.

There's a rather thoroughly developed background story about the two cults that shows some serious research on the author's part. And a really interesting conflict is nuilt up between the cults and also between some of the characters. But then nothing is done with any of it. In fact, a lot of what happens in the novel doesn't really matter: Hand lays all these little story elements and just lets them lie there, never doing anything interesting. People die for no reason. People hang masks up on their doors for no reason. There doesn't even seem to be a real reason to be part of either cult if you aren't in the inner circle: Hand never explains how people get pulled into the Dionysian cult nor what kind of "protection" they supposedly get out of it. I was expecting a Rosemary's Baby sort of thing to happen, with the protagonist's parents getting some kind of benefit out of being friends with the director who runs the cult and them knowing what price they're paying, but it never does. Hand could have dropped a ton of the material and had a novella that was just as coherent as this novel. Even then, though, it would have been kind of like Wicker Man. Wicker Man only works as a horror story if you're afraid of pagans and/or hippies and think that intolerant jerks going around judging people are somehow good guys. Black Light only works if you've got some kind of hang up about actors' kids or are terrified of kids getting wasted and having sex because otherwise there's nothing really that ominous going on. Or I guess you could get something out of it if you really just want to read a ton of pop culture references from the 70's (and some from the sixties). But the thing is that it wasn't really scary aside from the whole rapey vibe, which I don't think was the point.

The whole second half of the book reads like a bad trip, down to the short attention span that keeps the protagonists attention away from actually answering any of her questions. There's a comically over-blown house party/bacchanal in a giant mansion that's like a maze and, despite growing up there, the protagonist can never find her way around and never seems to actually try to figure out what's going on. Even when everything is laid out for her, she doesn't actually seem to get it. She's supposed to be this bundle of rage but for most of the book she's just frustrated, feels like she doesn't belong, and wants to leave her small-town home like the standard teen trope. By the time she "blows up" at the end, it doesn't actually seem in character. And by the time that happened, I just didn't care at all anymore. Just like a bad trip, I really just wanted to be done with it so that I could move on to something else.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this so much more than I did. The premise was excellent: two groups of magicians with very different approaches to magic and history vying for control of ... something, the world maybe?

It was delightfully atmospheric. Every time you turn around there were autumn leaves, poppy seeds, acorns, and ivy twining all over everything. The rich, somewhat scary, organic autumn of it reminded me a bit of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury or Tam Lin by Pamela Dean. But both those books deal with autumn and bildungsroman better than Black Light. At the end of the day there was too much atmosphere and not enough plot. Things didn't seem to make sense and never got very properly explained.

But worst of all was that the main character, a girl named Lit, seems to stagger from scene to scene with little agency and less common sense. She mostly questions other characters but doesn't take much action. She follows all sorts of shady folks into super shady situations without questioning whether that's a good idea. When she gets cornered by various creepers intent on some kind of sexual ritual and/or assault, she often starts protesting but then gives in. Why on earth would you ever think it's a good idea to join your godfather, even in his Dionysus incarnation form, in a sex and blood ritual? That's just a legitimately terrible idea. Early in the book, when she's just cutting school and smoking pot, her choices made sense to me. But in the end she runs off to live in a loft in New York with someone she's known for about a week. Escape may be the way, but this seems like a poorly thought out plan. Also, if you can create portals, why do you need to catch a train?

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trippy sixties occult novel. Unfortunately, main character spends huge amounts of it drunk or stoned and so it comes across rather like when your coworker wants to tell you a long and rambling story that makes no sense about a dream he had or that time she was soooooo drunk.

[MargaretDH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lit (short for Charlotte) is the daughter of tv actors and has grown up in the idyllic bedroom community of Kamensic, New York in the 1970s. This bedroom community is tucked away in nature, and full of charming old houses, theatre and tv royalty, and their children. And, of course, there are some weird artists and their weird drug-fueled parties. Now that she's 17, her godfather returns to town to throw an enormous party, and Lit finds herself slated to fill a role she didn't know she was cast for.

