pedestrienne

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.