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Elizabeth Hand

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Black Light Kindle Edition

by Elizabeth Hand (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.0 105 ratings

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A decadent tale of ancient darkness that “does for upstate New York what Stephen King has done for rural Maine,” from the author of Waking the Moon (Publishers Weekly).
Lit Moylan lives what she thinks is an ordinary life. Sure, her town has a few eccentric theater types, but that’s all. That is until her Warholian godfather, Axel Kern, moves into the big house on the hill. He throws infamously depraved parties, full of drinks, drugs, and sex. But they also have a much more sinister purpose. At one of these parties, Lit touches a statue, and learns she has much more of a role to play in this world than she ever thought possible. Ornate and decadent, Black Light visits an irresistible world of ancient gods and secret societies as enthralling as it is dangerous. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Elizabeth Hand including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although Charlotte Moylan thinks she lives a rather ordinary and oftentimes dull life, the reality is far different. Her father is best known as the famous TV personality Uncle Cosmo, and her mother is a 20-year veteran of the daytime drama Perilous Lives. They live in the New York community of Kamensic, an artistic enclave where the church is rarely used for religious ceremonies and where death is an "occupational hazard" for the young. The town is also home to Bolerium, a dark manor of indeterminate origin where the enigmatic and somewhat sinister film director Axel Kern lives when he's not making movies.

Axel is Charlotte's godfather, but he's one guardian who may not be looking out for her best interests. Aside from making questionable films, Axel is also in cahoots with the old gods, and is interested in bringing a couple of them along with him to Kamensic. This puts the town--and Charlotte--at the center of an age-old struggle between two Illuminati-style groups, the more-or-less benign Benandanti (seen in Hand's Tiptree Award-winning Waking the Moon) and their rivals, the Malandanti witches. As has become Hand's modus operandi, she tells this story with a luxurious prose that's at once beautiful and also somehow intellectually decadent. Although the book may be a bit slow-paced for some, those who enjoy a smart novel that's rich in style and substance won't want to miss it. --Craig E. Engler

From Publishers Weekly

Hand does for upstate New York what Stephen King has done for rural Maine in this well-written but decidedly creepy dark fantasy about a Bohemian bedroom community and artists' colony located about an hour from Manhattan by train. Seventeen-year-old Charlotte "Lit" Moylan, the daughter of two successful but second-rate TV actors, has never thought much about the oddities of her home town of KamensicAthe strangely decorated Congregational Church, for example, or the community's unusual Halloween tradition, or the high number of suicides among the area's younger citizens. Although she looks forward to going away to college next year, she's basically content with her life. Then Kamensic's most notorious citizen returns to his roots. Alex Kern, the successful avant-garde film director, brings with him a reputation for scandalous, extravagant and decadent parties, replete with perverse sexuality and heavy drug use. His mazelike mansion, Bolerium, sits on the hill overlooking Kamensic like some dangerous predatory beast. Eventually Lit and, indeed, everyone in town receives an invitation to a party, a gala event that, Hand hints, may be nothing less than a prelude to the Apocalypse. Something of a latter-day Aubrey Beardsley in prose, Hand has a talent for portraying forbidding millennial settings brimming with perverse antiheroes, suffering innocents and sadistic demigods. This book, although not quite the equal of her last two novels, Waking the Moon and Glimmering, should strongly appeal to aficionados of sophisticated horror.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When film director Alex Kern returns to his mansion in the small New York town of Kamensic, his goddaughter, Charlotte Moylan, discovers that he is at the center of a sinister conspiracy. As dark forces gather to summon a god of chaos back into the world, others arrive to combat the shattering of the world. Hands lucid style captures the perceptions of a young womans coming of age in the midst of a confrontation with unearthly dangers. The latest dark fantasy novel by the award-winning author of Glimmering (LJ 3/15/97) belongs in most fantasy collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