Hand takes some very cool myth and history and blends it into a creepy cycle of rebirth and fate. The horror comes less from the premise and more from the overripe surroundings and atmosphere. Hand deftly balances the fate part of the story with Lit's agency and ability to drive the plot herself. As always, her descriptions are vivid, and along with the creepy parts, there's some great descriptions of 70s fashions and drugs.

If you like horror that reimagines myth and history, you might like this.

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Closer to 4 stars, but not quite because I got kind of bored in the middle, and the pace was off at the end.

When I started Black Light it felt like just what I wanted to read. It was a Sunday morning. I'd slept in too long. I felt vaguely headachey. To fall into a decadent party thrown by an Andy Warhol-like film director figure (except more violent and Artaud-ish) was so deliciously right. Seen through the eyes of his goddaughter, Axel Kern's living/work space called "The Nursery" (b/c so many of his followers took plant names for themselves) immediately reveals its primitive, sinister bones. Charlotte ("Lit") only ten or so years old at the time, is taken to the party by her parents, who are actors, and abandoned among the drug use and orgies. She wanders into a green room with a disturbing painting on the wall (I pictured something like Saturn Devouring his Child but more abstract) with the sound of leaves in the wind, and giant seedpods on the floor. She has an encounter with Kern's strung-out high society superstar (obvs like Edie Sedgwick) who brandishes a bone knife and says that they're the same. Later that month, she ODs.

Fast forward to Lit as a teenager, slouching around Kamensic, the NYC adjacent town where she lives, along with many other children of the actors who live there. The town is loomed over by the Bolerium, Axel Kern's giant estate, which somehow has been there since before Plymouth. The story unfolds as Lit begins to see where she fits in Kern's plan, and what he believes he really is. There's a whole part about the academic forces of good and evil, visions of the past, rebirth and reincarnation, giant stags, and some seriously eerie imagery.

Hand's strength lies in atmosphere and environment. Characterization is there, but it is often told and not shown, or maybe Lit and her cohort are too bored and jaded with their lives to give the reader much in the way of personality. I think that's why I had trouble keeping my attention on the page. The descriptions are enticing, but the plot beneath the descriptions was ultimately too thin to latch onto.

The descriptions, though, did make a world that will stick in my unconscious, or seemed to come from it. Here's one of them

"I was in one of those labyrinthine oak-paneled passages hat wound through Bolerium like the trails bored by deathwatch beetles, opening upon anterooms and stairways, pocket libraries and maprooms, and even upon a tiny private chapel where it was said Acherley Darnell had been shriven the night before his execution. As a child I had sometimes wandered in these halls, when the adult conversation bored me and I'd tried unsuccessfully to find my way to the kitchen in search of normal food, rather than the robust and inedible spreads that Axel and my parents loved: morels, imported truffles and dark bread, venison studded with juniper berries; fiddleheads and shad roe.

"But I could never make any sense of the corridors. Sometimes I found the kitchen, and Axel's housekeeper would give me turkey sandwiches and a glass of milk before sending me back. But just as often I would wander for what seemed like hours, futilely jiggling doorknobs, climbing narrow stairways where the ceiling grazed my head, staring out lead-paned windows onto the slope of Muscanth Mountain and the distant play of light upon the lake. Eventually, of course, I always found my way back; bu ever after was haunted by dreams of dim passages , muted voices speaking behind walls; doors I could never quite open and worlds I could not understand.

"Now I felt that same dread returning. And I was starving. So I went on, trying to ignore the pulse of music from behind the walls, the flicker of movement behind half-closed doors. In front of one there was a stack of unopened mail that came up to my waist; by another someone had dumped an ashtray. The walls held some of the artifacts scattered thorughout Bolerium like the detritus of a fabulous library. Old, sepia-tinted photographs of places in western England: Land's End, the Lizard, a group of standing stones called The Merry Maidens. A huge gilt frame that held an oil painting in the style of Landseer, its colors so dark I had to squint to determine its subject: ravening hounds and an embattled stag, the deer poised upon the edge of a cliff with its head thrown back. An engraved brass plaque gave its title, 'AT BAY." (141)

In fact, I liked it enough that I want to seek out more of Hand's writing. When I read this I felt the excitement I would have felt reading it as a teenager.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hand is a master stylist. She often writes about contemporary people caught in a mysterious situation involving supernatural forces or ancient gods or rituals that are difficult for the characters to understand. They are often drawn into scenarios that are expertly foreshadowed to the reader, but which the characters themselves can't comprehend.

