Black Light

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Elizabeth Hand's sixth novel, Black Light, rounds off a highly productive decade that began, in 1990, with the publication of Winterlong. This new book carries forward certain themes and characteristics that have marked Hand's writing throughout the decade and reinforces her position as one of the most stylish exponents of that distinctive brand of fantasy in which ancient myth and everyday reality come face-to-face.

Black Light is set in Kamensic Village, New York, a fictionalized version of Hand's childhood home in northern Westchester County. Kamensic, which is also the setting for a number of Hand's earlier short stories, is an insular, well-to-do community largely populated by members of the theatrical profession: actors, writers, set designers, et cetera. Kamensic's most famous — and notorious — citizen is Axel Kern, a Warhol-like movie director who is the absentee owner of Bolerium, an old, decaying mansion situated on top of nearby Muscanth Mountain. Kern's decision to return to Kamensic and open up Bolerium for a wild, no-holds-barred Halloween party to which everyone in town is invited provides Black Light with its colorful, and dramatic, center.

As the party approaches, 17-year-old Charlotte "Lit" Moylan, Kern's bright, privileged, sexually precocious goddaughter, begins seeing things — a giant, horned figure, half-human, half-elk; graphic, primitive images of human and animal sacrifice — that can't possibly be real. By the time Kern's party — fueled by its host's nearly endless supplies of alcohol and drugs—gets underway, it's become apparent that ancient, arcane forces have descended on Kamensic, which is about to become the locus of the latest manifestation of a venerable Dionysian rite.

In many respects, Black Light is a kind of companion volume to Hand's 1995 novel, Waking the Moon, which deals with the reemergence of the moon goddess, Othiym Lunarsa, into the patriarchal society of the 20th century. Both novels are concerned with the reawakened presence of pagan mystery cults in the modern world. Both feature prominent appearances by an esoteric order known as the Benendanti, a hidden army of occult scholars charged with keeping the ancient pagan forces of the old world — and the old gods — eternally at bay.

In Black Light, the town of Kamensic becomes the embodiment of the Sacred Grove of Dionysus, god of death, revelry, and illusion. Lit Moylan becomes the embodiment of Ariadne, the god's lover, handmaiden, and victim. And Axel Kern's Halloween party functions as a sort of stage scrim through which an older drama — the eternally recurring rituals of sex and blood sacrifice that give the gods their power and their potency — gradually becomes visible. Virtually the entire novel, with the exception of some carefully selected prefatory material, takes place during the course of this single, orgiastic party, and Hand explores the hallucinatory interplay between the various levels of the novel's reality with resourcefulness, artistry, and considerable style.

In the end, it is the small, human story of Lit Moylan and her successful attempts to free herself from a huge but constricting destiny — to step outside the confines of a preordained life and reinvent herself on her own idiosyncratic terms — that gives this novel a personal, emotional relevance that nicely balances its mythical, larger-than-life concerns. Like Tim Powers's Earthquake Weather, a very different kind of book with a similar set of mythical underpinnings, Black Light is about ordinary people caught up in the implacable purposes of gods. Like the best of Hand's earlier work, it is the product of a writer with a distinctive and adventurous talent and is written with an uncommon combination of grace and power and with the unrestrained intensity of a fever dream.

—Bill Sheehan

Gary K. Wolfe

...[Continues] Hand's ongoing Machen-like fascination with eruptions of Dionysian myth in the modern world....Hand does a terrific job with all her portentsportalsand transformations... —Locus

New York Times Book Review

Hand has never been more deft in setting the scene and introducing the combatants. Her challenge...is to sustain tension through what is essentially a book-length prologue to an apocalyptic climax.

NY Times Book Review

Hand has never been more deft in setting the scene and introducing the combatants. Her challenge...is to sustain tension through what is essentially a book-length prologue to an apocalyptic climax.

Science Fiction Weekly

Hand deftly combines gorgeous prose, Lit's compelling voice, and an ending that is truly atypical of the books Black Light superficially seems to represent. In doing so, she sidesteps the usual horror cliches and creates a genre that is uniquely her own.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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 Kamensic--the 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. (Apr.)

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.

Gary K. Wolfe

...[Continues] Hand's ongoing Machen-like fascination with eruptions of Dionysian myth in the modern world....Hand does a terrific job with all her portents, portals, and transformations...
— Locus

NY Times Book Review

Hand has never been more deft in setting the scene and introducing the combatants. Her challenge...is to sustain tension through what is essentially a book-length prologue to an apocalyptic climax.

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 yet—the film crews, drink, drugs, black lights, hallucinatory or perhaps occult occurrences, all bound up with ancient Dionysian rites—Lit 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.