A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I love Hand's fantasy and mystery/thrillers, but vaguely recalled bouncing off her science fiction and feeling that it was impenetrable and had a hallucinatory quality that I didn't like. Having run through most of those genres by her, I thought I'd give her SF another try. I didn't bounce off this one, but though it wasn't impenetrable, it certainly was difficult to penetrate. Also, it had a hallucinatory quality that I didn't like.

Glimmering is near-future SF with an odd history. It was first published in 1997 and was unsettlingly accurate about a number of things that came to pass in the 2000s. Hand then revised it in 2021, apparently to correct some scientific errors and give it a more hopeful ending. (Having read the revised edition, if that's the hopeful ending, then the original one probably ends with everyone dead.)

An environmental accident that I guess is more scientifically plausible than whatever the original cause was creates the Glimmering, a fiery rainbow sky like a permanent aurora. This blocks a lot of sunlight so plants don't grow well. Meanwhile, everything is in a slow slide into dystopia, with pandemics and terrorism and uncertain electricity and so forth.

The main characters are Jack, a gay man who has AIDS (Hand did not predict modern anti-virals, so in the books it's a terminal condition) who is given something that's supposedly a cure, and Trip, a young man of indeterminate but very repressed sexuality who's become a megastar evangelical Christian singer. Their plotlines are completely separate for most of the book, and only intersect at all toward the end. I liked Jack and was pretty engaged with his storyline; he lives with grandmother and a housekeeper, he has friends and relatives, he has relatable problems and desires. I did not care about Trip and his creepy sexual encounter with a weird teenage refugee girl.

For most of the book, Jack takes the drug and finds that most of his symptoms improve, though he sees strange visions and continues to lose weight. Trip has sex, freaks out, takes drugs, freaks out, does other things, freaks out... I did not care about Trip.

The climax and ending go full hallucinatory. I'm cutting for spoilers but maybe what I write won't be spoilery because I'm not sure how much of it actually happened or what it meant.

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I could see what Hand was doing here. The themes are ones I like: a small-scale, slow-moving apocalypse; how people deal with mortality and love in the midst of both a global apocalypse and the small, personal apocalypses of their lives. But the book felt jumbled and incoherent, and it didn't make me terribly enthused about seeking out more of Hand's science fiction. (There's an SF trilogy she wrote a while back, and reviews often use the word "hallucinatory.")

Of her remaining novels I haven't read yet, one is Black Light (dark fantasy or horror) and one is Hokuloa Road, a mystery thriller. These sound much more up my alley.

Cass, now a person of interest in two different murder investigations from the prior two books, flees to London. Unsurprisingly, she promptly gets roped into being a courier for a dealer... she assumes of drugs, but what she delivers is much odder, an ancient artifact which suggests that very early people understood some of the concepts behind moving pictures. Murder and an investigation into a cult movie from the 60s ensues.

This was my favorite Cass book. It's beautifully thematically integrated, with all the plot lines involving images: photos, movies, or the thaumatrope, an ancient spinning disc with two carved sides. It's extremely dark as usual, but this time there's a counterbalance in the form of Sam, a teenager raised by horrible cultists who is what we'd probably call genderqueer and in whom Cass recognizes both a kindred spirit and someone she might be able to actually help.

Everything involving the creepy movie (which might literally be evil) and the shadows of the past, both the recent past of the 60s and the ancient past still present in the form of artifacts, ruins, and bones, was very evocative. The way it was all woven together was extremely well-done.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This would make a good paired reading with Gemma Files' Experimental Film, which also involves a middle-aged woman investigating a creepy movie.

Inexplicably, only books one and four in the Cass Neary series are available on Kindle. The link goes to the hardcover. Isn't the cover great?

Cass Neary was involved in the New York punk scene of the 70s, photographing junkies, corpses, and herself as characters; think Weegee meets Cindy Sherman. She published one cult classic book, then was raped by a stranger at knifepoint. Things stopped for her, and the world moved on and left her behind.

Thirty years later, she's still living in the same apartment, still drawn to dead things and damaged people, doing any drug she can lay her hands on, having fucked-up relationships with men and women, and indulging in random petty theft. When her drug dealer offers her a gig interviewing a reclusive and retired woman photographer whom Cass admires, she goes for it because she really needs the money.

The gig is on an island in Maine, and the chilly atmosphere makes you cold just reading it. Cass discovers that the job isn't what she thought, the area has a whole lot of disturbing history, and there may still be a killer on the loose. The mystery is less than mysterious, but the book is about character and atmosphere and suspense, not puzzle-solving.

Cass is self-destructive and unlikable in a way one doesn't often see with middle-aged female characters who are the protagonist of their own book. That is, I actually did... maybe like isn't quite the right word... but I did find her compelling and rooted for her, even when she was doing objectively terrible things like photographing dying people rather than calling 911. "Generation loss" is a photography term, and she's extremely convincing as a photographer. A big part of why I enjoyed spending the length of a book in her dark, depressed, nihilistic head was that it means you see through her photographer's eyes.

Monda is an excellent narrator for Cass Neary. I first encountered her in Grady Hendrix's We Sold Our Souls, and she's great here with an extremely different type of hard-edged, ground-down middle-aged woman who was famous in a niche way many years ago.

There's some light "is it fantasy" elements, which I enjoyed. Cass has some experiences in childhood which might be glimpses of cosmic horror or might be hallucinations or have other mundane explanations. She can sense people's damage or at least believes that she can, which again might be a very specific psychic gift or just a very specific type of intuition/keen observation. Or maybe she just thinks she can sense damage, and she's never proved wrong because who isn't damaged, especially in her social circles?

(Personally, I vote for "yes, she looked into an actual cosmic horror and it looked back which explains a lot" and "specific intuition/observation plus hang out with dealers and addicts, and it's not hard to find damaged people.")