This delivers a delicious foreboding to the reader. It's not really horror, but I would use an older description of 'suspense', a la Hitchcock. The Hitchcock movie that most closely reflects this feeling would be “The Birds”, which features an unexplained elemental force to create the sense of danger and suspense.

That is the case here, where a teenage girl from a very strange town in the 1970s learns just how bizarre the town is, and what kind of ancient entities and forces might be involved in shaping it. In a way it's a coming of age story, but with children of the 70s (sex, drugs, rock and roll) thrown into circumstances even stranger than they can concoct for themselves.

I was somewhat unsatisfied by the ending, which left some unresolved loose ends. It almost felt like a sequel was planned, but I am unaware of one for this 1999 publication.

Bonus: A shorter, more recent book that captures that 'delicious foreboding' feeling more compactly is "Wylding Hall".

[Mark Altosaar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book a couple years ago from a Humble Bundle of sci-fi written by women. I felt I'd fallen off the genre hard, and wanted some new out-of-context stuff I had no familiarity with.

I struggled with this book. I had a lot of trouble keeping up with what was going on, and frankly I think the author is just a lot more imaginative than I am. She could offer detailed flowery descriptions ... that just fell flat for me.

Roughly half-way through I consulted other reviews to reset myself and make sure I was following the story. Interestingly, I got the impression that many fell off the book half-way through, citing bad-pacing and not caring about the characters.

I had an opposite reaction, and half-way through I felt the plot really started to come together and explain all the tendrils I couldn't follow before. As well, the story does address the unrelatable characters quite well I think.

All told, I wasn't a huge fan, but I thought there was enough going on that I would definitely read other books by Elizabeth Hand. I may have suffered too in that this particular book was a sequel to Waking The Moon. I don't know how important it is to have read that book first, but it's kind of odd that it was omitted from this Humble Bundle collection.

[Ruth P · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this as an ebook without knowing what it was or where I got it (looking at the other reviews, probably a Humble Bundle). I know so little about the US that I thought it was an actual memoir of some famous actors' daughter I'd never heard of. So the vampire stuff or whatever that was was kind of a shock. I carried on, but that chapter was so bland compared to the earlier, mundane section, that I didn't see any point continuing. I actually thought that that chapter was supposed to be a play the title character, 16, was writing...

Also Hand has a really weird, hard-to-read way of describing faces. It's all angles and cascading hair and I still didn't have the foggiest what they were supposed to look like. Despite this, the first three chapters were reasonably engaging.

It's rare that I don't finish a book but in fairness I don't think I would have ever picked this up if I'd been able to read the cover.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 2 in the series ... Anything Elizabeth Hand writes for adults will get you thinking, will twist you around. Perhaps make you think about things in a different angle.

my, why didn't' I discover Elizabeth Hand earlier? Here is a mystery and a protagonist (antagonist) that is so different from anything you have encountered before, magically, described with the eye of the artist. ... And there are 2 more books in this series too bad my library does not have the latest one....
Ms. Hand is that rare writer, who can jump between genres ad succeed at whatever she does. Though at times you are a bit amazed at where the story takes you.

[Hanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just ended up not caring about the characters at all. The most interesting part was when the occult stuff was finally explained-the cult of Dionysus, etc. Before that and even after it was a meandering drug trip of a book. I did like how eerie the town seemed the more Lit learned about who she was.

[Spiegel · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book begins creepily enough, but then it goes down a well-trodden path in the overall plot and themes. Besides, the whole holywood/drug scene is just... meh. The decadence of it all being too well-written may have worked against the book. Oh, and Balthazar. It turns out there's a previous book in this universe and I guess that explains why his scenes feel tackled on in this one.

