Rating: 
Summary: "A vengeful little goddess"
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Elizabeth Hand is a genius!!!
Review: Why this book, or her last 2 novels (WAKING THE MOON, and my favorite of her books GLIMMERING) are classified as Science Fiction is beyond me. The elements are much more in the lines of the horror genre... Inventive, totally original, beautifully written horror. BLACK LIGHT captures adolescent angst. 1970's New York society and the best of dark fantasy all wrapped up in a small New England town that could best be described as a Poison Peyton Place. I think Elizabeth Hand is one of the most underrated writers working today, and Ms. Hand if you happen to read this... I LOVE YOU, WRITE FASTER!!!
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