In Hand's new fantasy, as in Waking the Moon (1995), two opposing groups of magicians, the Benandanti and the Malandanti, struggle to control human destiny. Kamensic is a spooky town, populated mostly by celebrities. High-school senior Charlotte ``Lit'' Moylan always felt like an outsider, but recently she's experienced unsettling presentiments and mystical visions. Sure enough, notorious movie director Axel Kern, Lit's godfather, has returned to his ancient, decaying mansion, Bolerium, to throw a Halloween party that everyone is commanded to attend. But at the entrance to Bolerium, Lit touches a phallic carving and is spellbound by horribly real-seeming visions involving hunting and bloody pagan rites. At the party, Professor Balthazar Warnick (we already know he's an immortal Benandante) claims she's the reincarnation of his lover, a Malandante whom he was forced to betray. As the party grows weirder yetthe film crews, drink, drugs, black lights, hallucinatory or perhaps occult occurrences, all bound up with ancient Dionysian ritesLit learns that the entire town is dedicated to the Malandante. Her task is to sacrifice Axel, the avatar of Dionysos, so that the god may live again. Instead, she learns how to open the portals the magicians use to move instantly from place to place, and visits Warnick's remote Orphic Lodge. He pleads with Lit to stay but she refuses and returns to Bolerium to confront her destiny. Vivid, evocative, and well informed if heavily symbolic, with accurately limned teenaged characters; the problem's not so much a slender plot that doesn't cohere as the failure of the characters to adopt any recognizably purposeful course of action. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

“Hand does for upstate New York what Stephen King has done for rural Maine in this well-written but decidedly creepy dark fantasy . . .” —Publishers Weekly
“Hand brings ancient mythology to terrifying life.” —The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957) is an award-winning author whose science fiction and fantasy novels include the Winterlong series, Waking the Moon, Last Summer at Mars Hill, and Glimmering. Her novels and short stories have won the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards, among others. Hand was born in California and raised in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, New York; she now divides her time between London and the coast of Maine. Over the years she has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many others.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009O3ZN4W
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (October 30, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 30, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5522 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 360 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #489,770 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #697 in Women's Action & Adventure Fiction
- #739 in Women's Fantasy Fiction
- #13,391 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 105 ratings

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Elizabeth Hand

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A couple of years after seeing Patti Smith perform, Elizabeth Hand flunked out of college and became involved in the nascent punk scenes in DC and NYC. From 1979 to 1986 she worked at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air & Space Museum; she was eventually readmitted to university to study cultural anthropology, and received her B.A. She is the author of many novels, including Winterlong, Waking the Moon (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award-Winner), Glimmering, and Mortal Love, and three collections of stories, including the recent Saffron and Brimstone. Her fiction has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopeoic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild Awards, and her novels have been chose as New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. She has also been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. A regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hand lives with her family on the Maine Coast.

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Leslie Bialler

"A vengeful little goddess"

Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2000

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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.

20 people found this helpful

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Caitlin Martin

Love this book!

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2009

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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.

12 people found this helpful

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AGB

Loved the basic plot but didn't care for the title ...

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2017

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Loved the basic plot but didn't care for the title in the end. I am a huge Elizabeth Hand fan but I felt that in the end if I type "Night Film + Coldheart Canyon + Wicker Man", I have summed up the plot. Sorry. A few of the characters were completely underdeveloped and it was disappointing. Because of that issue, I felt this would have made an excellent script, rather than a novel.

9 people found this helpful

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There Might Be Cupcakes Podcast

That house is Not Right

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2019

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Immersive, cloying horror. Perfect for those who love creeping dread.

3 people found this helpful

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Susan M. Baumann

Incomparable Writer

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2016

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Hand's "Waking the Moon" was a gorgeously written masterpiece that is one of my favorite books. I read it decades ago, and still recommend it to friends because it left such a profound impression. So, I was excited to discover "Black Light", and couldn't wait to read it. It is comprised of the same confident, masterful prose that was so mesmerizing in her earlier work. This book is good, but I was awed by "Waking the Moon" and perhaps I'm unfairly comparing the two. If you are a fan of Hand's work, you'll enjoy this book.

13 people found this helpful

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M. Wilson

Second Disappointing Book in a Row

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2000

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.

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