[Helen Fleischer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rather sorry I didn't abandon it. I sloggedon though I didn't give a damn what happened to the characters. Then set it aside when my library hold came in. Once I came back and pressed on, the supposedly profound revelations seemed utterly sophomoric as they were finally revealed. I guess this is not a book for jaded old ladies but for jaded young teens.

[Zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Leaf Grabenstetter]

I really don't know how I feel about this. I started out REALLY liking it, but it hopped the rails at some point and though I liked the ending I'm not entirely sure it absolved the book of some of the more uncomfortable parts. I'll have to sleep on it I think.

[Elle · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 15%. Reads like 50% boring ramble and 50% drug trip. It drags, it's boring, and the characters are uninteresting. I have a vague idea of where the story will eventually go, but I just don't care enough to stick around for it.

[Brittani · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a thesaurus-fueled drug hallucination.

[Bryan Wigmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of two linked parts. The first is about sixteen-year-old Charlotte's life growing up in a seventies small town in upstate New York, a particular town peopled by actors and hippies and ruled over by a mysterious mansion owned by a slightly Warhol-like film director. I really liked this part. Charlotte (or "Lit") is an engaging and realistic character, and though you wouldn't necessarily want to live near these people, they're interesting to read about, and there's an interesting occult-ish vibe to the setting that makes you wonder what is stirring below the surface.

This is answered in the second half of the book, which is mostly about a party given by the director, in which reality as Lit knows it starts breaking down, and she finds herself in a mythical tableau to do with the battle between the primal forces of order and chaos. The ideas in this part are actually more interesting to me, but it's hard to get a grip on what's really going on, or why, or sometimes where. The whole second half is quite phantasmagorical, and well-written, but perhaps needed a bit of reining in: order imposed on the chaos, as it were.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

got 3/4 of the way through and just couldn't take it anymore. I'm giving it 3 stars because the first third of the book is REALLY good. I was enjoying it and wanted to know what the mystery behind the town was. But then it turned into . . . I don't know what. Mystical nothingness. Ninety percent of the second third of the book is just some character staring at landscapes that keep changing, each one of which is described and then changes again. Can I tell you what isn't exciting? Reading a description of a magical landscape that keeps changing, without ANYTHING HAPPENING. And people have conversations that go nowhere. Nothing goes anywhere because there's no plot. I thought about giving this two stars but that seems unfair--maybe the ending's great? I just can't make it through to find out.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Elizabeth Hand's work in general. I think she does an excellent job of capturing a time and place that exists both inside and outside of pop culture at the same time. This one had everything I was expecting -- an art/movie/music scene set in the 60s/70s, a heavy influence of God/Goddess cults, lush and sometimes psychedelic writing -- but I didn't LOVE it. It drug on through a number of scenes, particularly the info-dumps that happened in the portal scenes. I also can't decide if I've read this one before, or if it just felt familiar because it had so much of what I expect an Elizabeth Hand novel to have -- it all just felt so familiar through the whole book.

[Alexandra K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hand writes SFF with folkloric/mystical elements and beautiful prose. This is extremely my jam and I've really enjoyed some of her previous work. HOWEVER, Black Light fell short for me, and I'm not sure why. All the elements I love are still there - Hand's prose is lush yet tense, and Teenage Me would have *loved* all the folklore references - but the second half of the book seemed to take *forever* and I had to force myself to get through it.

Still, I definitely recommended if you like beautifully-written, creepy SFF with folklore references and weird magic. Maybe this will hold up better upon a reread?

[Ken McDouall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This hallucinatory novel might be called a literary take on "country horror," set in rural upstate New York in a town that appears to be dedicated to a form of occult pagan worship. Greek gods and magicians have a prominent place in the story, as does an apocalyptic and very creepy Dionysian party. Hand's strength is in setting tone and atmosphere, and she pulls this off expertly. The plot itself is rather thin, and characters serve more as set pieces than flesh-and-blood actors in the story, but the reward of reading this late twentieth-century work is immersion in a surreal nightmare.